#Technology & Literacy

[gayvampyr]

im glad we’re finally talking about lack of technology literacy in younger people. everyone assumes we’ll automatically be good at it and have all the know-how because we grew up with it, and sure i might be more knowledgeable about it than say, someone 15 years older, but technology is changing and becoming more “turnkey” and a lot of the customization and workarounds just are not that accessible or obvious anymore. several tech companies boast that their new products are so simple and easy that a baby could do it, and users no longer have to figure out or understand anything behind the scenes because look, there’s a button right there you can press for this issue and if you’re still having problems you can just take it to a technician.

and im not saying this is inherently bad, it’s more accessible to people who don’t know anything about technology, but we are losing our computer skills because we don’t understand the tech and don’t see a need to. you buy a phone or a laptop and it’s perfectly usable fresh out the box and you don’t have to do anything to customize it because they’ve done it for you, which sucks especially considering they often don’t even want you to mess with the programming or software. customization is discouraged so they give you a handful of options they picked out and that’s that, and if your computer goes kaput then instead of learning how to fix it you can just throw it away and buy a new one! and while turnkey tech is a good option for a lot of people, we should still be encouraging know-how and teaching tech literacy in school as we become even more dependent on it. so many young people are struggling to work on computers and no one thinks to teach them because of the generation they’re in. it’s a major issue.

[ahb-writes]

"What's your fully formed opinion on this incredibly complex social issue that you just learned about five minutes ago? Quick, type it into your phone so the rest of us can tell you: Fuck off and die!"

Randy Feltface (Purple Privilege)

[katthekonqueror]

Another downside to the increasing amount of technology illiteracy is that if you do know basic troubleshooting steps, and you ever use them to successfully solve someone's problem, that person will think you're a fucking genius and sign you up to help a baby boomer with his iphone.

[maybefrench]

This is bullshit. I mean, I was on PC, didn't understand a fuck. Was moved on Mac, and then I could understand and was willing to put my hand in them to change parts. The problem is not Mac vs PC It's how *fixable* they are. And if this "study" is to be on tablet-kids, then I'm sorry to say your Samsung is just as not reparable as an iPad.

The real problem is there: the fact we can't open our devices anymore to go and check the parts, even if just to clean them from dust.

Not the UI.

[writeouswriter]

Genuinely don't understand people who don't want to actually think about and analyze what they read or want to use AI to write their essays, gonna be honest, I'd kill to be writing an essay right now, I'm dying to be in an environment where actually being able to delve into and lay out my thoughts on a work would mean something, have some effect or actual outside accountability or reward in the form of further understanding through review and working toward a further tangible goal, like genuinely if you don't want to learn the subject material, why are you paying to take these courses, I mean, it's one thing to be a disillusioned high school student who feels forced into an assignment and wants the easy way out, which, don't be that guy, even if you're struggling, trying to work through and pinpoint why is better than just trying to ignore it, but it's another thing when like this is your life, this is what you chose to do, what you're working towards and you don't want to do it properly, like do you genuinely want to go through life without ever having a single fully formed thought float through your head again? I'm being real, are you so dependent on AI or things like that, you've conditioned yourself to literally be unable to think for yourself, form opinions, understand text or deeper meaning or anything, that's how things get bad EVERYWHERE, that's how you get a misinformed population of the blind leading the blind, easily susceptible people who can't understand why we shouldn't create the torment nexus or why the leopards eating faces party would eat their face, too, like, yes, I remember procrastinating assignments, yes the school system is flawed, it's focused too largely on memory and rigid structures and etc., but this isn't the solution, if anything it's only further deepening the already existing issues of only caring about tests and end results, but in the end, if you play into it, it's not the system that's failed you, it's common sense. You can be better, you can do better, work smarter not harder does not mean don't work at all, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, don't hold yourself back, let yourself be capable of discovering things even through struggling and making mistakes, let yourself be capable of being smart.

[sugarandice3]

Nothing makes me want to go on a full-blown punk rampage more than the explicit violation of privacy that has become the status quo nowadays. This added with the fact that the general population (myself included) is technologically illiterate just makes this problem worse. People struggle to strike back effectively because the knowledge that gives us the power to do so is hard to acquire.

Misinformation, hidden features, ai, convoluted terms of service; all of has just become the norm!!!! Mostly due to the modern addition to convenience. No. Thank you.

The only way to make a change is to put in the hard work of educating yourself. Learn how technology works. Be aware of everything you agree to. Ignore the lure of frivolous convenience. Take measures to protect your privacy. It may be a slow process. Maybe you just start by switching which browser you use. This is good, this is an excellent start!!! The important part is that you care and you genuinely want to make a difference. You don't have to become a tech genius overnight, you just need to know more than the people trying to control you want you to know.

