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 .<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Nintendo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Who says the older generation doesn\u2019t have something to teach the kids of today?<\/p>\n
Of course, there were sceptical looks amongst the crowd that Wednesday afternoon and it wasn\u2019t everyone\u2019s cup of tea, but enough people were interested to give it a go.<\/p>\n
Most of them, I noticed, had cellphones, as do both my parents. I\u2019m sure there are a fair number of computers in their midst too as, like my parents, they want to communicate with children overseas.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 namely Florida.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sure, most of their technology upgrades are my hand-me-downs, but I have noticed how adaptable they are .<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s what they\u2019ve always used.<\/p>\n