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allisonaparrish@friend.camp
Nov 10, 2026, 11:38 PM
(to develop/clarify my thoughts here: i am NOT trying to say "actually computers are secretly easy!" i'm trying to say that people successfully engage with difficult, sometimes learner-hostile practices *all the time*, and politics/economics have an outsized influence in maintaining the understanding of computers as being *uniquely* difficult in comparison to other practices)
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C.cazabon@mindly.social
Nov 11, 2026, 5:18 PM
@aparrish
You've got it exactly right, and it's not just adults, and not just the last 20 years. I taught a kids' computer class back in 1992, and even at the age of 7 or 8 half the students had already internalized the whole "computers are complicated and scary and beyond my capabilities" message - while the other half proved it wasn't true. This is back in DOS command-line days, before "user friendly" was really a concept in the PC world.
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