There is so much to sort through and so much more to learn, but I personally am going to start working toward understanding the technological world so that I can have my privacy and independence.

[sightseertrespasser]

Do you want me to go find the first part of Odds of Survival so you can unwonky the masterpost?

I assume this is Keferon? If I remember correctly I actually slightly reworked the first part having gotten to edit it on the second pass.

I was actually considering Copy pasting the text into a new post all together and fixing it that way. Just a matter of finding the time to do so.

I have also been legitimately considering making an ao3 account for backups sake but that will be a ways away considering how long it’s taken me to figure out tumblr.

If anyone has like a cheat sheet for how to set one up and the general cultural do’s and don’t’s I’d gratefully read it over

[etlu-yume]

All of this.

I keep forgetting how absolutely vital the computer class I took in year 11/12 was. Ironically only two people took it, everyone else was more interested in taking programming. I wonder how that holds up today in comparison...

BUT the really big thing for me, which was really a teeny tiny part of the course, was going over file types. JPEG vs GIF vs BMP/Bitmap vs EPS, etc etc.

Because like someone said above, the thing that concerns me about a looooot of these app-specific file formats? What happens when that app... dies. When the devs stop supporting it, or it just gathers dust. Or there's another major shift between operating systems and it gets left behind?

I've seen soooooo many issues arise in both personal and professional applications that makes me worried about where it's all heading. Because this continued privatization of data and particularly file types is not looking good.

Take Adobe for example - part of the reason it has a fucking chokehold on the art and design world is because of the file formatting. Someone sends you a PSD file, and while there are other apps that /can/ open it to varying degrees, it's dodgy. But then you get people who can't or won't for reasons upgrade to later versions of the software (no shade intended - we encountered a print supplier who still worked with CS6 instead of CC and we had to prepare files differently for them. Iirc it was a pretty large scale industrial packaging printer too, so. Nobody's immune!)

Hell, even just from adobe you start getting issues with things like Pantone swatches (domino effect across the sector; creative agencies are scrambling trying to work out PMS swatches and printers are being supplied files that are totally unsuitable - because pantone removed their colour books from adobe products, and even with a paid subscription what I've heard from local designers has been that all it does is give you *access* to their colour converter. You don't get the swatches.)

And what's worse than colour swatches? Fonts!

As of early 2023 they stopped supporting T1 fonts ("Type1" fonts, iirc a Postscript format). Which suddenly renders HUNDREDS of fonts useless.

"oh just go download free fonts from dafont Etlu"

I mean, technically yeah, you could. But from my experience a loooot of the files being affected are also dating back to the 90's. They're formats that have worked for LITERAL DECADES and probably cost an arm and a leg. I remember a thumbdrive going around my uni class from a lecturer who "lost" it (he was being an amazing lecturer shh take a copy and pass it on), with $20,000 worth of fonts on it. (Fonts are hellishly expensive. For comparison, to buy the complete family of Helvetica Now with 96 fonts it'll set you back $866.86)

And now so many of those fonts are just. Redundant.

There's such a push for "cloud-based" programming and like no consideration/though about what happens when the internet goes down or if something happens to that particular "cloud"'s server network, etc etc.

Idk the more I think about it the more I kinda want to crawl back into a safety bubble of 2011-2012.

Me: oh yeah, if you think school photography is hard now, try imagining doing this with film.

The new girl: what’s film?

Me: … film. Like… film that goes in a film camera.

New girl: what’s that mean?

Me: … before cameras were digital.

New girl: how did you do it before digital?

Me:… with film? I haven’t had enough coffee for this conversation

[skippersthecat]

Toritsuka has definitely fallen for those 'horny milfs in your area' scams multiple times

[roobartpie]

“We’re making the cool technology like In The Movies!”

Did you watch The Movies? Did you realize the Undertones Of The Movies? Perhaps realize that The Movies are very anti-this? Did you pay attention in English class (Media literacy class?)

[disast3rtransp0rt]

Absolutely crazy that David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) wrote a book containing this precise problematic situation, "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits". And in one of the first four chapters he presents this technology as exactly the kind of threat it has turned out to be:

Another person shuffled down the aisle toward the restroom, and they also glanced down at her, an act that was starting to seem intentional - Zoey swore everyone who passed was doing it. Did she still have chili stuck to her face? This time it was a black teenage girl with wired-up glasses like the ones Jacob was wearing, which meant for all Zoey knew the girl had the built-in camera on and was broadcasting a feed, maybe one called The Worst Hair Dye Jobs on Mass Transit Daily (today's episode: "The Cat Girl in the Back Row with Cyan Bangs").

Zoey is in fact being followed by a murderous bounty-hunter in this scene, and random people are assisting the hunt by providing live feed of her location.

