>It's also worth mentioning that men actually don't have a strong natural interest and affinity with computers. If you look at males in the general public, very few of them would actually be considered a 'power user' or higher.
I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself.
In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story.
With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves.
People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.
I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games. My point is that just looking at boys alone, ignoring girls completely, the proportion of them that do write mods for games and similar is still well in the minority. Hence my point that males, looked at as a group independently of females, don't actually have a strong affinity for computers.
And no, I don't agree that "all the young people today know heaps about computers". I just left a job where I was the 41-year-old sysadmin and there were a dozen or so twentysomethings. Apart from one or two self-starters, I was the go-to guy whenever there was a problem requiring a bit of computer nous. I'm talking about simple stuff that a power user would be able to do. In the same vein, just because you drive a lot doesn't mean you have an affinity for vehicles. Plenty of people that have driven for decades can barely change their own fluids, for example. Mass usage != mass affinity.
>I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.
It's interesting you brought up gaming in your earlier post, as I was just talking about this with my brother.
Most of my programming friends and I (many of whom are women, by the way) first learned to use the command line for PC games. Same reason I first took apart a computer and put it back together. Most kids, then and now, don't play pc games. Back then, most kids didn't play video games at all. If they did, it was a console. That hasn't changed.
You can have an internet connected computer your whole life and never open it up. I'd say the vast majority of people fall into this category. Things work, and when they break, you take them to someone that can fix them for you. The people that aren't like that are usually in my experience people that want to boost performance on their machine, whether it's a car or a computer.
Script kiddies aren't hackers. What you've just described, using a jailbroken phone, downloading tons of apps - that's using a product another person developed.
I disagree, and think that adults who grew up before computers were commonplace are skewing your perception. I was a teenager not too long ago, and as I remember it, personal computer ownership was about even between the sexes in middle class youth, perhaps even biased towards girls a bit because "a boy will just use it for porn." In spite of this, pretty almost every young boy I knew that had a computer, whether or not they were really a "computer person" or grew up to do anything related to technology, was interested in tinkering with their computers in some way. From playing games for long hours, tweaking their configs or even making maps or modding the game, running their own game servers from their desktop (Minecraft is especially popular for this today), to having the spiffiest desktop and theme, to building their own PCs, hanging out on forums/irc channels/etc. and the good ol' fashioned standby of amassing a huge collection of pirated music, movies, and pornography, there were a lot of opportunities for otherwise "normal" boys to get experience in playing with computers and learning something about them along the way. Being good with computers could even be somewhat cool, in a "you're a fucking wizard, dude" kind of way. And to be clear, this is the perception I got from hanging out with kids on all levels of the social spectrum, not just super computer dorks like myself.
In contrast, most of the girls I knew used them mostly for IMing friends. The most "hardcore" girls I knew were involved in communities themselves like Deviantart or the various MMOs, which gave them plenty of their own opportunities to play and learn (for instance, Photoshop is a very complicated program, and sites like Neopets and MySpace taught basic HTML to a lot more girls than boys), but in general a larger proportion of the girls seemed more interested in study, their personal lives, relationships, and "drama" (the "dickhead teenaged boys" I mentioned in another post ITT would blush at the shit that girls do to each other), than in the computer itself or the internet outside of their "small world." I'm not a girl, though, so obviously I don't have the whole story.
With the younger generations, the situation looks similar to me, but with smart phones. It's common and "cool" for a guy to have a rooted/jailbroken phone, get a buttload of apps for free, and customize the crap out of his phone. But while I obviously don't have much contact with teenaged girls nowadays outside of family, the ones I have talked with are more interested in instagramming and snapchatting with their friends than the phones themselves.
People often say that women naturally have more emotional and social intelligence on average than men, so I don't really get why those same people get offended by the idea that men could naturally have more more "systems intelligence" or general interest in tinkering than women on average.