[ SECRET POST #5746 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5746 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



__________________________________________________



02.



__________________________________________________



03.



__________________________________________________



04.



__________________________________________________



05.



__________________________________________________



06.



__________________________________________________



07.



__________________________________________________



08.



__________________________________________________



09.














Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 13 secrets from Secret Submission Post #822.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I have several friends who teach at the college level and they're saying that a lot of young people are coming in now who don't know how to do a basic Google search, much less vet sources for reliability. If it doesn't pop up on their feed on a handful of social media apps, they don't know how to find it - and they can't tell the difference between a good source and a garbage one. Not all by any means, but enough that it's worrying.

Never mind the expectation that of course it's right and normal for corporations to monitor everything you look at so they can sell your data and try to control what you see and what you don't. Older people (and some younger ones) are rightly horrified by how unquestioned this is.

The AO3 thing is just one manifestation of a much bigger concern, but of course for fandom people it's going to hit closer to home.

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen it said that Gen X and Millennials are stuck in between two generations who don't know how the internet works.

[(Anonymous)]

Heh, as an older Millennial, yeah, I can see that.

[(Anonymous)]

If you're ageist as fuck, yeah. Oddly enough most over-40s have used the net most of their working life and can manage it perfectly fine, thanks.

[(Anonymous)]

This is true of people in their 40s and 50s, which is basically Gen X. Gen Xers are roughly 41 to 57 years old at present.

People in their 60s would have started using the net for work most likely at some point in their 30s or 40s (using 1995-2005 as the time period when people generally started using the net in a major way). So they have been using them for a long time, and technically it's true that it constitutes the bulk of their working life, but they also are very much not digital natives - they were relatively established in life when they came to computers and the Internet, and are much less likely to be highly fluent with stuff like web searches and reliable internet sources. And then obviously the older you get the more pronounced that effect becomes.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT - This! Honestly, I (an older Millennial) am definitely in the bottom third of my peers when it comes to being technologically savvy. Hell, I may be in the bottom tenth, for all I know. Yet I still know more about navigating the internet and using computers than nearly all of my Boomer-aged relatives and friends of the family.

I realize that there are plenty of Boomers out there who are adept at using technology and the internet, but there are also a LOT of Boomers who aren't. I also suspect there is a pretty heavy class divide with this. I mean, computers were expensive, and owning a computer that's even remotely current is still relatively expensive, plus, depending on where you live, paying for decent internet that isn't glacially slow was/is expensive. So a lot of people who didn't have much disposable income were slow to get on board the PC trend, and by the time they did get on board they'd already missed some of the learning curve and were stuck trying to play catch-up, which is always daunting. Plus, a lot of working class jobs don't require much tech competence, beyond the ability to operate whatever tills/phones/etc need operating.

I say this as someone who is working class and was raised working class. It's honestly a big part of why I'm not more tech savvy, I think. My household jumped on board the PC trend relatively early for a household of our income level, but my parents didn't know how to use the PC any better than I did, couldn't afford to pay someone to teach them, were too perma-tired to teach themselves, and we all lived in fear of doing something wrong and breaking it somehow, because we really, really couldn't afford to shell out more money to fix it or replace it.

I learned the basics eventually because, like, the internet was where shit was happening for people my age and younger. But the internet wasn't where shit was happening for my parents and their friends, so they just never really progressed with it.

[(Anonymous)]

Um, like half the over 40s alive are Gen X

[(Anonymous)]

Yup.

[(Anonymous)]

oh shut up, that wasn't ageist. I'm an over-40 GenX and the comment you replied to is absolutely fucking on point, not ageist.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm Gen X and well over 40, lol.

[tabaqui]

If they are, it's because nobody taught them. Kind of like the people who rant about 'these kids' who can't change a tire or whatever, but who have also never bothered to show their own kids how to do it.

[(Anonymous)]

Nobody taught my generation (Gen X) or Millennials either. Unquestioning faith in tech seems to be an uniquely Gen Z thing.

[(Anonymous)]

It's dishonest to pretend the environment Gen Z are growing up in isn't different, though. Back in the day fandom and online culture as a whole was more spread out and you had to know how to make computers do what you wanted them to do.

I knew how to boot a game in DOS when I was six years old, because that's how it was done when I was six years old. I learned how to optimize search terms because early search engines weren't able to guess what you probably wanted the way modern Google does. I learned basic HTML at 14 because I had to if I wanted to make an Angelfire page. Kids growing up today don't have to do any of that to use technology or the internet, so most if them don't.

[(Anonymous)]

Absolutely none of that is what I'm talking about.

[kutsuwamushi]

With respect to internet literacy, I don't think any generation has really been taught. Millenials in my age range taught ourselves - not because we're better, or anything, but because the technology and culture at the time facilitated that kind of self-directed learning. Like, I learned HTML so I could build a fansite. I learned indexes and search engines to find fan content I wanted.

