How silver surfers took the internet to thier hearts
As the Scottish Daily Mail launches its brilliant new app, a leading writer on why it’s wrong to see the web as just a playground for the young...
FROM last Thursday, here in the Outer Hebrides, Storm Gertrude flamed i n. She had scarcely ceased shrieking when her brother, Storm Henry, roared along in her wake. The Minch no longer looked like lively sea. It more resembled a bowl of whipped cream. For days, nothing sailed; for four, our vast, £42million new ferry, Loch Seaforth, sat uselessly by the pier on her vast bottom and we were in short order deprived of all manner of produce, from mangos and cauliflowers to fresh olives.
And newspapers – four whole days without newspapers, without as much as a distant rustle of the Scottish Daily Mail. No Ephraim Hardcastle. No Alan Roden exclusives. No trenchant editorial, no authoritative football coverage, no fat Saturday magazine, no erudite Chris Deerin, no daunting crossword…
But not this weekend. Let hurricanes blow, lightning strike, asteroids blast and galaxies collide for, as of today, with the advent of Mail Plus, the entire newspaper may be electronically and instantly delivered to my tablet, your smartphone, her device, supposing you be sipping the morning latte, dragged helplessly through the garden centre or outside dusting down the peat stack.
Eagerly I swipe from page to page. The latest blow for Sturgeon… Horror in Friday night Glasgow…
Even for a chap who never mastered the art of programming a video recorder, this is idiot-proof. A swoosh of your finger over the screen and page succeeds page. Do that thing with your finger and thumb and a report or a picture is blown up to full screen in a second.
If even that sounds daunting – the sort of surfing the information superhighway best left to teenagers, hipsters, and folk who wear baseball caps backwards – just ask your mum.
For as we sail deep into the 21st century, it seems to be our silver foxes who are i ncreasingly at ease with the extraordinary technology of the time.
My 87-year-old aunt chats daily to her grandchildren in Grand Rapids, Michigan... by Skype. I live in a clutter of books; my father sits serenely in his favourite recliner, reading by Kindle; my mother FaceTimes with her sisters by iPad.
Then there was my splendid old friend Peter Cunningham, Jordanhill boy and Highland gentleman, an authority on Hebridean birds and a veteran of the Arctic Convoys.
GENTLY optimistic, Peter signed a four-year deal for a new car months before his death in July 2014. He was then 96 years old. All his life, he never stopped learning – reading, thinking, mastering the latest gadget. As we learned at his funeral: ‘Dad only ever bothered us if his printer had jammed or the laptop was refusing to synch with his iPod Nano…’
My late cousin Girlie – who could remember her big brother leaving for the Somme and died last April, rather reluctantly, at the age of 103 – took great pride in her flatscreen TV and a remote control of boggling complexity that she wielded as effortlessly as a broadsword.
Her contemporary in an adjacent island village, Duncan John MacLeod, in his 93rd year took avidly to the i Pod; a Christmas gift from doting grandchildren. It was, he declared delightedly, perfect for listening to Gaeli c sermons.
The Queen, pushing 90, has two – respectively, gifts from President Obama and Prince Andrew – and, for all we know, tweets mischievously behind such a pseudonym as WeRoolUK.
Such ‘silver surfers’ are on a roll. Between 2006 and 2013, the number of British over-65s on the internet more than tripled. Over a million new senior citizens annually – and avidly – take up life online. Not just for email either but for shopping and banking, healthcare and entertainment.
There are still, it is reckoned, between four and five million UK pensioners who have never been nearer the WorldWideWeb than the moons of Jupiter – a concern to charities, not just because of the growing problems of social isolation but because more and more public services are moving online.
By way of encouragement, agencies are now designing and promoting devices specially adapted (and usually simplified) for first-time users old enough to remember the Blitz.
By the spring of 2014, for instance, a charity had developed its very own tablet computer. The Breezie – a modified Samsung – is customised at the point of purchase, with the option of allowing a trusted friend or relative to access it remotely.
‘Breezie tackles the two main barriers to internet adoption: over-complication and lack of relevance,’ says Helena King, Age UK’s head of development. ‘It is set up to meet the individual needs of the customer and evolves with them, so as the customer becomes more comfortable with the device, Breezie can help make the internet easier.’
There is, of course, a fine line between simplifying and being condescending, especially in a day when 80 is the new 50 and children of the Stanley Baldwin era might not care to be seen with the electronic equivalent of the Stannah stair lift.
A 2014 survey confirmed that technology and internet usage is as high among those aged 50 or older as between those aged 30 to 49 – and that stubborn and widespread belief of a gulf between young tech- savvy types and becardiganed technophobes is but myth.
‘A patronising approach to
older generations needs to be put to rest. Those 50-plus feel they are just as confident and as digitally- savvy as younger generations,’ s ays Chris Whitelaw of iProspect.
‘ Internet and technology usage among older generations presents the classic characteristics of late-adopter behaviour. Younger generations’ digital media habits are more advanced only because they have been online longer than their older counterparts.’
People over 70 spend more time online than anyone else – 63 per cent of them enjoying 11 to 30 hours a week. Pensioners are just as keen on internet shopping and online video streaming.
