I’ve noticed recently that selling my lenses have been quite difficult. I keep getting young kids asking all sorts of questions that could be answered if they googled the model number. “Is it autofocus?” “Is this for full frame?” “Will this work on my camera?” “Is it good for real estate?”
It’s like a whole younger generation of photographers don’t know how to research things and get their information from youtube and tiktok where you can’t search model names or technical specs.
It’s not just photography, it’s all over Reddit and elsewhere. While I’m sure some of it’s due to age, I think it’s just a difference in internet culture. I started using the web early on when the culture was to RTFM and lurk before you post, but then again when the web took off I spent hours learning about any and everything I could, so I found value in learning about topics and making decisions from that.
Now everyone is instantly reachable by any number of methods and asking Google probably makes less sense when you can ask the person or the hive mind directly, so I kinda get it. We also have explainers and tons of talking heads on various platforms that will simply summarize and editorialize information, and a lot of people prefer that to reading various sources to reach a conclusion.