Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Original title: Why can't young people use computers now?

Times have changed again. "Wear shoe covers in front of the computer room and buckle marbles under the mouse" may be the earliest memory of millennials for the Internet and information age.

However, with the passage of time, as shoe covers, roller mice and even dial-up Internet access have become the dust of history, mobile phones have become the most important intelligent terminals for most people, and a strange phenomenon has emerged: in the past, the problem of "middle-aged and elderly people who can't use computers" has reappeared in young people.

1 You can obviously guess what "problem" means. It started with countless shortcuts to web games, accelerator balls for computer stewards, and the moment rogue software such as P2P babymakers climbed onto the desktop:

The so-called "one foot high, one foot high," old netizens must have long been familiar with rogue software that set of "download software after checking" common strategy, but now more powerful designers have long changed into a new routine, began to use password twister installation copy to disturb your thinking:

Even millennials, once regarded as "trendsetters of the times," can only hold their academic certificates and cry silently in the face of colorful interfaces and word-twister games when unloading software:

And how to avoid these tricks of rogue software, nothing more than will become a contemporary young people have to think about the mouse after the problem.

However, in reality, there is another situation that is more common: before these rogue software can be used, the digital new generation will lose themselves in this complex machine.

You might think it's 2022 and computers aren't "complex machines," but the person complaining about the poor quality of the cup tray on the computer case probably doesn't think so:

With the change of times, young people who are good at accepting new things will also quickly accept the Office save icon and can also launch this matter:

When computers are no longer the only device for surfing the Internet, coupled with the lack of relevant training for a new generation of Internet users, some jokes that only existed in the last century have become reality again-for example, how to change "two fingers Zen."

A two-finger pattern similar to the one pictured above was once popular as a "classic" typing method among beginners who had just touched the keyboard 20 years ago, and was nicknamed "two-finger Zen" at that time.

You've reached the age where you're no longer struggling with which input method is more efficient, but there are still many young people on the Internet who are forced to touch computers after college and are studying "correct typing posture."

"typing speed" is just one of the ways that young people today lack computer knowledge.

The combination of shortcuts that we once used repeatedly and passed on word of mouth to form muscle memory may amount to the most esoteric incantation for young people today. At this point, we have to start from the second spring of "Alt+F4":

There are also shortcut names that you think are straightforward and unambiguous, and they can also give you the most simple input scheme:

I believe that's artistic hyperbole, and for more complex things like,"How do I explain Excel to my client? It is one of the philosophical themes of the information age:

In the perception of "older generation young people," Internet access = computer use, an equation that is as natural as "24 hours a day," need not be repeated; however, at a time when mobile Internet is becoming more popular, contemporary young people seem to need to learn how to "step on the information superhighway" again, just as we did 20 years ago.

More than 20 years ago, when computers first entered the field of vision of ordinary Chinese people, a mainstream computer with a memory of 256M and a CPU of Pentium III-700 sold for nearly ten thousand yuan:

In contrast, the house price in the central part of Beijing at that time remained in four digits per square meter, which also shows that in that era, computers were synonymous with expensive besides "high-tech," and it was difficult for ordinary people to have the opportunity to operate them, let alone master relevant computer knowledge.

However, the emergence of computer classes has given many millennials the opportunity to touch the device for the first time, resulting in the birth of a common memory of students across the country_"shoe covers must be worn before entering the computer room."

In the teacher's mouth at that time,"computer" is an expensive and mysterious equipment, and in contact with the computer before putting shoes on their feet, it can effectively protect its performance, as to why it is obviously operated by hand but to make an issue of feet, it became the early metaphysics of the information age.

Reliable teachers will tell students that these machines are very fragile and wear shoe covers to prevent static electricity. After all, in the era when computer rooms were more expensive than house prices, any failure of equipment would cause great losses.

Teachers, who may not know much about it themselves, give students all sorts of strange reasons to put on shoe covers, such as "to prevent the virus from spreading to the computer from the soles of their shoes" being one of the most famous.

But was this ritual compulsory course really the root cause of the difference in computer skills after that? Perhaps not necessarily, I think we also know, in the computer class, most students want to understand the problem should be:

Whether it's shutting down the teaching process from Mission Manager or creating a new account at boot time, students at that time always find the right way to get out of control from the cheats passed down from generation to generation, and then it's fun to play.

Information technology is still a compulsory course in primary and secondary schools. In the information technology textbooks published in 2015 for primary and secondary schools in Jiangsu Province,"inputting text,""operating WPS" and "sending and receiving e-mail" are still the skills that students must learn:

In the textbooks of higher grades, there have even been graphical programming software introductions such as Scratch:

If only from the textbook content, the computer education received by the new generation is actually far richer than that of 20 years ago, then what other reasons lead to the phenomenon of "computer illiteracy" among young people today?

The final answer seems to be left to "smart phones."

The popularity of smartphones is indeed the most intuitive and statistically supported reason. According to information released by the National Bureau of Statistics at the beginning of last year, there are about 989 million Internet users in China, of which 986 million use mobile phones to surf the Internet.

Compared with computers, a smart phone that can be carried around has become a new way for more people to surf the Internet. After the mobile phone becomes the first lesson of young people's smart terminal, it is certainly not surprising to put the logic of operating the mobile phone on the computer:

Similar situations are not only found in China. In Japan, people use the fixed phrase "if the PC is away" to describe the phenomenon that young people are away from computers and keen to use smartphones.

Japanese media conducted a survey on "smartphone penetration" in 2019, and the final statistics showed that 83.3% of young people in their mid-20s owned smartphones, while only 17.1% owned desktop computers in the same age group.

These young people who use mobile phones, whether on campus or in the workplace, also face the dilemma of lacking basic concepts of computer operating systems and not being good at using office software. Many people don't have the concept of "folders" and "file storage directories" until they write their college thesis.

Some time ago, Zhihu user @ Charon collected all kinds of jokes made by college students when they used computers, and designed the most severe torture in history_"watching contemporary college students operate computers."

Compared with computers,"technology black boxes" such as mobile phones are obviously more intuitive at the operational level, and this intuition naturally shapes the logic of users 'use of another electronic device.

At the end of last century, many media in our country jointly held a challenge activity called "72-hour network survival test," which required participants to rely on computers and live alone in a closed room for 72 hours. At that time, people felt:

Twenty years after the end of this activity, another "reverse challenge" was held abroad_No Phone For Year:

The campaign skipped computers and restricted smartphone use, even allowing participants to freely use PC devices throughout the event. Who could have predicted that in just 20 years, people's cognition would change from "Can you live only with computers" to "Can you live without mobile phones?"

In about 20 years, a similar challenge will become "Can you survive for a month without VR headsets?" Thinking about it this way, perhaps the computer blind spot of contemporary young people is not necessarily a serious problem.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Game Research Society (ID: ysaag), author: Yingrou Satellite

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.