On Smartphones & Computer Savvy

A day or so ago, @cyberwitchlexi asked the internet,

so a lot of people my age (early to mid 20s) sort of “get” computers intuitively from so much use growing up in the age before smartphones, even things beyond normal use

do you think kids growing up now will still have this considering the rise and dominance of the smart phone?

As an educator who focuses on techno-criticism, I have an answer to this question, but it is complex.  The short version is, “Yes and no, in ways you may find subtle and surprising!”

BLUF:  They might not, the way things are going now; if they do, it could still go very, very wrong; but if we swing it just right, they will and it will be good.  However, the likelihood that we swing it just right goes down the less we understand about how we got to where we are now.

First I have a note on techno-critical language and terminology, and then I’ll move on to the actual answer.

Techno-Critical Language & Terminology

When we talk about people’s interactions with technology, we tend to use tech-centered language.  This is useful shorthand for everyday conversations, but when we want to think deeply about the future of human-computer interaction, we should more carefully track & unpack what we’re saying.  For example, “How do smartphones affect human cognition,” is a perfectly cromulent question, and even a good research topic for a school paper - but what are we implicitly saying when we phrase the question this way?

A more human-centered version of this question (there are many) could be, “When North Americans use smartphones to access social media platforms for more than three hours per day, what feedback loops are created, and how do these feedback loops connect to emergent behavior that would be unexpected in a pre-smartphone world?”  Comparing those two questions, a few things stand out about the first attempt:

• We’re putting the technology first.  “Smartphones” are the subject of the first sentence, which implicitly ascribes agency to an inanimate object.  When I teach this principle to students, I hold up a pen and ask them, “What is this?” It’s a pen.  “What can it do?”  Write.  Draw. Point.  (etc.)  I then set it down on the table and ask, “OK, now when will it start doing those things?”  You have to pick it up!  “OK, I picked it up - now when will it start doing those things?”  You have to [whatever]!  “Huh, it sure sounds like I’m the one doing all the work here, and the pen isn’t doing anything.”
• We’re regarding humans as inert.  “Human cognition,” i.e. the source of our agency, is the object of the first sentence.  This implies that we are acted upon, not actors ourselves.  Microsoft’s Empowering commercial concludes by saying that technology “gives hope to the hopeless” and “voice to the voiceless” - not only implying that people who rely on assistive tech are hopeless and voiceless without it (which, ableism), but that the good that’s done is done by the tools instead of the toolmakers and tool-users.  (Better version: “What are engineers, and what do they do?” Best version: “What can people do with technology?  We can find new hope, we can amplify our voices.”)
• We’re ignoring nuance.  Why are we asking about the effects in a unidirectional way, as though the causal arrow goes from A to B and then stops?  At most, this allows us to see a variety of effects that can happen or not in a range of intensity. But this blinds us to feedback loops and other more complex emergent phenomena that aren’t so simple.  Oversimplifying a question in this manner is tantamount to asking for an oversimplified answer.

Fixing our language by putting people first and at the center, properly ascribing agency to actors and not to our tools, and being specific enough to both acknowledge and allow for nuance, are three simple steps we can take as a sort of “blind spot remover” when considering such questions.

Lexi's question has to do with the "dominance of the smartphone," and she avoids the worst of the above - but her question, in ascribing dominance to the device, obscures the role of all the people designing, marketing, and selling it. Revealing the man behind the curtain is easy, but I want to talk about his knobs & levers. Here are three key terms that will be useful to know in reading in my answer:

• Sociotechnical Systems:  OK, so you have a social system, like a “country” or a “workplace.”  You’ve also got a technical system in the same place and time, like an “internet” or a “copier.”  These systems interact, and those interactions produce outcomes and experiences, like “increased productivity” or “decreased job satisfaction.”  Those outcomes and experiences then feed back into both the social and the technical systems, changing them, perhaps in the form of “negative satisfaction surveys” or “new job title creation.”  This ever-changing feedback loop is more than its parts - it is a sociotechnical system, which keeps feeding back into itself.  Note that this is not a predictive theory, but rather an analytical framework:  it doesn’t tell you what’s going to happen, but rather helps you analyze and make sense of what has happened and what might happen.
• Community Informatics:  CI is the business of helping people use the resources available to them in order to make lasting improvements to their lives.  However, this has in the last 70 years largely taken the form of “teaching the skills that enriched the previous generation’s most successful people to the next generation,” and while the goal was to spread the prosperity, the act of spreading the skills has had the effect of devaluing them, as corporations are able to pay lower wages for the same work because more and more people are able to do that work.
• Knowledge Economy:  A “knowledge economy” is one where a significant portion of work is characterized by intellectual labor rather than physical.  With a widespread information network, this makes possible the decoupling of “labor” from “place,” meaning that it’s possible to do your work anywhere you’re connected to the information network.  Yes, you can take work home with you more easily now - and it can also follow you.

