It is sometimes helpful to have expertise on hand so that when someone runs into a problem, they can be scaffolded into figuring out how to either retreat from what they're doing and try something else, or untangle the situation they're in and find a useful result. The Flailing Around and Finding Out method is particularly effective when it comes to technology learning and instruction, but there are significant issues when it comes to enacting that method for many library users. It sounds like it should be easy to make this work. After all, the American Community Survey for 2021 [PDF] reported that across the United States, 95% of households in the United States had at least one computer inside. That certainly makes it feel like there's all kinds of technological and computing resources available to students and their accompanying grownups, but if we take a deeper dive into the numbers, we start to see some cracks in the belief that everyone has computing for days.
The American Community Survey, when talking about smartphone adoption, says that we have lots of smartphones in the U.S., but only 76.7% of households have a smartphone when that annual household income is underneath $25,000 per year. If you want 90% adoption of smartphones, you need an annual income of at least $50,000 or more.
For desktops and laptops, there's more variation across the various regions of the United States, but when the annual income is under $25,000 per year, it's only 56.3% of people who have either a desktop or laptop computer. For desktops and laptops, you don't get 90% adoption until annual income is over $100,000 per year.
Education also matters in these situations. Smartphone adoption for those who have less than a high school education is at about 77%, and only gets above 90% when someone has had at least some college or a two-year degree. For desktops and laptops, if you have less than a high school education, adoption is similarly low, at 51.3%, and it only goes up to 90% adoption for those who have a four-year degree (a bachelor's) or higher in their education.
As you can see, depending on the economic circumstances of your audience, they may or may not have computing devices available to them. Additionally, households with high-income earners and high educational attainment are more likely to have multiple computing devices. 82% of householders earning more than $150,000 per year had a desktop or a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, and a broadband Internet connection at home. For those who make less than $25,000 per year, only 29% of the householders had desktop or laptop, smartphone, tablet, and broadband Internet.
Education matters here, as well. 72% of households in which the householder has a bachelor's degree or higher have desktop or laptop, smartphone, tablet, and broadband Internet. Only 30% of households in which the householder does not have a high school diploma have all of those computing devices.
A limitation of this survey is that it asks whether or not someone "owns or uses" one of those types of computers, which suggests that any computers that are in the household count for the purposes of the survey. Which might very well mean that if a student is issued a computer, or a working person is issued a computer for remote work, those computers also count in the "own or use" statistics. As we go further down the socio-economic strata, the likelihood that the computers in the household are issued by work or school, or that the computing device that's in the household is a smartphone and nothing else, goes up.
This presents problems for learning about technology and for learning about how to use technology for your own purposes, because most school- and work-issued computer are managed, and they're managed in ways that remove key functions from them. Regular casualties of this management include the ability to install or remove software, change settings, change components, or disable any monitoring software that's been placed on those computers by their issuing authority.
As a general rule, monitoring software placed on computers has much greater potential for harm than benefit. Regrettably, the truth of the matter is that schools and workplaces see their computers as assets that need to be managed, and therefore there will always be steps taken on work- or school-issued computers to ensure that the assets are protected from accidental or intentional misuse, whether malicious or otherwise. Furthermore, smartphone operating systems are designed to mediate everything through the use of apps and app stores, and they generally greatly resist attempts to access operating system-level functions, or to gain measures of control over the device that aren't mediated specifically through what designers of the operating systems or apps want you to be able to do. In some cases, even wireless carriers or hardware manufacturers specifically lock out the ability to access important functions and refuse to allow users to enable those functions through normal means. What that often means, then, is that users have to either potentially do dangerous operations or take advantage of security flaws in their devices so they can assert control over their own technology. This carries risks, and the most disastrous one is that the device might render itself completely non-functional through the attempts to gain control over the device.
If the work or school computer is the only one in the household, or the computing is entirely mediated by smartphones, in addition to the imposed barriers present from organizations, carriers, or manufacturers, usually someone comes to an entirely sensible decision that the computer is necessary for work or school, and therefore is not to be experimented with. That machine needs to stay in a working order for continued studies, continued survival, continued working. And, if it's a device that's only affordable by tacking on, basically, a payment plan to the Internet or the smartphone services bill, that further discourages risk-taking with those devices. No-one wants to render their expensive smartphone, woork laptop, or school laptop non-functional.