> Apps are becoming so streamlined and gesture intuitive that children and young adults might actually be regressing in their tech competence while increasing their reliance on it.
This is truer than you might imagine.
I recently had to explain to a 16-year-old intern that their phone is a computer. And that "apps" are recipes for that "computer". And that humans made all those recipes sitting on the phone.
This was clearly a quite shocking revelation. It wasn't a hard conceptual leap, but the "app abstraction" is so total that it completely cognitively blocked the idea that their desktop computer and their phone are effectively the exact same thing.
Of course, at that point, the obvious questions started: "So, I could run <desktop program> on my phone? Why can't I do <deskptop action> on my phone?" etc. Eventually heading to the inevitable "Why do the phone manufacturers prevent you from doing something you want to do that the phone is perfectly capable of?"
This is truer than you might imagine.
I recently had to explain to a 16-year-old intern that their phone is a computer. And that "apps" are recipes for that "computer". And that humans made all those recipes sitting on the phone.
This was clearly a quite shocking revelation. It wasn't a hard conceptual leap, but the "app abstraction" is so total that it completely cognitively blocked the idea that their desktop computer and their phone are effectively the exact same thing.
Of course, at that point, the obvious questions started: "So, I could run <desktop program> on my phone? Why can't I do <deskptop action> on my phone?" etc. Eventually heading to the inevitable "Why do the phone manufacturers prevent you from doing something you want to do that the phone is perfectly capable of?"