Friends of my generation who weren’t in families with a computer they could play around on have ended up far less comfortable with tech. I would love to see data like this broken out by class background.
I suspect companies have historically been overvalued based on what a techie user could get out of them rather than their intended user. Does this happen with phone apps too?
Are there modes of instruction that help people advance in these skills? They seem like they ought to have a lot of impact, and yet I don’t think I see training around me.
How does good/bad UI design impact this?
Sorry for Going Off; I’m touchy about the topic because when it comes to actually advanced computer programming skills, there was this retracted paper that got a lot of traction that people used to justify their belief in their own superiority as people who Just Got programming, and that others just Weren’t Wired That Way. In my CS education it seemed pretty obvious that whether people got it or not had a lot to do with the alignment of their backgrounds and interests with the analogies and explanations that were used, rather than something fundamental, and I found this really really irritating.