I’m not sure- there seems to be some kind of fundamental technological confusion in people above a certain age, and no amount of explanation really makes it sink in.
It’s like there are some kind of tech concepts that just can’t be absorbed by a lot of people above some age, no matter how well or much you explain and train them. They need step-by-step instructions and completely flame out when confronted with something that diverges from those instructions.
Add age-related memory loss and/or the beginnings of what might be dementia, and it’s a losing cause.
However, I will say that modern touch-screen stuff like used on Apple and Android devices seems to be much more intuitive for some reason versus mouse-and-keyboard PC. I don’t personally get it, but the oldsters of my acquaintance seem to be amazed by how “easy” their iPad is, when their PC was hopelessly complicated and impenetrable. To me, it’s just very slightly different flavors of the same basic user interface concepts.
Years ago my father confided in me that the wisest thing he’d done to preserve the marriage was when he and a friend exchanged wives when they were learning to drive, post-WWII
Age- related memory loss might cause it and so might dementia. Age in and of itself, nope. You're confusing the experience that many currently old people have had with age itself.
My mother is 75 and is technologically confused- but she was confused at 50 and 40 and probably 30. When she was about 40, she called me at work to ask how to record something on her VCR. I told her to press play and record. It didn’t work because I hadn’t thought to tell her to press them simultaneously, since it was the same procedure on a audio cassette recorder. She didn’t know how to work one of those either. Forget programming the VCR to record something later- we finally had to buy her something that put a program guide on the screen and let her select what she wanted to record. It’s not really surprising that she doesn’t really understand her computer/internet/phone. I have been using computers of one sort or another since I took a programming course in college that required IBM punch cards - I’m pretty sure I won’t be unable to understand at 75 just because I’m old.
I didn’t mean that people lose their ability to deal with computers as they age, I meant that people above some age TODAY, in the main, seem to have some kind of cognitive block about dealing with technology that’s surprisingly profound. There are outliers who get it, of course, but there are a whole lot that are totally mystified by it and afraid of it.
To give you an example, my dad has typically been utterly fearless when it comes to physically assembling and configuring a PC. But he’s timid and unsure when it comes to setting up the software and troubleshooting it. I tried to explain to him that it’s the easy part- if you really screw up, you can always just clear the partition and start over, while if you botch the physical stuff, you can easily be out at least a hundred bucks or more.