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why do you think older people aren't that familiar with technology?

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ArishMell · 70-79, M
I do not think that at all.

If I were to, it would be because we are forever being told it is so by glib politicians and ignorant journalists.

Worse, the word "technology", coined decades before programmable electronic computers were even possible, is so loose and ill-defined it is really a non-word that could be applied to anything the least bit technical. Indeed, that was its original intention: a short-hand for any almost any form of engineering.

I assume here you mean anything involving computers and telecommunications, but the age aspect is a myth. Perhaps it is generated or at least spread by gossip-column types who want us oldies to keel over and leave the world to those Bright Young Things living by their Artificial Indolence!

There are plenty of people in their eighties happily using computers and "smart-'phones".

There also people in their twenties who struggle with such equipment, some perhaps by being unable to afford it.


Older people are more likely to have a very broad range of technical knowledge and practical skills to levels many young people now lack because they are not taught such knowledge, or imagine it needless..

If we keep only to "IT" many older people have grown up with it privately or professionally since the days of Microsoft MS-DOS. Or even before that, when you had to understand computers and programming to be able to use them for relatively simple mathematical and filing work. (My first brush with computers was at work, in the days of MS-DOS and writing our own programmes in BASIC.)


Merely being able to use a so-called "smart"-'phone, have a social-medium account or find train time-tables and buy groceries on the Internet, does not make you "tech-savvy" to use one the tackiest slang-words devised.

That only means you can use the instrument and services. Can you also create a spreadsheet containing formulae and graphs, write a document to more than scrappy memo level, operate a photo-editing or CAD programme reasonably well?

The real "tech-savvy" are those who can create complex databases, write programmes at code-level, design the electronics.... but even if they were users rather than makers, there are now many people who have retired from long careers in front of keyboards and screens.


Besides, being weak at using a computer or "smart-'phone" does not necessarily mean you are ignorant of "technology": you might for example be an expert carpenter, metalworker, car-mechanic, electrician... all "technological" skills.
DrWatson · 70-79, M
I am an older person.

I have written computer programs and even learned a little about building computer circuitry.

I am familiar with the technology that interests me. But I do not have the knee-jerk reaction of pursuing every new thing that comes along.

I suspect that a lot of older people have seen so many new fads come and go over the years that we are not so easily wowed by everything that becomes trendy for awhile.
kwood1 · 61-69, M
All things considered I think the older generations have kept up with technology changes amazingly. Sixty or seventy years ago the underlying structure was there - radio, cable, computing etc, but essential additions from flat screens to wireless networks were needed to make things happen. So many of those old sci-fi TV shows guessed how this might happen, but we still can't be beamed up ...
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@kwood1 Flat screens, eh?

I have a generic CAD primer whose cover photograph certainly looks dated.

It shows presumably the author's own computer, comprises a hefty CRT monitor sat on a large white box with 5" and 3.5" floppy-disc drives. The keyboard is white with white and grey keys, the mouse white. The two printers adjacent to it, appear to be roll-fed, possibly dot-matrix, machines

Though the image on the screen is in colour, with a black background.

When was this book first published?

1999.... all of twenty-six years ago; but my copy is of the latest re-publishing, in 2010 so at least this Century!)

....

Sci-fi? Sci-reality too. Somewhere I have a copy of a Tomorrow's World book complete with its title printed in that strange two-thickness font thought suitably "computery" in its late-1970s / early-1980s era. Such books are now interesting historically, for showing how science and engineering have developed, were predicted to develop - and sometimes failed to develop.

Progress hit hard one employee of a comany for whom I worked in the 1980s. It manufactured industrial screen-printing-machines with a growing market for very high-precision ones for making electronic circuit boards. He was a very talented mechanical-engineering designer, and was put in charge of changing the products to meet what was fast becoming THE new way to make PCB-based electronics. What no-one could foresee was that suddenly the electronics industry found an even better new way, and the poor chap had the rug - or drawing-board - pulled from under him. He was not made redundant but was now a middle-manager with little to manage compatible with his skills - which does not include sometimes helping pack completed machines for delivery. Disillusioned, he eventually left, I gather to somewhere wanting him to use his talents fully. (The company thrives still, albeit under different owners rather than full independence.)
DragonFruit · 70-79, M
Some are....one of my neighbors was working on AI before most of us had ever heard of it.
However, most older people have managed without needing to immerse themselves in all things technologic....we have televisions, computers and cell phones but aren't into all of the latest stuff.
GuyWithOpinions · 31-35, M
Because they were not conditioned to use it throught thier life
Its not obvious?
NinaTina · 26-30, F
Most can't read the words

 
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