@rra@post.lurk.org @entreprecariat@post.lurk.org Indeed people don't simply have this knowledge, but the question of 'where' and 'how' these tacit competencies have been historically developed seems to have changed, and that's what is interesting. In the 90s and 00s, teens were taught at school how to use a computer so they can be a bureaucrat (ref: the ECDL programme). This taught a very explicit performance of the office metaphor that our 'traditional' OSes employ. Nowadays, in the UK the 'smart economy' and 'creative industries' rhetoric reigns supreme in second-level IT pedagogy, and many secondary schools here adopted tablets en masse in the early 2010s. The generation of students who experienced this latter pedagogical approach to computers are now arriving in media arts degree programmes, with unprecedented skills in some areas, but a striking unfamiliarity in others (e.g. the filesystem). The metaphor of administrative work that older OSes emulated is something of an anachronism. Just as the 'blade' icon that allows the user to make an edit in video editing software no longer refers to the physical 'cut' in a strip of film for many people, the file icon has come to be an icon that primarily refers to itself - not some analogue, material equivalent.
