Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?

jcrabapple@dmv.pub to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 566 points –

My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We're in our early 40s.

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Yeah, there are plenty of people in my generation who grew up with computers, have watched phones evolve geom nokia 3210s to iphons all manner of magic folding phones etc who still do t know how to switch a comouter on or even use their phone outside of swiping through social media and even then its really basic knowledge.

It doesnt matter what generation you are. Its all about what interests you.

There are "boomers" in my work how can run rings around everyone when using certain applications or tech because thsts what they do every day.

The idea that age or generation affects your tech savvyness is just a fallacy

I disagree. I don’t think it’s age specifically, but rather your date of birth if that makes sense. It’s not that once you reach a certain age you are incapable of understanding something new. Millennials are good with technology because we grew up in a time where the internet was blooming and it made sense to adopt it into our lives. A lot of what we learned with regards to how the world works was through technology. Boomers already had a life that worked fine before the internet and had good reason to reject it. Now that technology is at the heart of everything they are decades behind millennials in their learning curve.

Obviously there are boomers who are tech wizards (and many whom we owe for how technology has shaped us for good or for bad) and there are millennials who suck at it. But to deny that there is no trend is ignorant.

I wouldn't deny the trend, but it's equally ignorant to make assumptions regarding the reason for the trend. You make some good points, but correlation is not causation.

To be honest, i was with you until you threw in what felt like a needlessly insulting dig abount ignorance when you haven't exactly provided any evidence. Only theroies presented as fact.

Sorry - I didn't mean to be insulting with the word ignorant. I meant it literally, not pejoratively. That is, in order to believe that there is no trend of boomers having less digital literacy than millennials, you have to ignore the facts that not only present themselves in obvious and ubiquitous anecdotes, but also have been well studied and published.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattklein/2021/05/03/why-baby-boomers-need-digital-literacy-to-defend-themselves-against-the-retirement-crisis/

https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1500&context=etd