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Tech Illiteracy for Upcoming Generations

I believe ever since Windows 95, the tech industry on the consumer side has went down a path of simplifying things too much, and instead of it helping us understand how computers work, they've also harmed us. Win95 for example, for all the amazing things it did with innovating UI design, added one of the worst options that would be enabled by default in all future windows versions: "Hide file extensions of known types."

This is bad from both a educational and security perspective. It's an educational issue because people starting out with Windows won't know what a file extension is. File extensions are important because they tell you what a file is; a program, a text document, an image, etc. Yet Win95 just expects you to know what a file is just by it's name and the icon alone. Unfortunately some file types share the same icon, so that method isn't reliable. It can also be frustrating to a user who's trying to import something like a photo into a program and it doesn't import because it's not the correct file type, but because the user doesn't know what a file extension is and likely believes all images are the same, that user would just be confused and wouldn't know why they can't import that photo (feel sorry to any new user downloading a webp.) Moreover, hiding file extensions is bad from a security perspective because you can't tell when a file isn't actually what is seems to be. Your only clue is if the icon doesn't match, but that can easily be changed by a virus author. Many users who were expecting to view an image, video or document ended up getting a virus likely because they couldn't see file extension and realize that file didn't share the same extension as the user's other documents, and instead matches the one for a program. That would have given a clue to a new user that something's up.

Later from Win98 and on, Microsoft would add the "My X" series of folders to try and simplify things further. While not a bad idea on paper, I believe this screwed with some users by thinking everything needs to go into those folders and that you don't have to worry about creating your own folders. I'm sure many users just dropped stuff into those folders and didn't think much of it, not knowing how to organize or create folders. And most programs didn't appear in those folders, so users might not know how to navigate the file explorer outside of the "My Documents" folder, or learn that removing a shortcut doesn't actually remove the program that's associated with it (and that's despite the popup in Windows XP about deleting shortcuts, which just tells you the uninstall control panel setting and not where the program is located.) Sure some users might learn to make their own folders and to organize better, but I'm sure more stubborn people, especially old people, will never realize that and just have their sets of "My" folders be a mess. And not all the "My" folders were used correctly. My Documents isn't "My" Documents any more, as programs would later use it to store stuff like user information, options and plug-ins, making it's purpose more unclear. Nearly everyone's My Downloads folder is a mess after Chrome made it a standard to save everything there rather than ask the user where to save. Lastly the short lived My Games folder, which I'm pretty sure a majority of games didn't actually save anything in there other than a shortcut.

I don't think we really realized the damage this has caused until we reached the smartphone era, where phones just automatically save images, videos and downloads to their own folders, and the file browser is seen as an app to ignore and most people don't know how to use it. Ask any kid or teen if they know how to navigate through their phone's file explorer, and a majority of them will answer no. Simple tasks like transferring files via USB are becoming less and less known with file and music streaming services becoming the norm. Everyone is just letting their phones put files where it wants and aren't really thinking about it. And this might not be too bad of an issue if apps weren't too inconsistent on where to actually place everything. Your camera photos might not be in a folder named "Photos", and are instead in a folder named "DCIM" in the root directory. Your phone might update your camera app too can cause your photos to be saved in an entirely different folder too (that happened to me.) Saved images or ringtones might be in their own weird folders separated from each other even if they are just audio or image files, because that's how they programmed the app. This isn't even a new user issue, it's an issue for everyone because experienced computer users don't even get to choose where an app should save it's stuff. You might not think this is an issue if apps just work fine despite this, but what if your phone gets full and you wanna delete files. Well if it's not related to clearing out cache or deleting apps, you're fucked if you don't know how to navigate through the messy and bloated file browser. I also wonder how much processing power is wasted on the phone searching for these files rather than looking on one or two folders where everything should be.

I could go on and on, but I think I've said enough. Things have been simplified to much to where it no longer teaches people how to use something. "Just ignore, you'll be fine, you're not letting anything build up. Oh is something not working correctly, well then the program just sucks. There's no super easy conversion method that will make the file magically work with the program, it just sucks! Did you get a virus? Well that's not our fault, you should have purchased an anti-virus! What do you mean you thought it was a video?"

Ironically in an attempt to make computers more accessible, we're soon gonna get more people that don't know how folders work.

#tech illiteracy #gen z #technology illiteracy #computer illiteracy