There's an article floating around that
for the last four years, university-aged students have been entering college and have no idea what a file or computer folder is, students that were born in the 2000s and are studying at expensive top-performing private schools to be astrophysicists. I thought it was complete nonsense and I still do, but I've been searching on Reddit to see how people are responding and an incredibly surprising number of people are saying they noticed something similar. Actually,
every response was saying they either see something similar or believe it, and nobody said it's hard to believe.
The rationale is people don't use computers anymore, only phones and tablets that obscure files and directories and only write papers on lightweight stuff like Chromebooks. I'm still not convinced. Even if you've only ever used a Chromebook (pretty unrealistic for someone entering college in 2017), Google Docs has a file directory and files, teachers and professors demand .pdf files, and I've basically had to download literally hundreds of different types of files for school. I couldn't just share my college essay with schools directly through Google Docs, I had to download it as a .pdf, locate it, then upload it. Maybe it's real, but I just don't understand it.
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"Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they're lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat."
Feels like stating that you can't drive if you can't swap the engine in your car lol. So many of these issues are just things that are obscure/not necessary 99% of the time and makes sense that the user wouldn't magically know.
I distinctly remember this article: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ and my thought has always been "who cares?" and that the author has a superiority complex and is also a little insecure.
Another time people complained is when Apple had an ad called "What's a computer?" https://youtu.be/pI-iJcC9JUc a few years back.
The kid does everything they care to do on the iPad more efficiently than they could on a computer, so use the more effective tool.
It just feels really "old man yells at cloud".
(which also is relevant bc so many applications now run on AWS/the cloud and you don't need to run applications for them anymore)
im fully on board with getting rid of stuff that's convoluted if all it's doing is getting in the way for the vast majority of people. If someone just wants YouTube, Netflix, FB, Gmail; then why have all that folder structure?
But yeah I have not seen this to be the case and I mentor at 2 high schools. They all know what a file or computer folder is. They may not like it but they definitely know PDF vs img vs Word doc. I think it's mostly what @X27 said
I feel though that nested directories is way too simple and intuitive of a concept to not understand it. Different users are separated by folders, program files have 32 and 64 bit folders to separate them, the pictures/documents/videos folders are all separate and nested in your user folder.
You can't solve everything with search, backups or zipping needs organization, loose files lead to junk buildup and wasted space.
I can't imagine filetrees going anywhere and idk why anybody would struggle with them.
It's definitely hard to tell since there's many kids who've avoided computers from either fear, lack of money, or parenting. When dealing with issues they might grab someone else to figure it out as well.