Humans as old as Google have a different mental model of data storage

For many members of Gen Z, files and folders are not intuitive

[ronin]

I read this with a sense of mild but increasing discomfort...

[...] student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. [...] She asked each student where they’d saved their project. [...] But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Source: [theverge.com...]

[lucy24]

I’m old . . .

[not2easy]

I am sorry to say that I know of a good number of people well past that age (like 3x) with the same problem. It is scary to think they probably also drive and raise/d children.

[tangor]

I'm probably older. (sigh)

"Gimme now" without "knowing how" (or why) is going to be a problem in the future. Classic dumbdown to get back to centralized computing. Hari Seldon anyone?

[engine]

I can't think of a better thing to do with files than to sort them in a suitable file structure for ease of retrieval. There's nothing worse than not being able to find that important file.

I guess people are used to using search for instant retrieval, and less likely to use bookmarks and folder structures. Even my phone sorts images into dates, events, reminders, etc., and I didn't have to take any actions to set that up.

New ways of doing things, eh.

[RhinoFish]

When I interview to hire, I ask people about how they organize their files, their Inbox, and even their Sent mail folder.
I also ask about their method for tracking to-do tasks and deadlines.

We should use search and automation to make us even more productive, but if there's garbage in, well...

[martinibuster]

I ask people about how they organize their files, their Inbox, and even their Sent mail folder.

You are asking the wrong question. Gen Z generally doesn't use email.

Gen Z has moved away from email. My teenager has a Gmail account but she never uses it, ever. Email today is fast approaching obsolesce similar to what happened to the Fax machine and analog phones.

[nytimes.com...]

[Seobi]

The question is, what can we learn from this behavior for our business? Generations change, I think this is not new and also not a problem. Of course, it is a bit scary when this new behaviors are completly different from what we learned and know, but that's life :)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Totally understandable, partly human nature not to expend the nature to retain and re-use knowledge when you can just search for it, costs less mental energy.

Makes me think of the people that teach 'how to think' (I guess education in general plays a part in that) rather than what to think. The what to think is generally subject to the algorithm, unless you know a good bit of the 'how'.

Hopefully their mental model takes into account the idea of the algorithm and a single source of truth being a single point of failure.

[ronin]

Gen Z has moved away from email.

Not just Gen Z.

I'm late Gen X (two "generations" older, apparently - or one and a half, certainly) and I use email as seldom as humanly possible.

I loved email in the 1990s, (loved it most in the late 1990s) and the early 2000s. By the mid-2000s it was becoming a headache and by the late 2000s it was already a real pain. By the early 2010s, email was causing me actual grief. By the mid-2010s I began intermittently ignoring it. In summer 2018* I bit the bullet and basically stopped using email. Today I use email in a functional capacity for password or account updating / retrieval and... almost nothing else.

Sixteen months later, in Dec 2019, I stopped using Twitter and Facebook too (content to leave both in the 2010s and move into the 2020s without them). If anyone asked me how I find life after email, twitter and facebook, I would say - without a second's hesitation - that life is improved.

Totally understandable, partly human nature not to [...] retain and re-use knowledge when you can just search for it, costs less mental energy.

I suspect an example of this that many people will be able to relate to is: phone numbers.

In the 1990s I could rattle off a good handful of friends' telephone numbers. Since the early 2000s, my mobile phone's address book has been my artificial memory for every phone number I need to know apart from my own.

But, thinking about it... when I access my artificial-memory-for-phone-numbers I still navigate that software's internal data-structure (which, in this case, is a list of alphabetically ordered entries) to retrieve the information that it remembers so I don't have to.

That's closer to files and folders rather than searching, isn't it?

[tangor]

Kids these days only "learn" what button to click. No real memory knowledge involved. Is this smarter or ... dumber?

Time will tell!

[tbear]

Wasn't it Einstein who said, why bother to remember something when I can write it down...?

[ronin]

Several variations of that sentiment are attributed to Einstein. Though rather more variations (and rather more frequently) in English than in German. Make of that what you will.

There is this (in German):

Als Albert Einstein um seine Telefonnummer gebeten wurde, griff er zum Telefonbuch, um sie herauszusuchen. Auf die Frage, ob er seine eigene Telefonnummer nicht parat hätte, meinte Einstein: "Ich belaste mein Gedächtnis nie mit Dingen, die ich irgendwo nachschlagen kann".

which translates as: "When Albert Einstein was asked for his telephone number, he picked up the telephone directory to look it up. On being asked if he hadn't memorised his own telephone number, Einstein opined: 'I don't burden my memory with things which I can look up somewhere."

That might be apocryphal.

There is also this (in English):

While Einstein was in Boston, staying at the Hotel Copley Plaza, he was given a copy of Edison’s questionnaire to see whether he could answer the questions. As soon as he read the question: “What is the speed of sound?” he said: “I don’t know. I don’t burden my memory with such facts that I can easily find in any textbook.”

which is apparently from Philipp Frank's biography, “Einstein: His Life and Times” (1947).

I couldn't find any trace of this anecdote in German.

Regardless of whether they refer to real events, both anecdotes raise the idea of the utility of recording rather than memorising information... but they do not discuss approaches to retrieving recorded information.