Social Media and the internet at large are already enormously useful tools for stalkers. Imagine what this layer of access could do; imagine the lives that will be absolutely ruined for no reason other than greed and hubris. Was everyone so blinded by Jeff Goldblum's tits in Jurassic Park that they didn't hear him question the mindless pursuit of scientific advancement without first considering the consequences?

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

That's still before taking into consideration the unknown psychological and neurological outcomes of this tech! What will it do to your vision? Your brain's pathway formation? How will it impact prepubescent vs. postpubescent brains?

These are tests that should be run before any kind of tool this involved can be rolled out to the purchasing public.

Occasionally Jacob's eyes would dart up and to the right and she knew he was refreshing an inbox that was only visible to him, otherwise she had no idea what he was actually seeing out of the glasses. They made games where you could bounce a little rubber ball off the faces of the people in the room (the ball was only visible to you, of course) or that would obscure everything with a fantasy world and leave you blind to your surroundings, which if you did it on the bus, was a good way to get your purse stolen. But either way, any time you talked to a person who was wearing the glasses, you never knew if they were actually seeing you. Jacob said, "You get used to them. They leave kind of an afterimage when you take them off, and you find yourself constantly looking around for your notifications."

Humans love our kinesthetic memory! It has worked very well for us throughout our entire evolutionary process! It's why "muscle memory" is a term and why cars with buttons are so much easier to operate than cars with touch screens!

Anyway. Be smart about your tech choices and read more science fiction.

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

"This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone," their Google document said.

Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone's image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds, their demo video said.

The co-creators said that they altered a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to create I-XRAY to raise awareness of "significant privacy concerns" online as technology rapidly advances.

[uovoc]

Me: so discord is like... Well you know group chats... Except they're usually organized around a common interest...

Mom: ??? the same as a Facebook group?

me: not really.... more like Weixin group?

Mom: oh, I get it.

~ Ten minutes later ~

me: so Apple Pay is like... a way to pay using your phone... but the money is from either your credit card or bank account...

Mom: ???

me: It's like Weixin Pay

mom: [instant comprehension] oh ok

[hibiscus-ships]

If you guys ever feel stupid, just remember that I learned that someone has you blocked when Tumblr gives you an error message instead of taking you to their page when you click their URL like.....1.5 months ago 💀 🌺

[commodorez]

"Oh, but you were raised around technology, you should know this".

Someone had to teach us (millennials) how to use it, and they failed many of you gen Z folks by not doing you the same courtesy. Someone did the same with gen X'ers in the office, but maybe they don't remember it. And before that, someone had to teach the baby boomers. And someone had to teach the greatest generation how to use a rotary dial telephone. I could keep going...

Look, I'm just some guy on the internet, but I'll help how can -- the inbox is always open for general technical questions about technology, old and somewhat new.

Telling young zoomers to "just switch to linux" is nuts some of these ipad kids have never even heard of a cmd.exe or BIOS you're throwing them to the wolves

[i-l-t-l]

The Shadow of Man

-

For a long time I have known I am different than most due to my mental illness. From a young age I could see that my world perception was different to such an extent that I often retreated and escaped into fiction where I wouldn't need to inhabit the same mental spaces.

During my most isolated of times I have had dreams of this figure and in my dreams it is always something of a warning. I think isolation burns something inside of us to the point that it'll merely consume you.

Face Your Shadow Lest You Are Consumed.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Attention: This Essay Will Take Approx. 5 Minutes to Read

An Introduction to Critical Thinking

We're fast approaching that hypothetical future point when robots will take over the hard jobs like making toast and folding laundry. The machines are closing the gap, and when we finally reach the "singularity," as it's called, the most immediately recognizable result will be unemployment. Not to worry. You’ll have all the legal pot you could want. Smoking it might make you paranoid about the likelihood you're under surveillance (which of course you are), but at least you won’t have to worry about remembering passwords or calculating tips. Maybe you can even get some reading done.

Whatever you do to prepare yourself for this dystopian inevitability, there are some basic human skills you might want to remember. Good old fashioned street smarts, for one. And other OG stuff like, say, critical thinking—you know, the ability to reason things out for yourself using logic and common sense. Having your own opinion may be your last vestige of liberty in this brave new world. So how might the industrious citizen go about forming an independent thought in today’s commercial landscape?

Step one: kill your television. At least, that was the simple advice offered in the eighties when this bumper sticker adorned the backs Civics and Escorts and Astro vans. Apparently, we used to have a healthy distrust of the establishment in this country. From the Vietnam War through 9/11, most Americans under thirty were skeptical of the Man. You know, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," as those free-speech-loving Berkeley students once said.