Now a lot of kids haven't really experienced the internet outside of major apps and social media platforms, where the workings under the hood are much more hidden (and much less customizable). There's a lot higher barrier to entry to getting started on coding now. Google searches are full of SEO nonsense; there's a lot higher barrier to entry to finding Google searches useful (and then learning to get better over time), even!

[tabaqui]

I think all of this is probably true for many people.

[(Anonymous)]

I recall seeing an interesting article once about how we all expected Gen Z to be 'digital natives,' that they grew up with the internet and would be the most tech savvy generation yet, and how it seems like ultimately that didn't happen because so much of the internet and computers in general has been sanded down to be as simple as possible. These kids grew up with ipads but only know how to click the shiny app and let the app tell them what they like, when people expected them to know how to jailbreak the ipad and load anything they want onto it. And a large part of why Gen X and Millenials ended up being the real tech savvy generation is we saw a lot of the messy parts of the internet before it became everything in the palm of your hand, we had to learn how to troubleshoot our own devices because you couldn't just press a button and find out what was wrong, we learned how to search from web rings and AskJeeves, we learned how to filter our own experience because we had to (and for less legal things, I've also seen it noted that Gen Z largely has no idea how to pirate things because they never had to).

In the context of AO3, Millenials and Gen Z navigated the wilds of ff.net in the old days when they didn't even have character tags and you just clicked on a likely summary and hoped for the best, so AO3's tagging system is an amazing improvement. Gen Z is used to sites just showing them what they want and they have no idea how to navigate beyond that because corporations have worked so hard to make sure they never have to.

[(Anonymous)]

lol at 'digital natives'. Kids aren't digital natives, they just aren't afraid of the tech because they were born into a world where it is everyday. They SHOULD be afraid of it, however...

[(Anonymous)]

I’m late Gen X and just finally getting my degree. I do distance learning and in my biology class I was the only one alive when Dolly the sheep was cloned. Not even my teacher was alive yet and I had already moved out of my parents house when that happened. Most of my classmates really struggle with all the things you mentioned and every class of every term so far I’ve tried to help them. They’re smart. I think maybe one or two out of hundreds aren’t smarter than me. They can learn and they want to learn but no one has bothered to teach them and now they’re overwhelmed trying to learn something they should already know at the same time their mental limits are being stretched and tested under the crushing burden of financial debt. I don’t blame the students, I blame their parents/guardians and their teachers. There’s a huge disconnect between what (and how) the kids learned growing up and what the adults in their lives thought they were learning.

[(Anonymous)]

Do schools just like... not have basic computer classes anymore or something? Because when I was in middle and high school in the 90s, we had a Computer Science class that was just teaching the basics of how to do some basic HTML, how to use email, how to type properly, how to do research for classes on the internet, how to use a word processor and Excel and other programs like that, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

Right, because computers were still relatively new and a lot of people didn't have the internet at home. These days, that class would be the equivalent of your 90s school having a Home Appliance class to teach you how to use a microwave and a VCR. In other words, schools expect parents to teach their kids this shit and parents are falling down on the job.

[(Anonymous)]

DA
Pretty much this! Though I’d expect that in high school students would have a few big assignments that required googling and learning good sources from bad. Colleges absolutely expect the kids to know this already and don’t teach it.
In my area, our school district is the best for college readiness per our state university. But they said that also every year fewer of the kids are college ready from all local districts and most of the country. Colleges and high schools aren’t in agreement about what the basics are. And state testing (and all the time wasted teaching to those tests) eat away at the time that should be spent on that stuff.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, my high school US History class had a big final paper that required researching and citing our sources instead of an exam, and so we had a few class periods spent in the library where we went over how to do that both with online sources and actual book sources. It was just something that was integrated into the class so that everyone would know how to do it and we spent the last couple of weeks of class doing research and working on our papers with the teacher around to help people out if they needed it.

It definitely served me in good stead when I got to college and most of my classes just expected that you knew how to do a research paper already.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, your school could afford computers!

[(Anonymous)]

I hate to say it, but "basic Google searches" are essentially fancy recommendation algorithms too that collect information from you in order to sell your data. It's not as much of a contrast to social media apps' automatic recommendation / scroll-endlessly-through-your-feed-of-content-served-up-by-corporations as you might hope it would be -- more like halfway between AO3's comprehensive search and social media's recommendation algorithms. Like, it's true the user has to be proactive in order to do a Google search and there's ways to control what kind of content you get, but the connection between "what is actually out there" and "what does Google show you is out there" is very tenuous in a way that's getting increasing amounts of criticism.

But yeah, anyway, it's always good to be able to evaluate the reliability of sources. That's a skill that will be evergreen through all technological change.