What gets me is that it isn’t universally an age thing.
My grandmother isn’t perfect by any means, but she is able to manage email, whatsapp (surprised me with leaving voice messages through it recently when her arthritis made her not want to type), texting, facebook (including chat), amazon, browsing the internet, video calls, and ordering from non-amazon sites. She’s in her early fucking 90s.
She had something she wanted to do and decided to learn about it. She didn’t make it everyone else’s problem. She has people, including me, who she will lean on for support sometimes, but when she does she takes notes. She wants to know how to do these things and puts in the effort.
Meanwhile her daughter, my mother, has this attitude that “Everything is supposed to be easier with a computer, so if it’s not easy it’s the computer’s fault not mine.” If she can’t figure out how to do something in two clicks, or if the menu option isn’t exactly where it makes intuitive sense to her, my mother effectively throws her hands up and gives up. Combine that with this intense fear of somehow cratering the whole machine if she clicks the wrong thing and she’s fucking useless.
She literally couldn’t manage getting music off of CDs onto an iPod. You know, the horribly complex set of steps of: plug the iPod into your computer using the charging cable, iTunes will open automatically, put the disc in the drive, it will automatically ask you if you want to rip/import the disc into iTunes, click yes, wait for it to complete, click sync on the iPod in the iTunes menu, wait until it’s done, then click eject.
Something that’s only going to make this worse over time is the constant attempts to make all of this more simple. Android and iPhones have built in password managers, which can be great (especially linking a Mac laptop’s keychain with the person’s phone) but if something fucks up all hell breaks lose because it wasn’t something they ever had to think about.
What gets me is that it isn’t universally an age thing.
My grandmother isn’t perfect by any means, but she is able to manage email, whatsapp (surprised me with leaving voice messages through it recently when her arthritis made her not want to type), texting, facebook (including chat), amazon, browsing the internet, video calls, and ordering from non-amazon sites. She’s in her early fucking 90s.
She had something she wanted to do and decided to learn about it. She didn’t make it everyone else’s problem. She has people, including me, who she will lean on for support sometimes, but when she does she takes notes. She wants to know how to do these things and puts in the effort.
Meanwhile her daughter, my mother, has this attitude that “Everything is supposed to be easier with a computer, so if it’s not easy it’s the computer’s fault not mine.” If she can’t figure out how to do something in two clicks, or if the menu option isn’t exactly where it makes intuitive sense to her, my mother effectively throws her hands up and gives up. Combine that with this intense fear of somehow cratering the whole machine if she clicks the wrong thing and she’s fucking useless.
She literally couldn’t manage getting music off of CDs onto an iPod. You know, the horribly complex set of steps of: plug the iPod into your computer using the charging cable, iTunes will open automatically, put the disc in the drive, it will automatically ask you if you want to rip/import the disc into iTunes, click yes, wait for it to complete, click sync on the iPod in the iTunes menu, wait until it’s done, then click eject.
Something that’s only going to make this worse over time is the constant attempts to make all of this more simple. Android and iPhones have built in password managers, which can be great (especially linking a Mac laptop’s keychain with the person’s phone) but if something fucks up all hell breaks lose because it wasn’t something they ever had to think about.