Key Factors

Getting back to the original question:

so a lot of people my age (early to mid 20s) sort of “get” computers intuitively from so much use growing up in the age before smartphones, even things beyond normal use

do you think kids growing up now will still have this considering the rise and dominance of the smart phone?

There are many factors at work here, but here are two I want to look at in a sociotechnical way:

1. the unique history of “Xennials,” who had an analog childhood and a digital adolescence, instead of being digital natives as the younger milennials are.
2. the advent of smartphones, and the simultaneous streamlining/universalizing of such technologies (a.k.a. “Always On” culture).

Each of these has some unique context that I feel deserves to be unpacked before we put them together to see how they'll feedback into each other into the future.

Xennials

Those of us who were born between 1977 & 1985 are a “microgeneration” known as Xennials: not quite Generation X, not quite millennials, we had an analog childhood and a digital adolescence that has given us a unique “intergenerational” background for our adulthood.  We grew up partly without computers, and they gradually became an increasing presence in our lives. Many millennials can’t remember a time without at-home broadband; more can’t remember a time without dial-up; Xennials are those of us who can say what grade we were in when we first got AOL at home.

Because the early days of widespread dial-up were kind of “Wild West”-ish, we got to screw around in ways that don’t really exist any more.  We also got to have a lot of our goofiness and awfulness be forgotten, in a way that often doesn’t happen these days. We watched as the “never going away”-ness of the internet crept up on us, and we developed a caution that younger millennials have been trained into since gradeschool - and because we developed this caution in our adolescence and early adulthood, we can discard it when we choose to.

This “optional caution” gives us a confidence to mess around with things in ways that both GenXers and younger millennials, for the most part, wouldn’t dare:  GenXers had it drilled into them that computers & such are fragile, expensive things, and if you screw around too much then you’ll break ‘em; millennials had it drilled into them that computers & such are omnipresent, omniscient Big Brother, and if you screw around too much then you’ll get in trouble.  We’re aware of both these possibilities, but we also have a “sixth sense” for when they can be safely ignored.

Written by an Xennial, probably. (source)

Keep in mind that, being a generational phenomenon, these are broad strokes with many exceptions:  some of us were the cautionary tales that warned the rest of us, and some of us didn’t get internet at home until later in life.  I’ll mostly be taking this caveat for granted, and will speak in otherwise-unqualified generalities for the rest of my TED talk.

There is also a resurgence of "Xennialesque" traits lately, as the Xennial quirks are seen as good and we've been trying to reverse-engineer them into kids for the past 15-20 years (or about since Lexi went into gradeschool, if I'm mathin' gud). So it's complicated, but it's probably to do with the fact that we're living in a time when we can react to a cultural conversation that's reacting to us, in another one of those sociotechnical feedback loops I've been talking about.

Smartphones and Always On Culture

Having an analog childhood gives you some more unique advantages in today’s world:  we remember what it was like to be bored because we had nothing to do, and not only because we were sick of it all; we remember what it was like to get lost and have no idea what to do next and no way to look it up; and we are able to regard capital-D Disconnection not with a sense of FOMO dread, but as Something It Is Occasionally Beneficial to Do.  All of this, and its value, is something that comes from our pre-internet childhoods, and it both A. helps us with things like boundary setting, grit, and mindfulness training, and B. stands in total opposition to Always On culture. (Again with the generalities, tho!)

Moreover, as computers migrated from expensive research tools, to high-end corporate tools, to household appliances, to personal devices, to everyday jewelry (smartwatches, anyone?), and the internet similarly infiltrated every facet of daily life, programs became less a specialized product for these machines and more abstractions of everyday tools.  With this ubiquity came the idea that computer programs should Just Plain Work:  that they should be intuitive enough that anyone who has an idea of what they want to do should be able to do it without any specialized training (and ideally, without even looking at the instructions!).

