... and why this is important is what Marc Scott talks about in his blog post Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You.
First of all and most importantly, ignorance is never a good thing.
I'm not saying everyone should be a computer genius, but let's think about this for a moment.
I'm in the second half of my twenties, and many people in my generation didn't have a computer at home before they were in high school, or even in university. Their encounter with computers is relatively recent, but this didn't stop most of these people from having a Facebook account, or using Wikipedia for their essays.
They learned these basic things, like googling and opening an account on a website and post things. Why most of them should feel so lost every time their "internet doesn't work"?
My mom has always preferred the latest technology to designer's clothes, so I was lucky enough to have a computer at home since I was in primary school. This is how it looked like:
I absolutely loved it. It wasn't just another game consolle, I could do so many fancy things with it! I was so fascinated by everything. There was this family friend who helped us with our first computers, I still remember when he taught us the ctrl+alt+del trick. It sounded like magic at the time.
I wanted to learn all the secret of this computer thing first hand, so I explored the system, played with different softwares and had a lot of fun doing so.
I decided to wrote my final primary school essay on word and print it out, because I thought it'd look much prettier and more clean, so I asked the teacher if I could. Some classmates saw me as a computer genius, some others complained that "it's not fair", because they believed the computer would do everything by itself -- pretty much what half of the clients of any person working in the creative industry still think.
Truth is, I was quite slow at typing back then, I didn't have Photoshop to create my fancy diagrams and if I wanted to include pictures I had to scan them from books and add them to my Word doc because Google Images wasn't a thing yet. Basically it took longer with a computer than by hand, but the result was so much better.
Or so I thought. I hope it wasn't in Comic Sans.
What I want to say is that I'm not a computer genius, but I'm also into computers more than the average person. There are computers in all price ranges these days, which means the average person is probably an average computer user, too. Many of these users are younger than me, and in the newer generations, much more people had access to a computer or a smartphone as early as me... or even earlier!
I do understand that not everyone can be interested in technology or not everyone want to be a programmer, and that's fine. But when you're a frequent computer and internet user, you should at least know a few things about them.
Ignorance leads to stupid decisions, see Cameron's latest announcement about default internet filters in the UK. Technically these things should filter out any rated content, so that children could surf the internet without being traumatized.
If you ever surfed the web with any family filter on though, you know these things rarely filter just sites like YouPorn, but even perfectly safe blogs and sites.
Yeah I know, I know: you can still call your provider and deactivate those filters... but that's not the point!
Censorship is never the answer. Censoring websites is the solution of someone who's acting like they're scared of the internet, like it's a mysterious monster we don't know much about and that acts on its own whim. These people forget that the internet is made by people: people who create contents and people who read and elaborate those contents. Instead of just hiding some contents that are inappropriate for some people, isn't it better to educate these people about how the internet works and what is the appropriate netiquette?
I know many parents would want to protect their children from the outside world, but let's face it: they can't live in a happy bubble forever. Your duty as a parent is to teach them how to be grown-ups. So instead of just hiding things, tell them why they shouldn't visit certain websites, or that they shouldn't click on all the shady ads they see... whatever you want, but please tell them why should they do that, and not that they just have to.
Teach them how to think with their own mind and how to take their own decisions, instead of just deciding for them. I went on the internet when I was a child too, but I knew the rules: don't click on things that wants money from you, don't tell your real name to strangers (that was before Facebook), don't be on the internet for more than an hour a day. Can you believe this last one? The perks of being on a 56k connection: living the real life! :P
Are people so tech-unaware because they weren't taught to think with their own minds, but they were accustomed to other people doing things for them? I hope this is just an exaggeration, but there's one thing I know for sure: if people were a little more tech savvy, no one would ask things on Yahoo answers before simply googling them.
