Silver surfers turn ace servers
I was thinking this as I watched about 30 or so septuagenarians, octogenarians and whatever the big word is for people in their 90s learning to play Nintendo Wii. You see, my parents live in a retirement estate, where at 80, they are among the younger residents .
After playing Wii every day since I loaned my parents my games console, my somewhat pushy Jewish mother convinced Nintendo to give a TV and a Wii to the retirement estate and StrokeAid, the non-governmental organisation for stroke victims which she helps out at every Tuesday.
Nintendo’s 20-something demonstrators made me feel old, but the games sparked a glint in the eyes of the elderly who can no longer run around a tennis court.
Walking is the most common exercise on their retirement estate, but half an hour on the Wii raises your heart rate in just the way doctors suggest.
Here was a bunch of pre-Internet, pre-cellphone, pre-MTV people, born before the advent of most of our most commonly used technology, adapting quite easily to a new, new thing.
I felt a sense of reverse parental pride as my parents demonstrated to all the other altakakers (old people in Yiddish) how to play tennis or baseball.
It ranked just below the hilarious sight of my parents showing their 13-year-old grandson and eight- year-old granddaughter how to play Wii last year.
Who says the older generation doesn’t have something to teach the kids of today?
Of course, there were sceptical looks amongst the crowd that Wednesday afternoon and it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but enough people were interested to give it a go.
Most of them, I noticed, had cellphones, as do both my parents. I’m sure there are a fair number of computers in their midst too as, like my parents, they want to communicate with children overseas.
My mother was 74 when she got her first computer so she could e- mail my brother in London and sister in the (real) promised land — namely Florida.
My father now has two digital cameras. (I bought him his first and I purposefully got the bigger model with the larger buttons and standard pen-light batteries). They have a satellite dish, a DVD player (there was massive resistance to giving up the video machine, however) and a flat-panel TV. Their Mac mini computer uses a 3G datacard to get them online.
Sure, most of their technology upgrades are my hand-me-downs, but I have noticed how adaptable they are .
Like the Wii-watching crowd that day, if you spend enough time explaining how new technology works, most people can adapt to it, get comfortable with it and become excited about using it.
My parents now use web-based e-mail. I host Shapshak.com on Google Apps so my family around the world can also use it as if it’s what they’ve always used.
I know chief executives of major companies that have never heard of Gmail or Hotmail, let alone the ability to host your own domain for free on Google Apps (www.google.com/a/).
It requires patience to teach new technology to people, especially older people. The first thing you have to do is stop them from saying: “I’m too stupid” or “I’m no good with computers/cellphones/whatever”. The moment those words come out of their mouths, they have convinced themselves they can’ t do it. A bit of patience, and a lot of repetition and my parents are bona fide silver surfers, a term coined to describe the generation of older people who have taken to the Internet.
My mother and sister chat a lot via e-mail. Next, I’m going to introduce my parents to Skype.
And no, neither of my parents have a Facebook page. Yet.
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