I had the attention span to sit down and play…maybe a quarter of GTA 5. If that. At this point, I don’t want to have to figure out what I was supposed to do or where to go. I want like…10 to 15 minutes of gameplay I can put down and then do something else and then come back and have another 15 minutes that’s equally self-contained. I just feel like GTA punishes you for trying to do that.
Or took “no” as an answer from a woman.
the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy.
What part of this article is inaccurate?
You can say the title is clickbait, but that doesn’t make it sensationalist. I feel like either you and I have totally different definitions of sensationalist, or you think the article is doing something it’s not. The article does the following
I’d like to know what part of that is sensationalist to you, because in my mind that is a remarkably by the numbers tech article.
Also, the data itself is not “BS” - it’s something that is accurate, but has to be understood within a specific context. That’s literally what the article is doing - contextualizing the information. You are saying it’s sensationalizing the data. It’s not. If anything it’s doing the opposite. It’s making the data more mundane by providing logical explanations for it.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won’t take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can’t write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It’s all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards “unstructured thought” or perhaps “stream of consciousness” than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.
So you agree the article is sensationalist?
The article is not sensationalist. Please quote me a part of the article that you feel is and I can address the statements that make you feel that way.
Why link me a study that is irrelevant for no reason?
Because that study is referenced as one of the primary sources the article uses to provide evidence for the phenomenon it discusses. The link to that research paper is literally in the article. It’s critical to the article.
Yes, they acknowledge that as well when they discuss the sample population. Baby Boomers are literally not a part of it. The title of the Vox article is just drawn from a Deloitte industry survey. Which has no real context or judgment around it - it’s purely a reporting of aggregate statistics. The Vox article just attempts to explain why Zoomers, a generational cohort that grew up with the internet, might be more statistically prevalent for succumbing to those scams compared to Baby Boomers, who were fully adult when the internet became widespread. The superficial presumption is that you would expect the opposite - the older generations have little to no familiarity with modern technology and are more easily victimized by it. That presumption is all the Vox article is discussing, really, and why it’s probably not correct.
Vox is being charitable to the Zoomers, though, observing that “Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.” The original study is also in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not making judgment calls about Zoomers. It’s aggregating statistical data. You can read the article here: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ijcic
From the discussion of findings at the end of the article, the researchers observed that
“It is reasonable to assume that the safer practices the older group self-reported is accompanied by greater knowledge of information security simply because of the additional years of being engaged in a digital-technology world. Specifically, it was hypothesized that Generation Y would rank higher than Generation Z adults on the OSBBQ Cybersecurity Awareness subscale, and significant differences were observed for half of the items included in the analysis.”
And also that
“From a developmental perspective, it is possible that the normal adaptations that occur throughout one’s life impacted how individuals in this study perceived the literal meaning of the items. This could be due to cultural differences inherent to their generational cohort and the individual experiences that occur over time with age. For example, people tend to lose their sense of invulnerability as hey age (Denscombe & Drucquer, 1999) and generation Y adults grew up in a world where adapting to privacy and cybersecurity threats were first becoming more commonplace. These individuals are now at an age where the realities of (online) risk have become part of their conscious awareness as it relates to their lack of invulnerability.”
Like, this formal study is incredibly generous in its discussion of why Gen. Z might be shown to be more statistically likely to fall for online scams than other cohorts. It also goes into great detail to explain its own limitations as a study.
By the source I assume you mean me, and not the article. Because I’m not being sensationalist. I’m being unfair and judgmental. Very different things.
*Person criticizes Zoomers*
Random Zoomer: “Yeah, well, THE BOOMERS ARE WORSE.”
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically “Linux with training wheels.” You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn’t necessity. It’s frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it’s that they’re incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said “click here for free V Bucks.” There are no V Bucks, dog. There’s never any V Bucks.
I feel like they’re fighting an up hill battle against startups. If you’re a tech startup, you don’t have to invest in physical office space. You can hire competent people from anywhere. Pay them competitively and not have to drop 50K a month on a corporate office lease. It’s a minor edge in the long run, but something of an inevitability I think. Anyone genuinely competent realizes that if you force people to go into the office, you’re just gonna have people who dick around in the office and make idle conversation while staring at their phones instead of doing honest to God work.
I’ve always liked the term “institutional inertia.”
As opposed to what? It’s where the people they follow post. Why would they leave for somewhere that doesn’t have any content they care about? It’s like asking who the fuck is still on reddit. The answer is the enormous shitload of people who just want a steady feed of the same content they’ve always consumed.
I really hope startups are using Copilot and stuff as much as possible because so much of that code is absolute bloatware trash and it’ll make Copilot worse with time. Or maybe it won’t. Would be funny if it did, though.
This isn’t Elon’s hyperloop. It’s a company called Hyperloop One, predominately funded by Richard Branson.
No one reads the article, my guy. Everyone just assumes it’s Musk’s imbecilic project, when in reality it’s Branson’s imbecilic project.
Part of me is glad that my continuing insistence that younger generations are dumber than I was at their age is not just me being an old man mad at kids for still having the youth that he squandered. A larger part of me is terrified at the prospect of a generation being continuously microdosed with levels of garbage entertainment and misinformation that would make George Orwell nauseous.