"apps have completely eroded tech literacy!"
can you actually demonstrate as a fact, not an assumption on your part, that tech literacy has ever been a general-purpose phenomenon
because I was working in retail selling games consoles at the last point they could arguably still be thought of as standalone plug-and-play machines, and lemme tell you, substantial numbers of people struggle to cope with the technological demands of "plug in both the power and video cables. The other end of the video cable needs to be plugged into your TV"
there are many many reasons to hate the arc of tech toward grasping control, functionality fragmented and siloed into units of marketing, and swingeing monetisation; but harkening back to a time People Understood Computers ain't it
kinda seems like maybe the thing that's actually changed is the average person went from "can't use computers because they don't understand them" to "can use [some form of] computers without needing to understand them"
I would frame it more as "can use [some form of] computers without understanding them because they HAVE TO." To blame people for not understanding when they never signed up for this but have to use computers anyways in order to exist in the modern world would be lame.
The expectation for everyone to have computers and smartphones and active hostility towards those who don't is probably one of the worst roads we've been heading down. Imagine being, like, an old person with just a flip phone trying to do anything today.
i will say, for example, in an academic setting the assumption that everything is available "on the cloud" herds students to huge corporate mediated datastores, and makes it harder to teach people about where data actually can be.
you could have devices that make it easy (well easier) for unsophisticated users and still give them the opportunity to have control over their data, but vendors, information services and administrators seem to agree that that is not in their interests.
