{"id":244,"date":"2025-02-24T12:53:24","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T12:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/?p=244"},"modified":"2025-02-25T19:36:45","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T19:36:45","slug":"21st-century-teens-struggling-to-use-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/en\/2025\/02\/24\/21st-century-teens-struggling-to-use-computers\/","title":{"rendered":"21st Century teens struggling to use computers ?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How can a generation born with smartphones in their hands be so ignorant of the basics of computing? Nicolas Sabatier’s article on Mac4eve<\/a>r, ‘Pourquoi les jeunes sont devenus si nuls en informatique’, pokes fun at this paradox while raising some essential points about our evolving relationship with technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This conclusion made me laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I remember something my grandmother said to me when I was a teenager. I was helping a family member set up a computer for the umpteenth time, and I was obviously grumbling. My grandmother told me: \u00ab\u00a0You’ll see, you’ll be happy too when your children help you with technology when you’re old<\/strong>\u00ab\u00a0.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that never happened: here I am, old, and not only am I still helping my grandparents with their computer, smartphone and internet connection problems, but I’m also doing it for my children<\/strong>, who have no interest (and therefore no skills) in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only death will release me from this task. And with my last breath I will tell my children once again: remember the 3-2-1 rule and that RAID is not a backup.<\/p>\nNicolas Sabatier, Mac4Ever, 23 f\u00e9vrier 2025<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For this IT teacher, who has been teaching for 20 years, young people in the 2010s are having difficulty mastering the basics of computing, which could become a handicap in their future careers. The cause lies in the technological evolution of the smartphone, to which these young people are exposed from an early age. The seemingly accessible interface prevents them from going further, from tinkering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because all applications on smartphones are full-screen, young people are lost when it comes to window management. They need extra screens to work properly. They don’t understand file browsing, the need to save work and after where to find documents on the hard drive. They find it difficult to take notes on physical keyboards. <\/strong>They don’t use the Shift key and prefer to use Caps Lock, even to do a single capital letter (which drives me crazy\u2026). I also have to teach them how to use square brackets [ ] and curly brackets { }. A lot of people who use the insert key, get really annoyed and don’t understand why the text disappears to the right of what they’re typing. They can’t convert to PDF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the author, the skill is lost because there is no longer the playful challenge of launching a computer. We no longer grope around trying to understand how this machine works, to personalise it. \u2018Hacking helps to demystify and better understand how a computer works\u2019<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These illustrations help me to understand how difficult it is to pass on this computer culture to my 8-year-old nephew, who summarises the activity as \u00ab\u00a0doing something with the screen\u00a0\u00bb, without distinguishing between educational purposes, video games, and active or passive viewing behaviour. He really must have thought I was an alien when I taught him Alt + Enter to get him out of an emulation session. While everyone should condemn the use of the old television, whose limited systems to allow maximum consumption with compulsory advertising, he can’t do without a remote control to navigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is just the beginning of computer science, with no notion of Internet web language or web architecture, when we need to be trying to make ourselves independent of the major content providers who control our personal data and analyse it until now in a liberal way. Learning to chat with ChatGPT and not being fooled by artificial intelligence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until then, I’d been rather optimistic. I thought that young people playing with Snapchat, Instagram and Tiktok filters and masks must have given them a different view of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not to be pessimistic, I hope that when he’s a teenager, this nephew will think about bypassing the little extension I’ve put on his browser that prevents him from surfing freely. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not very difficult to get around that extension, and if he does, he’ll be mature enough to understand the content that’s currently inaccessible to him. It might also make him think about using VPNs to get around ISP blocks and pirate a few videos from the latest series on a service he doesn’t subscribe to. This experience could help him find a way to send instead of always receive and be more independent. It seems that there are young people who manage to go into the darknet and become radicalised\u2026 Could they be more intelligent than others? Instead of condemning them, could we perhaps channel their malaise into something more positive?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How can a generation born with smartphones in their hands be so ignorant of the basics of computing? Nicolas Sabatier’s article on Mac4ever, ‘Pourquoi les […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rollcom.fr\/skyroll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}