[Mark_A]

I use the phone a lot to talk to customers, but I also use email to follow up, make quotations, keep in touch etc in business relationships. A lot of people are working from home at the moment and many are not giving out home or mobile phone numbers, again email comes to the rescue.

The youth don't use email, it is true, my son doesn't look at his email, but he is a student, he isn't working for a company. My bet is when he is working for a company he may quickly find that email is an accepted communications medium and useful.

[lucy24]

why bother to remember something when I can write it down

Whether any one person said it or not, this reflects a fundamental change that has come with increasing literacy over the last few centuries or millennia (depending on where you live).

:: insert relevant Aristotle quotation ::

[brotherhood of LAN]

>That's closer to files and folders rather than searching, isn't it?

Guess there's a separation of concerns where you know the classification system or not. With phones it's a simple dictionary lookup, you know what to expect, most likely your contacts in alphabetical order. No major surprises or unknowns. Filesystems are more or less the same, you get to order your data in the way you think it's easiest to find.

Even with web directories, you reasonably know what to expect. With search engines there is a large element of black box where you don't really know what to expect, with as much confidence anyway. It's subject to relevance ordering and exclusions which you have no prior knowledge about, and knowledge you'll never get to know about.

Slightly OT. I managed to bork my main OS (Debian 10) and had to reinstall just last week. I knew that whatever happened (OS failure, disk failure, whatever) there was a separate copy of everything I needed to maintain my daily chores. There's my machine, an external HD and a github repo sitting on another server. If any of them fail, I can recover. If the search engine fails, it is a whole new proposition. Been programming for 20 years now, and it's safe to say I still use search engines for answers but at least I know there are man pages etc on my local filesystem should search engines be gone.

[blend27]

@all

"Who are we?"

..WestWorld..

[blend27]

..Whether any one person said it or not, this reflects a fundamental change that has come with increasing literacy over the last few centuries or millennia (depending on where you live)..

Is what we spread is it, copy of "it"?! Some loosing the tail, some learning from adults, some reinstall from last week, some learning from lawyers isolating themselves from, hey lets say me, ...grrrrr

But what are we loosing that is not already in our heads, or yet?

[NickMNS]

@tangor

Kids these days only "learn" what button to click. No real memory knowledge involved. Is this smarter or ... dumber?

I don't think you have any idea what kids learn these days. But I can assure that the level of math that my child learns in the 7th grade has some parents struggling. Not to mention robotics and programming classes.

Boomers these days....

[ronin]

Oh. It's not just old man Tangor. ;-)

Socrates didn't say this 2440 years ago:

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

See: [quoteinvestigator.com...]

But I surely wish he had done. :-D

[ronin]

Related:

My students have been trained to use tools in the web-browser: cloud word-processors, web-sites, etc.

When I try to teach programming on the computer: using programs that are on the local computer. They find it difficult.

I do a demo. I then show the class one step at a time, what to do.

- Close web-browser.
- Go to start menu, and open xyz program.

As I look around the room, one or two students at this step re-open the web-browser, and start attempting to follow the instructions there.

Source: [cseducators.stackexchange.com...]

Oh. Wow.

[tangor]

@NickMNS ...

don't think you have any idea what kids learn these days. But I can assure that the level of math that my child learns in the 7th grade has some parents struggling. Not to mention robotics and programming classes.

When I encounter kids 7-17 standing outside the convenience store waiting for the door to open---instead of grabbing a hold of the door handle---I wonder where all that programming and other education is going. :)

However, the thread is contemplating how information and data is structured and how different generations retrieve it. The "book" remains one of the great inventions of all time since we are all born completely blank ... and with books ( and now including all forms of media) the human child can go from blank to brilliant in a single life time with all the knowledge that took centuries to homo sapiens sapiens to acquire.

[lucy24]

Rereading this thread, I remembered my father--a chemistry professor--complaining about a student who didn’t know the periodic table. Her justification was that she could just look it up.

Nope. No matter what your field, there are some things you’re expected to know. The bank teller who counted on her fingers* to establish that a 180-day check issued in June was still valid in November ... was in the wrong line of work.

* True story.

[NickMNS]

@tangor
[youtube.com...]

[tangor]

Hmmm .... a youtube reply instead of words? BTW, nothing wrong with grumpy old men, just SNL versions of same by a youngster wearing makeup. :)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

There's a lot the latest generation of adults don't know anything about and a lot of it is behavioral. It's not so much that folders are confusing, in my opinion, it's that young users don't have enough patience or tolarance for much. Everything is 0 to 100 instantly, for every perceived slight.

"Folder frustrate me, folder fault, SMASH!"

I just wanted to add that this "phenomenon" is regional. People in some parts of the world complain and people in other parts do some pretty cool things with them,. YMMV

[Brett_Tabke]

Fascinating thread! The original story is great, but they point the finger in the wrong direction. It's not the Google generation, it is the Apple generation.

[Dimitri]

Peace first, then ...

So imagine what it will be with the Facebook generation ... :-)

[Lexur]

... but the Tiktok generation will be even worse. :-D

[Dimitri]

desevolution in progress :)