That's an exaggeration. Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.

No other prior generation comes close.

Compare them to people growing up in the 1980s. The average person at that time was overwhelmingly oblivious to computing very broadly, their grasp of a "file" as a concept would have been close to non-existent. That was just 40 years ago.

In the mid 1980s a mere 10% of US households had home computers. And that was a high mark globally, it was drastically lower in nearly every other country (closer to zero in eg China, India at that time). The number of people routinely using office PCs was still extremely low.

Today young people have a computer in their hand for hours each day, and they knowingly manage files throughout the day.

I use lights every day, but I know way less about electricity than my grandparents, two of whom who could remember when their town was electrified as children and who therefore treated it as the marvel it truly is. And also because we've worked out a ton of bugs in electricity and it often just works.

My kids will know way less about filesystems than I do, because I had to learn DOS commands to navigate around the operating system if I wanted to play computer games, which led to a lifelong interest in how computers actually work at a level they can (and, so far, do) happily ignore.

You don’t upload a “file” in a “folder” to TikTok. You upload a “video” from your “library”. Consumers have been conditioned to stop thinking about files especially when it comes to media since iTunes and the iPod in 2001.

> They grew up using Chromebooks … in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems

While it is possible to interact with the local file system on a school Chromebook, it’s certainly not the default. School interactions with Chromebooks seem to consist of logging with highly secure passwords like “strawberry” and using Google Docs. And playing games with heavy PvP components and paid DLC (paid by parents whose kids beg for it, not by schools) that call themselves “educational” because they interject math problems needed to use those juicy spells, make no effort whatsoever to teach anything, but produce a nicely formatted report correlating scores to numbered elements of the Common Core standards.

There may be some demographic groups located between people who were young during the 1980s and people who are young during the 2020s, time periods which are 40 years apart.

Maybe they do more intuitively think of things as virtual objects, but it seems like the issue is they don't have a deeper understanding of how the mechanisms behind the abstractions work and can easily get fooled into accepting terms they wouldn't if they properly understood.

> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.

This argument is like saying you understand nutrition because you eat food every day and haven't died yet.

And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares.

They know app silos, not file system hierarchy. Ask a teenager where a file is on their phone and the will tell you the name of an app. Ask them how to copy it somewhere else, and they'll use the share sheet and send it to another app.

High adoption doesn't equate to high literacy.

> drastically greater understanding of what a file

No, they do not. First, simply using something does not mean you understand it at all. Secondly, because the devices they've become the most accustomed to work very hard to hide all those details from the user.

> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them.

I totally disagree!!! Yes, everyone works with computer, phone, tablet, whatever, nowdays!

But does generation z "knows" about what a computer is?

Absolutely not!!!

While tech has advanced and graduated IT personal know more than previous generations (obviously!), all the rest, while they do know how to do their jobs, they know nothing about computers!!! They are pretty much like everyone else that didn't know what a computer was in generations x and previous!!!

However, contrary to previous generations, because they do interact with the tech, they represent a higher security risc for them and for others!

... Because they know nothing about it!!!

It's like giving a box of matches to a neanderthal in the middle of the woods...

Almost everyone in the "Gen x and previous" that interacted with the tech, did know what they were doing (past the initial learning phase)!!!

This does not happen after gen x!

To disagree and recycle some past writing:

> Yeah, I have a particular rant about this with respect to older generations believing "kids these days know computers." [...] they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.

> They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.

Unfortunately, they don't.

They might have had a computer in their hand for hours each day, but they barely know anything about it. The ones who do tend to be those who grew up playing on PC, as opposed to console or mobile, because the latter - despite falling under the "digital natives" aegis - are really shockingly ignorant of even basic concepts.

That's also a stereotype. Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012) is roughly 2 billion people. Among them are the technorati, and the tech literate. The influencers and the influenced. It's fair to compare what was available to them growing up, vs yourself (I learned to program before there was Google), but it's hard to say things that are going to be universally true across that many humans that are interesting. Most of them will have two arms and two legs but will most be able to navigate /etc/systemd/user/? Can't say.