So, I was sucked in by the headline on this Boston.com story about “Digital Dinosaurs”. I spend a lot of time helping elderly people with their computers and it has been a very educational and enlightening experience seeing how they do and do not interact with technology. But the “geezers” in this article are 40-somethings! MILFy suburban soccer moms! I’m trying to decide how the young-vs-old meme shifted this far south, especially since the population skews older and older every day, much to the delight of FOX News and the Tea Party. What happened to “60 is the new 40″? Having said that, my personal indignation notwithstanding, I realized that the notion that there are so many people in my own age group who are still very clueless about technology and the online world is actually pretty remarkable. I just don’t like the “too old to use Twitter” angle; it’s not about old at all, it’s about smart.
Then there was this blog post by a UX designer about an encounter he had with a 60-something man who had somehow never really used a computer, and what insights it gave the designer about how badly computer interfaces are designed. I found it via this MetaFilter post, which has an awful lot of “ha-ha old people and computers” comments, but I think a lot of those people missed the point of the article that the guy’s age wasn’t the factor in his difficulty, it was his lack of experience and no grasp of the context of 25 years of software development. He actually demonstrates a basic problem-solving ability that proves he has the smarts, he’s just presented with a totally foreign scenario. Even somebody much younger would have to scramble to develop a working process to accomplish a task in a totally unknown environment.
