I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
put an old man face on that kid and you’ve nailed it
I think fediverse users are on average much older than other social medias. I often see polls on mastodon and the most prominent groups are very often the 35-45 year olds. I feel like im in the minority of my age (19) caring about free software and it makes me sad that nowadays tech has to be so dumbed down because even the young can’t use computers just like my grand parents. It’s crazy how my classes most people only knew how to open instagram, but they had no clue how to save a word document
You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
I just found out that people use search on thier computers to find files and have no idea where anything is located. It hurts just thinking about it.
And paradoxically they refuse to use search engines to find anything on the Internet.
Even worse that Windows search is slow as hell, can’t imagine the time wasted