Times have changed again.
"Wearing shoe covers in front of the computer room and picking marbles under the mouse" may be the earliest memories of millennials for the Internet and the information age.
But with the passage of time, as shoe covers, scrolling mouse 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 will not use computers" will appear, and now they are reproduced in young people.
You can obviously guess what the "problem" refers to. It starts from the moment when countless shortcuts to page games, computer butler acceleration balls, and rogue software such as "P2P Cubs" climb onto the desktop:
The so-called "road is one foot high, the magic is high", old netizens must have long been familiar with the rogue software set of "check the software after downloading software" common strategy, but now more powerful designers have long changed to a new routine, began to use tongue twister installation copy to disturb your thinking:
Even millennials, who were once regarded as "trendsetters of the times", can only silently cry with their academic certificates when uninstalling software, in the face of colorful interfaces and tongue twister-like word games:
And how to avoid these tricks of rogue software, nothing more than become a contemporary young people have to think about after holding the mouse.
However, another situation that is more commonly encountered in reality is that before these rogue software can strike, the new generation of digital people is lost in this complex machine.
You might think that it's already 2022 and computers can't be called "complex machines," but people who are complaining about the poor quality of the teacup tray on the computer's chassis may not think so:
As the times change, young people who are good at accepting new things will also quickly accept that Office's save icon can also be launched:
When computers are no longer the only devices for surfing the Internet, coupled with the lack of training for a new generation of Netizens, some jokes that only existed in the last century have become a reality again - for example, how to change the "two-finger Zen".
The two-finger keypad pattern similar to the one above was once popular as a "classic" typing method among beginners who had just touched the keyboard 20 years ago, and was also jokingly called "two-finger Zen" at the time.
You've reached an 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 the computer after going to college and are studying the "correct typing posture".
And "typing speed" is only one of the portrayals of contemporary young people's neglect of computer knowledge.
The shortcut combinations that we have used over and over again, passed on by word of mouth, to the point of forming muscle memories, may be about the most profound and incomprehensible mantras for today's young people. This point also has to start from the "Alt +F4", a ten-thousand-year-old terrier that has been rejuvenated for the second spring:
There are also some shortcut names that you think are very straightforward and unambiguous, and they can also give the most simple input solution:
I believe this should be artistic exaggeration
As for some of the more complex knowledge, such as "How to explain to Party A what Excel is?" It has become one of the philosophical topics of the information age:
In the cognition of the "older generation of young people", they will go online = they will use computers, this equation is like "one day = 24 hours", there is no need to repeat it; however, in the current era of increasing popularity of mobile Internet, contemporary young people seem to need to learn how to "step on the information superhighway" again, just like we did twenty years ago.
More than 20 years ago, when the computer first entered the field of vision of ordinary Chinese people, a mainstream model computer with a memory of 256M and a CPU of Pentium III.-700 was priced at nearly 10,000 yuan:
In contrast, the house price in the central area of Beijing at that time, the price per square meter was still maintained at four digits, which also showed that in that era, in addition to "high-tech", computers were still synonymous with expensive, and it was difficult for ordinary people to have the opportunity to operate, let alone master the relevant computer knowledge.
However, the emergence of computer classes has given many millennial children the opportunity to touch this device for the first time, and thus the common memory of students across the country has been born - "you must wear shoe covers before entering the computer room".
In the mouth of the teacher at that time, the "computer" was an expensive and mysterious device, and putting a shoe cover on his foot before touching the computer could effectively protect its performance, as to why it was obviously operated by hand but had to make a fuss on the foot, it became the early metaphysics of the information age.
The reliable teacher will tell the students that these machines are very fragile, and the shoe cover is to prevent static electricity, after all, in the era when the computer room was more expensive than the house price, the failure of any piece of equipment would cause great losses.
Teachers who may not know much about it themselves will come up with all sorts of strange reasons to get students to put on shoe covers, such as "preventing the virus on the sole of the shoe from transmitting to the computer" is one of the most famous.
But was this ritualistic compulsory course really the root cause of the difference in computer level after that? Maybe not necessarily, I think everyone knows that in the computer classroom, most students most want to understand the problem should be:
Whether it's closing the teaching process from task manager or creating a new account at boot time, students at that time can always find the right way to get out of control from the cheats passed down from generation to generation by seniors, and then enjoyable playtime.
In the current primary and secondary school classrooms, "information technology" is still a compulsory course. Published in 2015, in the information technology textbooks for primary and secondary schools in Jiangsu Province, "entering text", "operating WPS", and "sending and receiving e-mails" are still the technologies that students must learn:
In higher grade textbooks, there have even been graphical programming software introductions such as Scratch:
If only from the perspective of the content of the textbook, the computer education received by the new generation is actually far more abundant than 20 years ago, then what reasons have led to the phenomenon of "computer blindness" among young people now?
The final answer seems to be left to the "smartphone".
The popularity of smartphones is indeed the most intuitive, but also has a statistical support for the 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, and the number of people who use mobile phones to access the Internet has reached 986 million.
Compared with computers, a smart phone that can be carried around has become a new way for more people to surf the Internet, and after the mobile phone becomes the first lesson of young people's smart terminals, it is certainly not surprising to put the logic of operating the mobile phone on the computer:
A similar situation is not only found in China, but in Japan, people use the fixed phrase "若者のPC離れ" to describe the phenomenon that young people are far away from computers and are keen to use smartphones.
The Japanese media once did a survey on the "smartphone penetration rate" in 2019, and the final statistics showed that the proportion of young people around the age of 20 who owned a smartphone was 83.3%, while the proportion of desktop computers in the same age group was only 17.1%.
These young people who use mobile phones, whether in school or in the workplace, are also facing 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 preservation directories" until they write their college thesis.
Some time ago, zhihu user @charon collected all kinds of jokes made by college students when using computers, and designed one of the most severe tortures in history - "watch contemporary college students operate computers".
Compared with computers, the "black box of technology" such as mobile phones is obviously more intuitive at the operational level, and this intuition naturally subtly shapes the user's logic of using another electronic device.
At the end of the last century, a number of media in China jointly held a challenge called "72-hour network survival test", which required participants to rely on computers and live alone in an enclosed room for 72 hours.
And 20 years after the event ended, another "reverse challenge" was held abroad – no phone for year without using a smartphone:
The campaign skips the computer outright, instead restricts participants to smartphones, and even allows participants to use their PC devices freely throughout the event. Who could have predicted that after only 20 years, people's cognition would change from "can only live with computers" to "can you live without mobile phones".
In about 20 years, a similar challenge will become "can you take off the VR headset for a month". Think of it this way, perhaps the computer blind spots of contemporary young people are not necessarily a serious problem.
This article is reproduced from the Game Research Agency (ID: yysaag) with permission, please contact the original author for secondary reprinting.