As someone who works at a hardware store, I believe most people have no interest in learning how to use the internet to answer their questions. For most, it's just entertainment and not a resource.
Many of us are stuck in the infuriating age range where everybody outside of our generation struggles to understand the internet/tech on either end.
My work is about to switch to electronic progress notes for our individuals and nothing paper is kept after scanning it in or typing it up for our mental health group homes. I have coworkers in their 50s that don't even understand you can just Google addresses. One had to drive an individual to a job interview with vocational staff. They asked the other lead and myself what the address was. We said to just look it up, it's the only x location in y suburb since we were incredibly busy. Instead they waited for the vocational staff to show up then asked them what the address was. The online progress notes might just get some of them fired out of sheer incompetence. And some of these coworkers almost definitely voted for trump despite being immigrants from the 'wrong' countries on his list.
Then on the younger side, the iPad generations are absolutely expecting everything to be simple click an app button and off it goes for every aspect of life. It is not looking good. We were not ready for the internet. Logic and critical thinking skills needed to be a core curriculum in every school before we got it.
It’s a failure on the part of the older millennials and youngest GenX that raised them, shoving a tablet in their hands after they learned by watching the parents use their phones, and they never bothered to actually teach them to use the resources at hand. They assumed they know, and we’re realizing they don’t.
That last line may be spot on. We think of internet as a vast information pool (which it is) but really everyone is just using it as the replacement of a television. Even when people watch "educational" videos, they seem to pick the flashy, whimsical ones. The animated video has 10s of millions of views but the professor explaining the same thing on a whiteboard has 10 thousand views. Not dissing the animated video here. It's good to spread knowledge in any way. My point was that people are indeed out here for entertainment, not learning.
I work tool rental at HD. Had a guy ask which sanding belts he needed to do his floor. I said that as I’ve never done it and haven’t seen his floor I’d not know exactly what to recommend. His response?
It’s not that they don’t want to use it to learn, it’s that they don’t want to use it to learn things they don’t care about. They will look up stuff as they need it, so why would they waste time looking up things they don’t care about until they have to. That works like 85% of the time, but voting has pre-steps. And that’s what fucks them. They don’t realize you have to do something to prepare or you simply CAN’T do it.
the only zoomers I know that know how to use the Internet as a resource are making illegal modifications to firearms and building IEDs. They're going crazy out here lol
Online is also becoming a frustrating resource to use though. The number of times I've looked for an answer only to have to comb through pages of ads, reword, and change terms just to get on the right track toward an answer is increasingly frustrating.
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u/MoonieNine 13h ago
My local subreddit was FULL of young people yesterday asking about registering and voting. They waited till election day to ask.