Mastodawn

piegames Apr 12, 2024

Every time I do tech support for my family I get very angry about people who whine about lacking "tech literacy".

90% of the stuff I have to teach them is how to navigate manipulative software and dark patterns. This has nothing to do with tech, but with capitalism. Tech is not complicated, it is just made maximally confusing on purpose to remove agency.

Better tech ed won't fix this.

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witch_t *navi Apr 12, 2024

@piegames while i do that too, i've had to show family many times what folders are and how to create one, how to move or copy files, and similar things

and i had to do that for older and younger people...

sure dark patterns are a big part of it when showing them how to do something online, but when doing something on the device itself, tech literacy is usually lacking

that doesn't account for phones tho, phones try to hide as much as that as possible too... ugh...

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Arma Bellum Apr 12, 2024

@navi Yeah, that is the point. Up until recently you could just mess around until you got the result you wanted and there wasn't a big risk to trying stuff out.
Nowadays you have to be able to recognize what is a safe space to mess around and what isn't, which means less savvy people who are aware "unsafe spaces" exist will, obviously, treat everything as such out of caution.
@piegames

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Arma Bellum

@navi And current tech trends towards maximizing obfuscation from the users. Every app, OS, service, etc. targeted at a mainstream audience wants you to treat it like a magic box that automatically does what you want, without giving any chance to the user to understand it. Everything wants to "just work", the problem is that nothing does and everything is an unknowable black box.
@piegames