From what I've come to understand, Millennials were the only generation to be taught basic computer literacy in grade school and high school.
My Gen X high school computer exposure was punch card FORTRAN (no, I don't remember any of it) and the bleeding-edge TRS-80 and Apple ][.
(My Boomer sisters didn't even get that much.)
Despite being a STEM major, I never touched a computer during my first ill-fated stab at college in the 1980s; at that point, computers were still for dedicated computer science majors, or were expensive toys that didn't do much. Returning to school a decade later got me access to some very thorough computer and library science classes that provided systematic rigor to what I'd learned messing around on my own on a 286 DOS machine.
By my understanding, in the 1990s, most of the information that @dreamsy990 provides above was fairly common curricula in US primary and secondary education.
(On the other claw, I had several Millennial classmates in fairly advanced courses in the late '90s who had to be slowly coached through things like "open a folder on your computer" before we could actually start learning the software.)
Things changed around the turn of the century, though -- not just because "No Child Left Behind" disrupted the entire US educational system, but because there was an assumption that "this is the first generation that grew up with computers, so they must instinctively know How This Stuff Works."
Unfortunately, that ignored the fact that the tech industry, through both operating system design and the advent of device-based apps, spent those years deliberately obfuscating "How This Stuff Works."
seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
Simple: the commercialization and monetization of the Internet relied upon people buying into the Panopticon. As I said back in the days of the Nym Wars: They needed toΒ make you easier to track.Β They neededΒ to make you a product.
When Facebook's CEO claimed that "the social Web can't exist until you are your real self online", I replied:
The logical fallacy, of course, is the conflation of "real self" with "legal name". You can't be your "real self" if you're always wondering, "what would my family think of this? What if my boss Googles me?"
IΒ amΒ my "real self" online, and my "social Web" is woven among those who know me as "Athelind" and "Your Obedient Serpent".
That other name?
That's not my "real self", Ms. Sandberg.
That's myΒ banking information, and I know why you want it.
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