My father-in-law called me one day, asking for my help in downloading some music for the new MP3 player he just bought at a garage sale. “I think I remember how to do that,” I replied.
The honest truth is that I hadn’t downloaded music in more than a year. I haven’t even owned an MP3 player in more than five years, and when I did it was the sweet U2 version of the iPod, which was still more advanced than the 256MB RCA player he had just acquired.
His current phone is some sort of Samsung flip phone that roughly resembles the phone I had to carry around with that U2 iPod five years ago. Therein lies the problem: Technology now moves faster than we can reasonably expect everyone to keep up.
The digital divide between our poorest citizens and the technology that the modern world considers fundamental is well established. But another digital divide also exists between our oldest citizens, and all sorts of technology that rest of society now finds indispensable.
Younger generations have been moving the goalposts for our parents and grandparents when it comes to music. They had just started to understand that they needed to adopt these new shiny records called CDs when we changed the game, making CDs obsolete. You just needed a little device called an MP3 player and Internet access to download music. My father-in-law just got that memo, but he’s already too late. If I tried to explain Spotify to him, he might pass out.
He will never own a smartphone because it’s just too complicated for him. In his generation, he’s not alone. In fact, he’s in the overwhelming majority. And that majority will be shut out of consuming music, taking and sharing pictures and videos, and connecting online with people within the next decade. The tools that these people use to do those tasks are already obsolete, or will be made so soon. Just ask Best Buy, which is also growing more obsolete every quarter.
When it comes to smartphones, we didn’t simply move the goalposts for these people. We moved the stadium. And forgot to tell them where it is. And raised ticket prices.
For whatever reason, it seems younger people have more time to spend on learning new technologies than retired or semi-retired people. Of course, the learning gap isn’t too great between iTunes and Spotify, for example. People like me can change from iPhones to Androids on a whim because most of the terminology is the same.
But these older folks lack the base-line understanding that people of my age (early 30s) received somewhere around the time of Napster. If you missed that “Intro to Gadgetry” class back in the late 1990’s, your learning slope might be too steep to compensate. So when it comes to smartphones, they’ve simply given up. For 80 percent of their lives, phones were used exclusively to make calls. For more than half their lives, phones were attached to the wall. Now they go everywhere and do anything, if you have the prerequisite skills.
When I speak of my father-in-law’s generation, I’m not talking about elderly people. Elderly people expect to be shut out of waves of technology. It’s part of being old. But my father-in-law is only in his 60s and is making a valiant attempt at staying relevant technologically. He uses e-mail and Skype and is quite handy with the digital camera we got him for Christmas a couple of years ago. But the jump from the flip phone he wears around his neck like a mid-90’s drug dealer to even a basic Android phone will simply be too great. He will be left behind, technologically speaking, with decades left to live.
The solution, as I see it, is actually quite simple: Help them out.
Get your oldster an iPad and spend an afternoon showing them how to use it. They can write emails, Skype, take pictures and video, browse Facebook, and lots of other tasks that they probably already do, or want to. The only thing they can’t do is make traditional phone calls. Even Android-heads can admit is that iOS is very simple to learn, and the iPad is also bigger than many competing tablets, so they can see it more easily and feel more confident in tapping with their fingers. It can also make gateway to a more complicated phone of their choosing.
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say this might be the second-most crucial issue in technology, after the traditional digital divide created by poverty. People with a lot of gas left in the tank risk being shut out of our society’s tech-saturated way of life. It’s a disservice to our parents to allow that to happen.
Honestly, I think lots of tech is more elderly friendly, I can get my grandmother to navigate my android tablet and I don’t have a prayer getting her to use any desktop operating system.
My dad (age 77) uses an iMac and a Kindle fire. He dedicated himself to learning how to use them and understand them. Seems to me a lot people (of almost any age) just revert to “it’s too complicated and I’m too dumb to understand all this technology.” Things worth doing take effort.
Agreed Bill, I definitely think my parents gave up on effort cause they know I can just do it in 2 seconds for them.
It’s also Apple’s common sense. I’ve also used a Galaxy Tab, and the amount of ads and annoying buttons that are too easy to press by accident, combined with the hidden screen lock feature and unsafe/incompatible apps, make it dog shit next to the iPad.
All product designers should see http://www.mhealthtalk.com/2011/09/webcam-101/. It’s a short video of a cute elderly couple trying to use their new PC and includes a link to a related article presenting the iPad as a much simpler solution. Using any new technology can be daunting because of how seniors learn, and that contrasts with how young kids, or adults who grew up with tech, learn.
I noticed this 40 years ago as an IBM systems engineer shortly after the PC was introduced. We wanted to show it off to teachers and also showed it to 3rd graders, and there’s where the stark contrast was noticed.
Opening the demo room to about 5 teachers, we had to coax them over to the new PC, where several chairs were placed in an arc around the keyboard and display. They stood, reluctant to take a seat, as if that was a commitment, and no one wanted the center seat. They even pulled the chairs back some.
Now contrast that to the kids, who went immediately to the PC. All sat down and pulled their chairs closer, fighting to get the middle chair or their paws on the keyboard.
It seems that adults of that generation learn new products by first opening the manual, while kids learn by doing and experimenting without worry about consequences. In fact, they’ll even do unpredictable things with a device just to see what happens. So product design ahold be simplified to eliminate the learning curve, and the manual.
Anactonic :)
In today’s economy where jobs are scarce, I think a good industry is tutoring elderly folks how to use technology.
My parents can seemingly pick up relatively “advanced” things pretty quickly in terms of using their new iPad from day one. But ask them to delete their cookies or transfer a photo from their iPhones onto the iPad? That’s all greek to them and means an 8am phone call to me demanding I do it for them.
Sometimes I feel it’s just more laziness than it is an inability to pick things up with them.
No more than technology has ALWAYS done so. What, are we suppose to halt progress?
My 4 yrs old niece knows how to use iPad and iPhone(soundhound, playing music, games, how to change brightness, volume, camera, YouTube) and my parents are clueless lmao
“Tune out” is a choice. I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer and have taught up to an 85-year old married couple. It’s seniors’ decisions to learn or not learn.
I guess I am not your typical old geezer of 68 years. You state “The only thing they can’t do is make traditional phone calls.” With a free googlevoice account and MO+ for googlevoice, you can call anywhere in the US or Canada for Free. So your are not well versed on this subject. Imagine an Old Geezer never having to pay a phone bill again