Savoir faire vs. Wisdom in Technology

The Tumbler repost The modern digital divide (Reddit) is about how well younger students really understand their digital devices and apps. This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It’s a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting.

The Internet vs. Apps

It contrasts using the Internet with using apps, which are not at all the same thing.

The Internet is an open place with links and content, accessed by a machine with a keyboard and nearly boundless opportunity for creativity—within the strict confines of the pathetically crippled and dysfunctional dumpster fire that is all software—whereas apps are walled gardens and deliberately designed to restrict interaction with other sources. The input mechanisms on phones and tablets necessarily restrict many forms of creativity by making them impossible to do efficiently.

These digital natives can enter data quickly enough into a phone, but that mechanism is so limiting and limited compared to a laptop, with a real keyboard. Tablets and phones are a fallback for when you can’t use a laptop or desktop computer. They are not a replacement—not even close. If you can replace everything you need with a tablet or phone, then you have nearly no requirements. You’ve already capitulated to a very restricted worldview. You’re satisfied with extremely limited capabilities relative to what other people can do with other devices.

The author of the post thinks that poverty limits people’s access. But a phone or tablet isn’t necessarily cheaper than a computer. It’s just cooler and necessary and ultra-portable.

So-called digital natives know only apps on tablets and phones. They have no familiarity with web sites on desktop computers. But apps are very limited in their ability to offer true creativity, both by their nature and also by their purpose, which is to make money for the app developer.

More critically, almost no-one at most businesses does any or even some of their daily business on an app. Although many LOB (line-of-business) apps purport to be usable on mobile, they are incredibly inefficient as compared to their desktop counterparts. Even browser-based tools like Microsoft’s Office tools are really limited relative to native desktop apps.

So the tools that businesses use to run their world are out of the reach of most of the people in the next generation. They are not being trained or even introduced to these tools. There’s a training gap that no-one thinks they’re responsible for, which means that capitalism doesn’t have a solution. Its solution is to wait around for the state to do it. This is probably not going to end well.

What’s data? Where is it?

The problem goes deeper, though, to a complete ignorance of where data resides or how to find it other than to “search for it”. Imagine, instead of knowing where you live, you were just to get somewhere close to your neighborhood and just start shouting the names of the people in your family until someone pointed you to your house.

We aren’t teaching people how to organize information, or how to think about where their information is, or how it is being shared or used, or how they could preserve it for later. It’s just assumed to always be available—or not. I think a lot of people assume that, since they can’t find the information anymore, that it’s just gone.

Words like “upload” or “download” mean nothing in this world. “Save” is also meaningless.

It’s nice that people don’t have to remember to save files anymore or necessarily know where they are in a file system. But that convenience stops when you need to coordinate with other people, when you all need to be able to find things. Then, you need to agree on a system.

📂 Stuff
    📂 Good stuff
    📂 Bad stuff
        📂 Horse porn
📂 Misc.

In the old days, we used folder hierarchies. These were limiting in that they allowed you to encode exactly one categorical dimension, but it was better than nothing. A boss of mine in NYC in the 90s simply stored everything at the root of his hard drive. No folders. That won’t do.

Nowadays, a lot of systems offer tags so that we can assign as many categorical axes as we want, but you still have to do it. You have to be aware of the value of categorizing your data rather than hoping some machine can match your fuzzy query against categories that a machine has intuited from the content. There’s so much room for interpretation that no machine can fix this.

You have to label your stuff. People don’t know this.

They have tens of thousands of pictures that they can only search by date. They scroll endlessly on their phones looking for a photo they know they have.

No notion of privacy

People like this can’t care about privacy because the concept is illogical, it means nothing. They showed their friend a picture, not the whole world. What’s the problem? That picture is on their phone and on their friend’s phone—and that’s it. The EFF may argue that young people care about privacy, but I don’t think that they have even the same concept of what can be made private. They upload everything to one cloud after another, without a thought about who gets to use it.

No, AI will not rescue them

Reading is hard and tedious—and writing is even worse. No wonder that people immediately welcome the very first snake-oil salesmen who appear to sell them a tool that will do it for them. They welcome so-called AIs with open arms because they purport to summarize long texts to avoid reading and to generate long texts to avoid writing.

Apps are a step backward

Most people know as little about the Internet as people in the olden days did, when they thought that AOL was the entire Internet. Most people spend their time in data silos, being spoon-fed content that they didn’t choose.

The latest generation of users is about as good at using actual computers—the ones that people use in the real world to earn actual money—as the so-called greatest generation was, a generation that grew up with no digital devices at all. This is a sad situation for which I’m at a loss to offer a remedy. Other than work and effort, so it’s probably over before it’s begun.