me, gesturing to an episode of The Screen Savers on TechTV: this is TV from the year 2000! they're teaching people the difference between port scanning and packet sniffing!
her, scrunching her face in amazement: nice!
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i'm telling you, folx, we really lost something culturally
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live call in TV where someone wants to use their Promise Ultra 66 card with Linux and the answer that they give is "oh yes thats doable, it's easiest if you patch your kernel, here's some places to look for how to do that"
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in another episode, they teach folx what a hex editor is, the basic layout of the UI, what its used for
they also give a very basic but correct explanation of a memory error you might create whereby you modify a string in a way that fucks up the addresses in instructions
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keep in mind that this was a LIVE variety show meant to educate and entertain ordinate people, back in an era when computers and especially the web were still new and fresh
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and its delightful to see the ads for what is, frankly, basic shit today but also was still WILDLY new back then. things like Homestead's DIY website service
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but honestly, I think that these ads wouldn't be out of place even today, because they're aimed at the Masses, not at nerds like us, right
like, you and i might think "ah but i can write some HTML and CSS, no problem! who needs sites like that?!" but most people cant
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and so i feel like even today you could run an ad on TV promoting a service to let normal folx make their own websites, and you'd actually probably get a lot of interest
this is why MySpace was initially popular, why facebook became popular, why Twitter became popular
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not ads, i mean the appeal to normal people looking for an easy way to be on the web and interact with people
the whole channel was really well designed for normal people to learn about the tech world, but these ads weren't ZDTV/TechTV-specific
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ads for things like Homestead were REALLY common at this time
i mean here's a SUPERBOWL ads from 2000, for a website (computer.com) that explains computer stuff
those ads were fuckin expensive and yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKAn7Jhwl1E
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but in the 90s, the fact that the web was so new, and the fact that as a result now tens of millions of people had computers and were on the web, was a clear motivation to consciously address newbies and their needs
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there was just no way to pretend like the web and computers was anything other than completely new
you couldn't pretend like people SURELY know how to use this stuff
the rollout of the web was INCREDIBLY fast
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at the beginning of the 90s, no one had the web except a handful of people at universities
by the end of the 90s, literally HALF of US households had a computer with internet access
thats like 140 million people that needed to be educated in all of this shit in barely a decade
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and most of that was really LESS than a decade because these numbers didn't creep above about 10% until 1995 or 1996 anyway, so it's more like 120 million people having to learn about computers and the net in 5 years
it's a MASSIVE shift that's hard to imagine today
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and you just couldn't deny that it was happening, because no one around these people knew about computers either
whereas today, everyone has a smartphone and a computer and we're just saturated in it
but the thing is, most people don't .. know things about computers?
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I suspect that the truth is, today, a SMALLER fraction of people are actually learning to understand their computers than back then, and that a SMALLER fraction of people understand them than in 2000
and its precisely because we've gotten so accustomed to their presence
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their usage is everywhere, but there's also no need for people to understand anything because all of the primary use cases that people have are so calcified, that you can just learn those motions and thats it
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we used to try to teach computer literacy, promote access to learning resources at the fucking superbowl, all of this shit
but now we promote Facebook pseudoliteracy, ChatGPT pseudoliteracy, etc etc
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we ASSUME that everyone just knows this stuff because we're surrounded by it, and so we've stopped teaching it, and as a result most people probably don't know it actually
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this is why I said before that I'm actually fairly confident that you could make a service like Homestead, and advertise it on TV, and maybe get some people to use it
i think there's a lot of people who do need things like that, or who need computer literacy sites, etc.
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and i think that if there's one thing that ChatGPT has shown, it's that there are a lot of people who WANT answers to things, but who aren't getting them through traditional means like Google searches
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part of that is definitely due to quality problems with Google, but part of that is also certainly because people don't know HOW to search for things
Google is also no longer new, so Google literacy (gLiteracy??) education is basically nonexistant
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we expect people to use the internet to learn things but no one is teaching them how to find that stuff, how to identify junk, etc etc, and so things like ChatGPT, which have the appearance of just getting straight to the answers clearly and quickly are very appealing
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now up: an episode of Big Thinkers with Vint Cerf as the guest. they talk IPv6 and the need for widespread adoption
this was broadcast on Feb 9, 2000 lol
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@beka_valentine I'm surprised how my son's generation, which grew up on the internet, is horrible at finding information on the internet.
I'm reminded it's all out there, you just need to know how to look.
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@poindexter @beka_valentine
"how to look" keeps changing, and search engines have gotten horrifyingly bad of late - I'm having difficulty finding resources lately that I used to consult routinely.
Not to mention how certain resources have become completely unavailable.
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