Old ways

Old people have a hard time with technology. Supposedly, this is just the way of things. Is that pattern due to technology being poorly designed for the elderly? (Certainly true, some of the time.) Is it that the elderly do not want to learn or switch to assistive technology that is designed for their needs? Or is it more due to the fact that the worlds they grew up in were so much less flexible and fungible than the technology-infused crazy place we currently live in? Will the younger generations of today have similar problems when they are elderly, with the new technology of tomorrow? Some researchers think so, but I have my doubts.

Sure, technology is always evolving rapidly, but the kids of today are (hopefully) learning how manipulable information and computing are. Maybe they don't know it in those words, but I feel like someone who grows up with these systems gets an intuition about them in a general sense, and can plug into things in a generic, always-learning sense. Perhaps it's simply the fact that computing really is, in some ways, ubiquitous [at least for us privileged first-worlders.]

Is it true that elderly people learn slower? Not necessarily. Perhaps this is an ageist response, but I feel like many elderly folks are not stopped short by bad design or disabilities with hearing and seeing and so on. When old people approach a new technology, instead of being interested and curious, they just get grumpy. If we can dodge the grumpiness as we catapult into the future, I suspect that we can all grow old gracefully; remembering that to stay inflexible is to fall dangerously behind.

Of course, this is all much more complex than a flippant blog post can delve into. I reserve the right to shake my fist and yell "Damn kids! Get off my cyber-lawn!" like every generation does when they are confounded by their descendants, feeling a little guilty perhaps that we didn't build ourselves (and, by extension, later generations as well) a better way.