At first, the doctrine of Just Plain Work was implemented by engineers, for people with a need for specialized software programs.  This shifted over time to apps developed, sometimes literally overnight, both by and for pretty much anyone who thinks There Should Be An App For That.  As this ubiquity crept into our lives, and the expectation that these things should Just Plain Work became more and more of a reality, the productivity treadmill also ramped up - and Big Data also came into the picture.  Suddenly, corporations were able to access so many more metrics that let them chip away at our free time to fuck around with these devices, "free time to fuck around" being what got Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg into their whole deals.

Nowadays, the general trend is that most people spend so much time focused on what they can accomplish, that they have very little time to think about why they’re accomplishing it, or who benefits from this arrangement.  Your boss needs a thing, and texts you at home; you can download your data from the cloud, and find an app that lets you perform the operation you need to do in order to answer your boss’ question in a few minutes. You do this, because if you don’t, then you’ll be replaced by a worker who is willing to; your boss is this kind of boss, because if they weren’t, then they’d be replaced by one who is.  And now it’s human beings, not merely our tools, who are expected to Just Plain Work - and the very idea of Waiting Until Tomorrow to get a question answered is corporate heresy.

This is what it means to work in a capitalist Knowledge Economy with a twist of Always On culture:  you are not doing physical labor in a physical place, but intellectual labor that can in principle be done anywhere.  This makes it easy to get so tied up in getting things done that you lose sight of how it's affecting the rest of your life, and how this system is affecting the rest of the world, because we’re all too preoccupied with keeping up to organize and build solidarity.  After all, who has time to think about how we ought to live and discuss it with peers, when making a living occupies most of your waking hours and can claim the rest at any time?

What About the Future?

Putting the above two sections together with the introductory bit, we don’t have a clear picture of what the future will be - but we do have something of a map for where things might go, depending on what we do now and in the next five to ten years.  We’re in a state right now where today’s teenagers are able to distribute AI-manipulated selfies over half-a-dozen social media platforms at a few taps, but don’t know how to save a document they’ve created to their desktop folder and then open it later (probably because a lot of them don't even use desktops).  This came as a shock to me when I first learned it, because I saw the former skill as way more advanced than the latter; but when students find out that I can access the metadata of their files to find out they started writing an assignment the day it was due, they look at me like I’m a witch.

They know just enough about technology to be consumers, but not nearly enough to be producers or game-changers.  We try to teach them the latter two in school now, but the last ten to fifteen years (give or take, depending on your area) of that educational focus has brought us to today.  Nowhere does questioning and criticizing the whole thing enter into the equation, and so the best and brightest have been scooped up by the ultra-rich to find even more ways to keep the rest of us consuming.  The intuitive ease of today’s apps is no longer for our benefit: it’s a consumerist ploy to get us relying on corporations for things we could truly do without, in exchange for the precious metadata that informs their marketing campaigns.

This has been the dark side of Community Informatics all along:  at every step of the way, as we try to democratize the skills that have led to prosperity in the past, what we end up doing for the future is devaluing those very skills.  This is why I teach techno-criticism instead of the mere use of technology:  what I always struggle to communicate to my colleagues is that we will continue this trend of devaluing skills if we only teach skills.  We also have to teach the philosophy of being critical of this technology, and mindful of how it affects our lives and the world in sociotechnical ways, if we want to make any change for the better.

And so, to answer the original question at last, the kind of hacker culture that gets into the roots of things may never happen again in a widespread way; or it could happen and go very very wrong if we keep doing the education aspect the way we're doing it now; or it could go very right, but only if the kind of shift that I am pushing for becomes much more widespread.  It’s entirely possible that the number of hackers in the world is going to just go down from here on out. It’s also entirely possible that it’ll go up, but they’ll all be corporate code-monkeys. What I’m pushing for, with the way I teach, is a generation of kids who know how to take apart a desktop PC and put it back together, write code that gets a raspberry pi to talk to an Arduino, and also change their own oil and crochet - but who also know how to stop and think about their lives from time to time, take quiet moments in each day, and see the tools in their lives in terms of world impact rather than simply personal benefit.

I kinda have my work cut out for me, but I guess we'll all see how it goes?