To google and tweet for the first time — at age 82

Going online brings benefits for seniors despite challenges of technology, research shows

Kerstin Wolgers made it through 82 years on this earth without ever once checking an email, watching a YouTube clip or sending a tweet. But last week, as part of a crash course that introduced her to the Internet for the first time, the former Swedish actress did all three — plus googled, Instagrammed, Wikipedia-ed, shopped, video-gamed . . . even online dated, eventually.

“Lots going on here,” she says of Tinder. “It’s really exciting, if you asked me.”

Exciting, but also confusing, “difficult” and “mad.” Over a period of only five days — during which she wore a heart monitor to track her anxiety and a camera to beam her adventures online — Wolgers learned a lifetime’s worth of Internet skills, from how to conduct a Google search and pay a bill online to where to watch cat videos and “Gangnam Style.”

At the conclusion of her grand experiment, Wolgers conducted an interview on Reddit that briefly reached the site’s front page. She did not know whether she would keep using Tinder, she said, but she planned to look into getting a broadband connection — she wanted to watch ABBA videos, look up more art, read some poetry. “I actually think that the world is better with access to Internet,” she said. “It opens up so many possibilities!”

And not just to play Battlefield or meet (much younger!) men — but to access services and participate in larger social discussions.

Wolgers didn’t dive into the Internet for the lolz alone. Her grand experiment was part of a Swedish advocacy campaign, organized by the public relations firm MyNewsDesk, that aimed to draw attention to the “digital divide” — the often invisible gulf between people who use the Internet and those who still do not, particularly among seniors.

Research from Pew suggests that many elderly people have health issues or financial constraints that prevent them from logging on to the Internet. But there’s a cultural gap at play, too: the vast majority of seniors who aren’t online think they’re either not missing anything, or — even if they are — that the new technology is just too difficult to learn. That maybe, at a certain age, it’s just not worth it.

Increasingly, of course, gerontology research shows the exact opposite to be true: seniors are actually more lost without the Internet than with it. Those who log on tend to be far more educated about their health; they’re far less isolated and more independent.

“These skills and devices enable communication, entertainment, health management, etc., in a demographic where face-to-face social networks are shrinking as friends pass away and children and grandchildren are more geographically diverse,” said Kate Magsamen-Conrad, a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who runs a computer literacy program for seniors. That literacy “allows people to connect on multiple levels, (and) connecting in relationships fosters positive well-being.”

Such insight has inspired a number of new initiatives in recent years: a Toronto program called Cyber-Seniors, in which teens taught computer skills in a retirement community, was the subject of a documentary last spring. In November, the American Association of Retired Persons and the Internet-based advocacy group DoSomething.org recruited more than 81,000 young people — including YouTube stars iJustine and Kevin Droniak — to teach older people in their lives how to use the Internet.