“Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,” he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously. “I’m kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files.”

People who think this is a youth issue are just focusing on that demographic when I think it's a lot more common than people think. My dad is in his 50s and his desktops always end up like this. My mom's too. I have to beg them to let me organize it. Because it's so frustrating to see.

Also what exactly are we comparing these kids to? The vast majority of people with little to no concrete knowledge of how a computer works? They mention a study on how 2% of 8th graders have "digital native" computer literacy. Well what's the average? What're the criteria? yes I know they link the study I'm ranting ok

I think ultimately it's both that people won't learn more about systems they interact with unless they're interested in them, and that computers and the like are increasingly integrated in schools. So people were never really learning about organization that much anyway, and now it's a lot more visible in those darn youngsters because of there's more opportunities to show it.