I find the technological incompetence of our political leaders and advisers very worrying. I doubt any of them could describe the difference between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web browser and a search engine.
It's not only your leaders. Things are same everywhere. In India, one can say anything about government openly but say something on social media site and fool leaders will try to censor you.
There have been multiple instances displaying how bad situation is. A movie company was able to get court orders to stop piracy of their movie and this ended in ban over 70+ sites. Not specific pages, blanket ban on whole sites. [1]
Then we have had a girl arrested over liking a Facebook post criticizing a leader[2]
I had high hopes with our generation but looks like most of the people in early twenties are not much better.
> I had high hopes with our generation but looks like most of the people in early twenties are not much better.
I know a 12 years old who can't watch photos on a usb stick or a cd-rom if the windows dialog "what do you want to do ?" doesn't show up when inserting the disc or the stick on the computer. But he has mean fingers to send a gazillion sms per minute.
I know adults who seem unable to grasp the concept of resolution as they keep adding 4000x4000 pixels images in their powerpoint. And they seem to forget as soon as I tell them where the "shrink images" function is.
My outlook on this is that things haven't changed since the 90's (when I was a teen): some people want to know how computers work or make them work "better" and some just want stuff done. The first are more technologically literate (more like jack-of-all-trades) than the second but I am not convinced they are automatically better set for life as a result or that what they do with the computer is more appreciated.
Nah, the other half is just stupid or lazy. It's the same kind of people who will ignore screwdriver and will try to pry the bolt out with pliers unless they have been shown the benefits of using the proper tool in the past 15 minutes.
I work at a large library and the smart, non-tech people are genuinely interested in improving their and their peers' effectiveness and are willing to learn. I frequently chat with a friend who can make shoes, design and construct electrical devices, build small buildings, survive in nature and anonymously watch things he's interested in on the Internet. He frequently asks about relevant things and gives advice from his fields of knowledge.
There's only one actual scientist in the house of commons (Julian Huppert, LibDem, Cambridge) and he is regularly heckled whenever he gets up to speak about anything. Shameful..
