[nend]

Family members for me, but they don't understand the difference between the windows search box in the task bar (next to the "start" button), and google. The difference between Chrome and google.com is lost on them as well.

It's a good exercise in patience for me while we go through the steps of describing the differences between searching for things on your computer vs searching for things on the internet, what google is, etc.

They've been using the internet since I was a kid in the 90's.

I'm sure most of us have examples of this in our lives, being the de-facto "computer person" in the family. It is what it is at this point. For whatever reason, if you didn't grow up with computers, it's incredibly difficult to understand them as an adult. Which still applies to huge swaths of the worlds population.

[jeffasinger]

Interestingly, I think we're seeing less people grow up with general purpose computers, and instead just have an iPad or an android tablet, or a chromebook.

I wonder what things will look in 20 years.

[Drew_]

Probably more and more like what this The Verge report finds on how students don't really know what files and folders are:

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

As things get more and more offloaded to the cloud, local computing is something only developers, engineers, and geeks will properly understand.

[professoretc]

Something like Asimov's "Profession" story, I imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

[entropicdrifter]

At least chromebooks have the capacity to become general purpose computers by installing Linux. But yeah, anyone who doesn't grow up with a Raspberry Pi or the like is gonna have a hard time.

[xattt]

I wonder if there’s any stories of anyone suddenly becoming technoliterate after feigning ignorance after a number of years.

[Avicebron]

Anecdotally, my grandfather ~78, works very hard to understand how to navigate and use the computer they have, not sure to the extant you would call "technoliterate", but certainly he puts in the effort to learn how to navigate and use the device without asking for much help.

[benhurmarcel]

At some point those people would be happier with an iPad or Chromebook really, where they wouldn’t need to think about what’s local or not.