Digital Natives are Digital Dimwits

The paradox of ubiquitous screens and plummeting computer literacy.

Growing up in the 1980s, my family’s Panasonic VCR was my most cherished object—a magical analog portal out of small town New England to far-away worlds of gonzo cult movies and late-night TV. But it did have one annoying flaw: every time the power flickered, its cyan LCD clock blinked “12:00^am” until manually reset by pressing three tiny buttons 10,000 times in just the right order. To my parents – then younger than I am now—Panasonic might as well have compelled them to calculate the Space Shuttle’s re-entry vector on an abacus missing half its beads. Without me, that clock would have blinked continuously until Bill Clinton’s second inauguration.

Having spent the ensuing decades working at the intersection of tech and media, I’ve long dreaded the arrival of my own “VCR clock moment”—the day some new-fangled gizmo will render my generation slack-jawed in helpless bewilderment—wholly dependent on the youngins to restore order to techno-chaos. But it hasn’t happened yet—and not because my Gen-X brethren and I are tech savants. It’s because by and large, so-called “digital natives” are pretty digitally clueless.

My first inkling came a dozen years ago, when a fresh crop of interns arrived at the TV production company where I worked. I was excited to welcome our first crew to have come of age post-iPhone, in houses and schools packed with broadband computers. How effortlessly they would breeze through the thrilling backlog of digital grunt work we’d set aside for them! Instead, my colleagues and I were dumbfounded at their general ineptitude. More than one prestigious college undergrad, when assigned literally the simplest computing task imaginable, replied “Copy and paste? What’s that?” Then the next batch of interns was worse, and the one after them was even worser. Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Our so-called “digital natives” can meme, stream, and doomscroll like virtuoso rock stars, but crack open a laptop and ask them to actually produce anything of substance — and they’re suddenly your feeble, tone-deaf uncle caterwauling ABBA at karaoke.

If you’ve bought the hype that Gen-Z “digital natives” are digitally gifted, the actual data might make your frontal lobe buffer. The 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study—the gold-standard global exam for 8th graders—shows American kids’ digital literacy plunged 37 points since 2018. Computational Thinking? Same nosedive, now below the international average. Only about 2% of American students hit the top proficiency level.¹ A 2021 University of Toledo study put it bluntly: “Students are consumers of technology, but they have limited skills in using technology to solve business problems.”² All this, despite 97% of kids having home Internet access³, 95% of teens having smartphones⁴, and 88% of public schools now issuing every student a personal device.⁵

This translates into a generation of humans who despite being grafted to screens like cyborgs, don’t understand Computing 101 basics like file formats, directory structures, transferring documents, permissions, and settings. Indeed, our so-called “digital natives” can meme, stream, and doomscroll like virtuoso rock stars, but crack open a laptop and ask them to actually produce anything of substance—to use the device as a legitimate work tool—and they’re suddenly your feeble, tone-deaf uncle caterwauling ABBA at karaoke. And teachers confirm it: one high school media arts instructor recently told me her pupils complain bitterly about having to learn professional-grade desktop software from Adobe, insisting instead on touch-based phone and tablet apps that produce amateurish results. Because why learn the tools of the trade when the toy version is easier?

In retrospect, this should surprise exactly nobody. It has been glaringly obvious since the dawn of the iPhone/iPad era that these are consumption devices—leisure and lifestyle accessories built for idle tapping, scrolling, and chatting. Yes, they can be used for work, but those features are mere dainty side dishes. The entrée? A Cracker-Barrel-sized heap of vacuous e-gluttony.

Blame for this can be laid at the feet of Boomers, Gen-X and Millennials. Together, we built the Internet, designed its ultra-addictive apps and games, then handed sexy devices to our trusting youth without having bothered to first teach them any basic computing concepts, vocabulary, or standards. We seamlessly bundled practical pro tech and utterly frivolous tech into one deliciously irresistible package—effectively erasing the line between work and play, and sabotaging the desired outcome: successive generations of digitally competent citizens.

And the job market is noticing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, teen labor force participation peaked at 71.8% in July 1978 and had fallen to 43.2% by July 2016—a drop of nearly 29 percentage points.⁶ We’ve given kids more glowing rectangles than any generation in history, but their practical computer skills—and job prospects—are swirling down the Skibidi Toilet bowl. Sorry gang, but employers don’t hire for fluency in the TikTok blackout challenge.

And yet our culture at large—and schools in particular—continue to peddle the simplistic narrative that tethering kids to screens will foment the digital literacy needed to be successful in the hi-tech economies of today and tomorrow. By this cartoonishly reductive logic, puppies wearing shock collars become master electricians, and the only career fast track to Michelin star chef is gorging yourself sick on Doritos.

If we keep mistaking screen time for skill time, we’re not just setting kids back — we’re setting the whole workforce back. The consequences for them, and for all of us, will be considerably greater than a Panasonic VHS deck blinking “12:00^am.” And that’s a shame, because after multiple decades of providing free IT support to seemingly every old person in my life, I’m officially done with doing it for “digital natives”, too. So please, Gen-Z, for the love of God, get it together… and set my damned VCR clock.

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a comedy producer, satirist, creative director and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for dismembering all those self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

1. https://www.iea.nl/publications/icils-2023-assessment-framework

2. https://articlegateway.com/index.php/JABE/article/view/4084

3. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cch/home-internet-access

4. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-internet-device-access-fact-sheet/

5. https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/2_19_2025.asp

6. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/teen-labor-force-participation-before-and-after-the-great-recession.htm