Anecdotally, since the 80s, I’ve seen a rapid rise of general computer savvy in students and am now seeing a decline in computer savvy with a corresponding rise in gadget savvy students, though I’m not quite sure if that’s what I mean since I’m not really sure what computer savvy or gadget savvy actually means, in any meaningful sense.

Let me see if I can parse this out. By computer savvy I mean a general comfort and “comfort in the” interest in the workings of the machine, which I would attribute to newness or greenness of the object (not a general interest with its next iteration when that “its” becomes an annoyance). Has anyone cared about the next iteration of the stove?  In the nineties we were excited about computers for all kinds of reasons. Telephony gadgets were things you feared being clubbed with. The Walkman wasn’t a digital gadget but it was the iPhone of the 80s. In the 90s, students were still using typewriters. Before the ’00s, computers, I would argue, were “exploratory.”

I don’t think this is true for most college students these days. Computers are things people just have. I don’t see a lot of students “exploring” the possibilities. In the recent years, I’ve observed platform cliches (people still argue Redmond vs Cupertino and now vs Mountain View)  but the chatter’s all old hash and you can hear the hinges creaking.

Still, things are changing fast and I don’t really know what to expect when I say, “Send it to me through email.” Not a lot of  “savvy” that maybe one doc might not work if sent through mode of transfer. The proliferation of “types” is driving me crazy. I cringe when a student sends me something with the extension .pages, and wonder when I get one that says .odt (hm, I know when someone’s using open source but isn’t worrying about the information contained in the dialogue or context box dropdowns). In other words, thinking about “what one sends” matters. But what people hear when I say “through email” is “okay, my doc is the same as yours, so, I’ll send my .pages doc or ‘whatever I’m saving.'” But I wonder if people are thinking about the object they’re actually saving. One way of thinking about this is the “personal cloud”: drag it to my public file, but then I have to worry about what’s being dragged in.

I have students who text during class. They have their phone on the desk and periodically tap a message out. And then get one back. It’s amusing to think about this activity. It doesn’t get me anywhere to judge the behavior, but it is curious to think about what sort of compulsivity to which this points. I tell students we need those things to look up information. When you want to evaluate data it’s good to have the real numbers from the CDC or the FBI. Computing devices, wifi enabled, are fantastic for that.

Which finally gets me to the reason why I started this post: the recent news about the NSA and the iPhone, about which I’m holding a certain amount of skepticism. I need someone to tell me how this actually works. And thus the problem: how does one search for a piece of software on the iPhone or the iPad. How does one know, and manipulate, specifically, “all” the software on their gadget?

This story, true or false, tells me something about the relationship people have had with computers and the technical relationship they’ve developed with the iPhone.  This is the “decline of the computer savvy” narrative. My conclusion or observations here may, of course, be true or false.