alt text
An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
i think that’s true of most people in any generation, honestly. gen alpha isn’t uniquely tech illiterate in my experience.
it’s anecdotal, but my father is gen x and basically only uses his phone and tablet. meanwhile i know a gen alpha kid who pirated windows 11 pro for the remote desktop functionality so he could afk in roblox while playing minecraft… or look at all the stuff kids are doing to bypass age verification!
there’s also that all of gen alpha are kids or teens, of course most of them are gonna be less knowledgeable about stuff than adults lol