Why are computers such a darned pain to use?
Too many older people are being left behind, daunted by the digital tools that could liberate them
One of the great missed opportunities of our family life was that my mother – as she approached 90 – never got online. On a typewriter she had been a highspeed, rattling demon ever since the Forties; a broadsheet reader and acidic commentator to the end, she had friends across the world, spoke fluent Polish and reasonable French. In her late seventies, she rode shotgun as interpreter in a lorry cab on an aid convoy. If, when she made it into the 21st century, we had persuaded her to get online, she could have emailed old friends and grandchildren, and chucked her experience into online forums in two languages.
But even email was too much: she wouldn’t touch a computer, its language too alien, its pitfalls daunting. Today a simple tablet might have done the trick; then, even clunky simplicities like the “Amstrad emailer” were rejected. As for TV, mercifully she never had to grapple with modern multiple remote-controls and catch-up services.
Last week’s BBC survey of how receptive we are to its digital offering indicated that she was not untypical. Older people who use the internet less or not at all “express concerns at what they see as the prioritisation of online content over traditional broadcasting”. I would imagine relatively few pensioners will really miss the youth-targeted BBC Three when it goes online-only, but it is not hard to find an undercurrent of dismay at gung-ho comments about how technology is transforming the consumption of news (which, of course, it is) and that online services must grow.
Even radio, delivered still with the beautiful simplicity of analogue to battered, friendly old wirelesses, constantly plugs websites and catchup services, assuming everyone will nod approvingly. In the survey, words such as “forgotten” and “left behind” came not only from older viewers and listeners, but from some who were just poor, or living in rural areas hobbled by slow or absent broadband.
Newspapers have to face this reluctance too, to look beyond the busy tap and glow of urban screenjunkies and admit, in their offers and extras, that not everyone gets willingly or frequently online. So must banks and government departments (you can’t do your VAT on paper any more, and National Savings and Investments offer more interest if you’re willing to do it all in cyberspace). A hundred other needs, bookings and appointments become annually harder to achieve off-line.
You need not be old or frail to understand frustration at the Age of the Geek. All of us have, at some point, felt the rage. Part of the problem is the rather wonderful exuberant progress of the industry. New controls arrive, lightning-fast touchscreens which some shaky hands dislike; there is constant compulsory upgrading of “operating systems”, making yesterday’s documents unreadable without weird manoeuvres. If your laptop breaks, the new one may seem to turn your old data into gibberish. Novelties arise every month (“Darling, what is WhatsApp? Is it like Instagram? Can’t you just email me the baby’s picture?”).
The language itself, which began soberly talking about documents and files, explodes into a thousand apps and memes and dashboards. Sellers pre-load the simplest device with nonsensical words like GarageBand. Your finger slips, and your iPad suddenly flashes up an unflattering and cruelly angled picture of your own face, depressing you for the rest of the day. Try to buy something on a website and it insists you ‘register” with some footling forgettable password, and suckers you onto a marketing list which will require a magnifying glass to find the magic word “unsubscribe”. Try to explore an interesting website and it contemptuously informs you your Adobe is out of date.
There is plenty to complain about in the headlong geekery of modern IT, and in design that too rapidly makes assumptions that the user is au fait with its systems. But admit it: it’s actually pretty great – useful and potentially enjoyable, culturally enriching and economical of time and effort. And the older and more housebound you are, or the more geographically isolated, the more modern IT has to offer you.
A 26-country survey in 2010 by the BBC suggested that four in five people consider access to the internet a fundamental right. The UN thinks so too. NIACE, the adult education charity, laments that a lack of digital skills in many 55 to 64-year-olds will hamper their employability as life expectation and the pensionable age rise. The continuing existence of broadband blackspots is something of which this small island should be ashamed.
It is reasonable – even fun – to scoff at new fads. But the online world is not a fad, but an evolution. Boycotting it is as pointless as objecting to running water, electric light or women in trousers. Certainly the industry should work on simplification and intuitive controls; costs must be kept low, community telecottages funded to flourish.
But individual frustration and fear must be confronted, too. It pays off.