I used to have a friend whose grandmother was from a little village in the old country (Italy) and she did not trust telephones. She refused to use them, was terrified of them, did not understand how to use them. Without her children, who she lived with, she could not survive in the modern world. She was telephone illiterate, to coin a phrase.

The telephone has been around a long time, but it changed slowly, people had a chance to adjust to it, to pick up on new features and learn how to survive with those that went away (remember when you could just dial a number and an operator would tell you the phone number of Betty's Bagel Barn and offer to connect you? For free?).

Right now, not only do we have to learn a bewildering array of devices and systems, but they are changing all the time. So we have to learn how to learn new ones. I've used computing devices all my life at school and at work, still do, Hell, I used to earn my living as a Silicon Valley "scientific software engineer", and I feel totally ignorant about modern computing. I didn't even own a home computer until about 10 years ago, or a cell phone until about 3 years ago. I still have it, its one of those disposable $10 drug-dealer models with no camera, and I had to download its 70 page user manual off the internet to figure out how to use it. And I don't know how to drive a car with ""paddle shifting" or "keyless entry". I once could write assembler code and read a core dump in Hex but I can't program (or even set up) my TV set. And I suspect that little white square full of black pixels you displayed is really the Mark of the Beast. And its not like I live on a desert island. I have been making an effort to keep up. As a computer mapping specialist, its not like I was actually isolated from digital technology.

The speed at which things are changing seems to be speeding up. My instincts tell me we're heading towards some kind of logjam effect,
A society-wide constipation where the networks and devices we depend on running our civilization no longer become accessible to the people that need to use them for the most routine activities. We'll all become like my friend's grandmom.