[conspire] File Not Found (How Kids Find Files These Days)

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

"CatherineCatherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files."

As someone who's worked on full-text search (not to mention as a programmer), I'm fascinated by this, the idea that people just drop files any old place and expect to find them. But there definitely is a cultural shift, and it affects things like how people use mass storage.

I am somewhat guilty of this in the email department: I do sort some mail into specific archives, but keep the rest quarter-by-quarter. The reason in my case is that I'm more likely to remember *when* something was rather than the exact language in it.

-- 
  Deirdre Saoirse Moen
  deirdre at deirdre.net