This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
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The YouTube tutorial is the perfect emblem of this rot. Tutorials are not documentation. A tutorial teaches you to perform a specific sequence of steps to achieve a specific outcome. The steps are usually correct for the specific scenario the tutorial covers. If your scenario differs — if something’s changed, if you get an error the tutorial didn’t anticipate, if you’re using a different version — the tutorial has given you no tools to respond. Documentation teaches you to understand a system: what its components are, how they interact, what the configuration options mean and why they exist, what the error messages indicate. One produces people who can follow instructions. The other produces people who understand what they’re doing. The industry has enthusiastically replaced the latter with the former and called it democratization.
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This is a really interesting & powerful post. I didn’t touch a computer till my 30s and missed the whole BBS experience. I didn’t start with basic or the command line, but mac OS 7. The system was small and simple enough to get some sort of handle on things. Simple open ended software, HyperCard & appleScript helped too. My experience with the AOL HyperCard community was very like:
Kids learned by watching, by lurking in forums, by getting their stupid questions answered by people who then expected them to answer someone else’s stupid questions eventually
By the time OSX came along I was not ignorant of or put off by the terminal. I’ve never become expert, but I can use it in a basic fashion.
I also learned, by viewing source, how very basic html works. I know how to set Safari to show the full URL. I think these things are worth learning & teaching.
I was lucky in being exposed to tech in simpler times, there a lot of basics I know nothing about but the ones I do grasp I believe help.
As educators get excited or hot under the collar about the latest AI or design it for you free graphic package I do wonder if we have thrown the baby out with the bath water.
There is a lot more in the posts, it notes problems from the tech giants, algorithms & AI, suggesting learning and anger as possible ways to push back.