Remarkably, over- 70s ‘ are leaders in consuming YouTube videos via tablet and Smart TV, with 8 per cent of them claim- ing to use a Smar Smart TV to access online videos videos, co compared with only 2 per cent of 30 to 49-yearolds, 7 per cent of 50 to 59-yearolds and 4 per cent of 60 to 69-year-olds.’
So much for prevalent prejudice – our notions of doddery old dears left behind by the surging tide of modern technology. But why are there all those millions of silver surfers and why have they taken to gadgets and the internet as to the manner born?
We need first to remember that age is but a number and that people today live far longer – and with great quality of life till much later: better nourished, better educated, and largely spared the decades of backbreaking physical toil of their forebears. They are a generation who have seen consistent rise, through the decades, in their standard of living.
At 80, my grandmother – born in 1899 – was, mentally and physically, an old, old woman. She creaked and groaned and limped. My mother, her daughter, will be 80 next month. She walks several miles a day, dresses with zany style, takes great care with her appearance, boasts legs like a teenager, daily devours her Scottish Daily Mail, loves shopping and blazes through her day with merriment and energy.
Most of her golden generation – and the postwar ‘babyboomers’ just behind them – have, thanks to modest property prices into the 1990s and a widespread ethos of saving up, money to burn.
They can readily afford laptops and gadgets and have taken avidly to shopping online. And then, thanks to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, computers and devices have become extraordinarily user-friendly.
Today, the typical tablet is so straightforward a toddler can work one. (Millions actually do.) Any senior citizen, if they will only try, will make short work of it.
This is a generation, remember, who have grown up and raised families through decades of staggering social change, galloping technology and, since the early 1980s, a relaxed consumerism never before known in Britain.
They are not easy to intimidate, they are beyond being shocked, they have no fear of anything new and they are far more widely travelled than generations before. Besides – because schools in their day did a lot less, but much better – they can actually read, write and count. For them, email alone has revived the gentle art of correspondence.
Now newspapers are not all about additionality, subsidiarity and neo- classical non-endogenous growth theory, and there’s a reason why Mail Plus – besides hard news and cheery celebrity tittle-tattle – is replete with puzzles, sudokus, brain-teasers and that crossword.
Senior citizens have never eaten better or been keener on physical fitness – and they keep keen interest these days in keeping their minds sharp too.
Online abounds with braintraining apps, nifty lateralthinking games and assorted conundrums to keep your little grey cells in tip-top order. And there is hard evidence it does.
In a six-month study last year, volunteers completed cognitive tests, including assessments of grammatical reasoning and memory, before the study began and again after six weeks, three months and six months. Those over 60 also carried out tests of daily living skills, such as using the telephone or doing shopping.
AFTER six months, the over- 60s who took part i n the brain training were found to have significant improvements in carrying out daily tasks, while those over 50 recorded better reasoning and verbal learning.
Indeed, those who played at least five times a week were the most improved. Science has long shown, too, that folk who have complex occupations or stimulate their brains with activities such as crosswords, puzzles and learning new skills throughout life tend to have lower rates of dementia.
Our patriarchs seem to have a keen dislike of clutter – perhaps because most grew up in houses jammed with fussy Victoriana, all antimacassars and stuffed owls and bad prints and standard lamps with frilly shades.
A certain minimalist Sixties chic is their aesthete and one great advantage of really good devices is that you can clear out a lot of stuff – videos and DVDs, CDs and cassettes and so on. So, for the downsizing generation, finding rather jollier ways of spending the kids’ inheritance, a powerful laptop or a nifty tablet is just the dab – and portable too.
There is also the joy of reconnection – of being able, from your favourite chair, to track down long-lost relatives and old school friends.
‘Margaret Koroidovi is searching the internet for information about the black American GI father she has never met,’ enthused one 2009 report, ‘while Trevor Little uses the internet to work out share values. Sitting at another terminal, Winifred Roach emails a school friend in Canada and Rosemary O’Garrow has just caught up, via Facebook, with a cousin she last heard from 20 years ago.
‘They are all members of Age Concern Hackney’s Silver Surfers and, judging by the amount of purposeful activity and lively banter between them, they are doing all the right things to keep their mental wellbeing in excellent shape.’
The East London group started around 2002 with lottery funding, which enabled it to buy 21 state- of-the art computers for the learners and pay the salaries of three fulltime staff for three years.
It laid on free tuition and free access to people aged 50 and over; there was no need to book and around 25 people dropped in each afternoon.
‘They find the internet enables them to shrink the planet,’ beamed Rick Crust of Age Concern, ‘so they can keep in touch with all their friends and relatives in a way they never could before.
‘And that is important to our community because more than half of them have roots in the Caribbean or Africa. They get photographs of weddings and funerals and of grandchildren from the West Indies – it’s impossible to say how important that is to their wellbeing. They are not cut off from their grandchildren by distance or technology – they can share.’
Hackney Silver Surfers shut up shop last July – partly down to council cuts but largely because it had done its job; most pensioners now have their own laptops or devices and can operate them with cool confidence.
Which was more, last weekend, than could be said for the Stornoway ferry. If I find myself ever struggling to any degree with Mail Plus, though, there will be nothing for it but to swallow my pride and call on my auntie. Get the Mail Plus app today
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