At this point my sister-in-law (10 years older than I) and my mother-in-law (30 years older) know more about social networking and Facebook than I do, because I do not use these things and they use them almost daily. Plenty of old people know how to use computers and technology. Plenty of young people do not.
Furthermore, just knowing how to use Snapchat is not really knowing about "technology," any more than knowing how to drive a car makes one a mechanical engineer or knowing how to plug a gizmo into the wall means one knows about electrical theory. So there are some newer things out there that use a smartphone. So what; knowing how to use them does not make one knowledgeable about technology or smart.
If this writer wanted to know how to use Snapchat, good. Find someone who knows how to use Snapchat. One's Snapchat abilities has nothing to do with one's age.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
And it's so true, you know, you learn about computers when you need a floppy with drivers for the 4x cd-rom drive you just installed yourself (or when you later install Slackware and then Gentoo... also helps). You don't learn about computers using a modern smartphone.
I like this part a lot: I've messed up, as I'm sure many of you have. When we purchased an XBox it was Techno-Dad to the rescue. I happily played about with the mess of cables and then created profiles for everyone. When my son's MacBook was infected with the FlashBack virus Techno-Dad to the rescue. I looked up some on-line guides and then hammered away in the terminal until I had eradicated that bad-boy. When we purchased a 'Family Raspberry Pi' Techno-Dad to the rescue. I hooked it all up, flashed an OS to the SD-card and then sat back proudly, wondering why nobody other than me wanted to use the blasted thing. All through their lives, I've done it for them. Set-up new hardware, installed new software and acted as in-house technician whenever things went wrong. As a result, I have a family of digital illiterates.
This is especially pronounced since MATLAB became the lingua franca for signals processing education. It's both a blessing and a curse - you can fit the appropriate MATLAB shenanigans into a lecture but it won't be the same as translating certain transforms into 'C'.
But... I really reject this whole "millenials as digital natives" narrative, in terms of the idea that millenials have some unique relationship to technology and some innate sort of technological prowess. It's just a rehashing of an earlier idea which dates back at least to the 80's, where "kids have to program their parents VCR's". There's always this notion that "the young" - at a point in time - are more technical. But in absolute terms? Well, Gen-X kids grew up with access to computers and a lot of technology as well, although it was (obviously) the technology of the the time. I would posit that there's no reason to assume that a Millenial would be any more inherently technical than a Gen-X'er.