Now that I am over thirty and have spent more than a few years teaching writing to undergrads, I sometimes take a survey because I want to know what the kids read (not much, apparently). We compare screentime averages. After several semesters I learned that college students spend roughly six hours a day on their phones, not counting the other screens that crowd the remaining waking hours. The average adult spends only about fifteen minutes a day reading anything--and most of their time within view of a screen.

Don't get me wrong--I like my phone, but I try to remember that what's on the screen is not reality--not exactly. It's a curated representation of reality, a simulation or simulacrum as Baudrillard called it. The algorithm determines our desires and fears with increasing specificity and provides us with symbols to which we can relate--i.e. optimized and monetized content! When it comes to social media, we just happen to be the content they monetize.

Ever notice the way those memes leave an impression after you close your eyes? They return while you're lying in your bed unable to sleep, like a film on the underside of your eyelids, a vague blur that spreads like some drug from a Phillip K. Dick novel--the visual equivalent of earworms. Melodies and lyrics can do that. Or slogans, or words on a page. Images and language seep into our minds and spread like contagion, making contact, rewiring synapses. When we read or watch or listen for extended periods of time, an osmosis occurs.

People with short attention spans are easy to control. They don’t remember the last time they were lied to. Like Charlie Brown, they keep trying to kick that football and Lucy keeps pulling it away at the last second. We fall for the same trick again and again. Propaganda and revisionist history, fear and psychological manipulation, the exploitation of ignorance--Orwell illuminated all of these in both Animal Farm and 1984—two prophetic novels worth rereading (if you have more than fifteen minutes to spare).

So, quality control: Instead of doomscrolling through headlines and social media posts made to order by the almighty algorithm, one thing you might do to improve your critical thinking is read a book from beginning to end—in that order.

Reading is valuable in and of itself—we need not read for content alone. The sound, rhythm, and word order of well composed syntax is nourishment to the mind that thinks with language, that in fact uses language to illuminate the world outside and within. As we read, the brain looks for patterns--identifying the independent clause, retaining the subject and verb as the eyes track through multiple parallels, projecting the direct object or compliment, not to mention grasping the dramatic throughline, the structure and meaning. As W.B. Yeats noted: “As I altered my syntax, I altered my intellect.”

After all, how does one come to understand what a compound, complex thought looks and sounds like without reading one first? Our ability to follow a train of thought is enhanced by the ability to comprehend in parallel subordinate clauses.

Consider the following poem:

“I.M.E.M.” by Anthony Hecht

To spare his brother from having to endure Another agonizing bedside vigil With sterile pads, syringes but no hope, He settled all his accounts, distributed Among a few friends his most valued books, Weighed all in mind and heart and then performed The final, generous, extraordinary act Available to a solitary man, Abandoning his translation of Boileau, Dressing himself in a dark, well-pressed suit, Turning the lights out, lying on his bed, Having requested neighbors to wake him early When, as intended, they would find him dead.

This is one long sentence. The independent clause has four verbs. He settled (accounts), distributed (books), weighed (all) and performed (act). Then that “final, generous, extraordinary act” he performed gets modified by parallel clauses all beginning with their own verbs--abandoning, dressing, turning, lying--the last of which includes an additional adverbial clause (when...).

The first time you encounter this poem you may have some difficulty finding the independent clause (having to wade through a long left-branching introduction has this effect). But by doing so you achieve something similar to what Yeats was after. You alter your intellect.

We know the internet is a collection of stupid facts and sublime fictions, a carnival of conspiracies, a virtual reality curated by a host of companies for whom it would be more profitable to replace our views with their views. And there are oh so many ways to capture our attention-- say, for instance, through the clever means of wrapping a watermelon in rubber bands (as reporters from Buzzfeed did in 2016).

What will happen next? This question guides most content creation: it is a marketing principle known as the curiosity gap. When something surprising creates a gap in our expectations we feel a need to stay tuned, scroll down, click through or swipe. We anticipate more than we inquire.

When was the last time you read a user agreement on your phone? Like everyone else, you probably scrolled to the bottom and clicked accept. Who besides a lawyer can read the bloviated syntax and obfuscating lexicon of contract law and understand it?

Groucho: It's all right. That's in every contract. That's what they call a sanity clause.

Chico: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause! 

“Attention is life,” as the poet Mary Oliver said. In other words, when it's over, that which you paid attention to will have been your life. Spoiler: we are each allotted about four thousand weeks in which to figure this out. Which is not to say that you have to kill your television or take a hammer to your phone or stop playing video games, only to recognize, as John Lennon did, that we’re “doped with religion and sex and TV,” and develop an ability to discriminate between that which rots and that which enhances.

Solution: Learn a new routine. Read a new book. Life is full of distractions—some of which actually require our attention--like, say, an oncoming car (or a technological singularity). Unfortunately, Chico was right. There is no Sanity Clause.