I've spent the last decade of my life working with large amounts of photo and video files. At my first job, I'd spend two days shooting a music festival and then the next two days cataloguing, sorting, selecting, and editing literally thousands of images - not just mine but those of my entire photo team at the festival. My work folders on my laptop have an immaculate organisation system - everything is dated, labelled, and divided into subfolders according to type and project - each file in its right place. All of this means that if I or anyone else needed to find a particular photo on my computer, nestled somewhere in 100+GB of data (as I very often had to do at my first job), I could find it for you in under 30 seconds.
In the last few years, though, I've realised that the Youths simply don't know how this works. One of my teacher friends laments that they constantly have to re-explain to their students how to send a basic attachment from their computer or how to track changes on a document work. Kids these days (yup, I'm ageing myself) are supposed to be good with technology, having been born into a generation of native computer and internet users...but the evidence finds that in many places, especially when it comes to the understanding of file directories, the Kids are Not Alright.
Thus, I introduce to you today's Thing: File Not Found - a piece on The Verge about this exact issue. I keep going back to re-read this piece every few months, and I've shared it with multiple Olds and educators (and old educators) that I know, and they've all chimed in with agreements and their own similar experiences. To quote the most pertinent point in the piece:
She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? 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.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This part of the generational divide fascinates me - the idea that students not that much younger than me, young'uns that were born while technology was thriving, have completely bypassed something so intuitive and essential to us first-gen computer users that we don't even have the words to help bridge this divide of comprehension - because pretty much every single metaphor one can use to describe how a file directory works (the article pinpoints analogies such as the branches of a tree, kitchen utensils sorted into drawers, etc) can fall on deaf ears.
From the piece:
It’s a difficult concept to get across, though. Directory structure isn’t just unintuitive to students — it’s so intuitive to professors that they have difficulty figuring out how to explain it. “Those of us who have been around a while know what a file is, but I was at a bit of a loss to explain it,” lamented one educator in a 2019 forum post, a sentiment that respondents shared.
In a way that I really don't know how to explain (I'm an Olds too, I guess), it's one of the most glaring examples of generational change I've come across, especially since it involves technology. Let me tell you, of all the differences I see in the Youth, this wasn't one I was expecting at all.
Fellow Olds, please read this fascinating article. I'd love to know what you think. As for me, it's time to get my teeth sunk into my monthly file organisation hour.
Cheers
S