this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Wikipedia says Gen Z is born from mid to late 90s, which makes me a Gen Z'er. I use adblocker and try combat enshittification a few ways, including contributing to the commons. My day job is being a firmware developer for an opensource company. I'd say I'm tech savvy.
I think there are quite a lot of people like me, it is just that there are more people using technology at younger ages, effectively diluting the pool of Gen Z'ers you are encountering both online and in person.
I suppose its easy to find tech savvy gen-z people on Lemmy ;)
Obviously what I was referring to is anecdotal and stems from my social bubble. But there is something to it, that growing up with dumbed down devices makes you less prone to dive deep into the details of tech. If I were born 2 decades later, I don't think I would have gathered as much tech know-how as I did. I essentially had to go through all of it (started in the 286 era with PC-DOS, broke my dad's PC countless times trying to make shareware games work, dabbled around on bulletin boards, grew up with the early stages of internet and saw how it turned to shit, etc.). If I didn't have that, I might just have ended up knowing nothing more than smartphones.
I'd also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these "Pokemon MMOs" back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).
It's very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don't know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.
Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.