Siva Vaidhyanathan brings up some great points in “Generational Myth: Not All Young People Are Tech-Savvy.” And it’s true, not everyone in my peer group is tech-savvy. In fact, I know more people who hate technology than those who seem to innately know how every little gadget works. I don’t consider myself tech-savvy. Yes, I do know how to work with MS Excel and MS Access, and yes, I do understand how to operate the TV in my family’s living room that seems to be connected to at least three or four different remotes, but I don’t think that makes me tech-savvy.
There’s certain things I love about technology, though, like using the Internet for research instead of digging through huge books for one little snippet of information. Still, I prefer print books to my e-reader and often find myself hand-writing sections of the short stories I write in my free time before typing them up. Oh, and let’s not forget how I still don’t quite understand how Twitter works but my 12 year-old sister does; or how I’m perfectly fine with using MS Office or Windows Movie Maker and I’m constantly using iTunes to burn my playlists to CDs for my car, but hand me a DVD and tell me to edit clips in Final Cut Pro and submit them for grading and watch me have a little panic attack. And though it doesn’t seem like it to people like my parents and older aunts and uncles, there’s many of us in their late teens/early twenties who just aren’t as tech-savvy as we seem. We are not a digital generation. We just happen to be surrounded by constant technological advancements; it doesn’t mean we know them inside and out.