Growing up with technology, or Why the iPad generation doesn’t understand technology
As a millennial, albeit a very young millennial, I grew up with technology. Not just grew up using technology, but grew and matured as technology did, particularly the internet. Though the capability existed since the sixties and seventies, it only became commercially available in the mid-nineties, and rose into prominence only in the mid-aughts. It’s important to specify the internet, because it is what has led to the twenty-first century technological boom. As a consequence of this, I haven’t ever had to struggle with technology in my life, never expected to, and felt that all subsequent generations would be even more technologically aware than I was.
My father has always worked in IT, and even the definition of IT has changed over time: in our modern elitism, we now differentiate between a tech worker (highly compensated and skilled) and an IT worker (lowly compensated and sets up laptops for new employees with an admin password). This was a quarter of a century prior to the days of remote work, so the home computer was used just for leisure, but it was abundantly clear to me that my father knew what he was doing. Most of what I wanted to do required authorization of his admin account anyways. It wasn’t until a decade later, when my friends at school taught me how to torrent, and voyages across the internet required the intervention of AdBlock, that I realized my father didn’t know everything about computers simply because he wrote code.
He would often encourage me to take computer classes, despite my protests that I didn’t want to go into IT. I thought they were useless, and he thought they would do me good. In fairness, we were both right. There was nothing for me to learn from computing classes that taught anything other than programming, but some programming classes would have done me a world of good, and made me a lot of money. However, a quick Google search taught me everything I needed to know about using the computer, and I quickly learned how to access software for free, bypass school firewalls, and play games more sophisticated than 3D Pinball — Space Cadet. I learned of folders nested in other folders, the differences between executable programs and the files they read, and generally how a computer worked: it wasn’t magic, it was simply a big calculator following instructions, which could very often go wrong. My friends and I reveled in pranking each other: plugging keyboards and mice into each the computers of an unsuspecting victim, switching the virtual keyboard, rotating the display, and hiding the login box. This process taught me not only about using computers, but also not to trust computers: popup ads, malware posing as coveted programs, and malicious links that lead to websites serving no other purpose than to spite the user.
I recently saw a study claiming that members of Gen-Z were more likely to fall victim to online scams than their Baby Boomer counterparts. Understandable. In the same way that Millennials were inoculated against the evils of the internet from the wild west they grew up in, Gen-Z grew up in Apple’s walled garden: technology has always just worked for Gen-Z. Millennials have seen the old search directories and blue-linked internet; Gen-Z is only familiar with the internet as experienced through the polished portals of proprietary applications. Though in Gen-Z has a theoretical understanding of the Internet as interlinked webpages, companies fighting for territory have cordoned off many lesser-trafficked areas, leaving them with only polished content to drain their attention. This isn’t Gen-Z’s fault; there are legion of conniving UI/UX designers whose bonuses are tied to retaining users on their apps and away from the internet as a wider phenomenon.
There were days that I was scared to become a digital dinosaur who wouldn’t be able to keep up. These fears are mostly quelled of late: I understand that my generation is equipped with an intuitive understanding of these machines, unless of course, they take another quantum leap. But who will drive that development if all the kids know are little windows of content? To clarify, I’m not criticizing the strategy that companies have taken, nor the streamlined platforms that exist now: they surely offer a superior user experience. However, the users don’t understand what’s going on in the background. With these apps, there is no opportunity to open the executable file with a text editor, replace a string of text with something found from an online forum, and then watch as magic happens, or the family computer is infected with an intractable virus. Once upon a yesteryear, I would have said that the new internet Gen-Z works with is like an iPhone: beautiful, but monolithic and irreparable, but all phones are like that now: no removeable batteries, expandable storage, or self-repair, just like the programs they carry.
Maybe I’m just an old pirate, lamenting about the days when it was possible to own a program instead of paying for a subscription. I’m distrustful of cookies, trackers, and technology. I’ll browse the internet on Firefox, use a proxy, search for things in incognito sessions, and don’t trust the cloud. I save backups of backups: what if Google’s servers go down? I refuse to work on live files, instead emailing decks with names like 20230928_Revenue_Performance _v5_TeamEdit. I wonder if that’s how my father thinks about my generation, that because we’ve never seen a BIOS screen or used a punchcard to record information, we don’t really understand how computers work. And in fairness, I think most of Gen-Z don’t need to have a complete understanding of the ins and outs of technology to thrive in their brave new world.
Maybe new technology will never backtrack to the early days of Web 1.0 and 2.0 where everything was accessible to those who knew how, and instead things will be built on the foundation of these walled gardens. Calling decentralization and blockchain Web 3.0 seems a little premature now, and I think it’s likely that the next generation of internet will be accessed solely from corporation-owned portals, though whatever grand development that will take is beyond me. Perhaps it’s extremely premature to say that I lived through technology’s formative years, and there’s an AI revolution waiting in the wings. Whatever it is, I just pray I’m not left behind.
