My dad is having the most difficult time with a new cell phone he just got. Although it’s a bare-bones model with few features, he still finds it impossible to do more than just dial a number, despite there being clear menus.
A couple of years ago, I bought my parents a high definition television set. They watch it, but won’t watch the HDTV channels. Why? Because on the cable system, they’re on channels 700 and up, and punching the extra digits in the remote is “too hard.” Even programming a simple clock radio is a Herculean task for them.
20 years ago, the senior citizen with a VCR with a display that constantly blinked 12:00 was a cliche … but true in many regards. Today, it’s still true; I think we all have stories to share about the difficulties older people have using new technology; DVD players, computers, cell phones, and the like. My question is … why? Have any studies been performed to show why older people have a much harder time learning to operate a new appliance or item of electronic equipment than those that are younger?
I’ve only heard one theory: that seniors who grew up in simpler times can’t grasp the concept of multifunction buttons. That explains why they were able to operate the climate control system of a 1952 Buick, which might have had six unmarked knobs, four pull levers underneath the dash, and two sliding levers marked “Dynoglide Deluxe”, but are at a loss when given an iPod.
(I know someone will chime in about their 95-year old uncle who can navigate the Internet with ease.)
My mom had a theory about this after taking a basic “digital camera” class at a local camera shop with an older lady who just couldn’t get it.
There’s visual cues that young people have always seen and gotten used to. For example, when we’re looking at a menu screen on a digital camera or DVD player, if we don’t see the menu option we want, we know automatically to look for a little “down” arrow to see more options. No explanation necessary. Older people have never seen this and don’t know what to look for.
Also, they’re scared of breaking something, or going into a wrong menu and not being able to go back and correct the menu option they just changed. And yes, the multi-function buttons are weird… it does this under 1 screen, but operates differently under another, and sometimes the button does nothing at all. It’s hard to grasp sometimes.
But like you said, some older people “get it” instantly. My dad doesn’t… my mom is surprisingly good with computers and gadgets.
It’s because they can continue to live and function without the new stuff. The TV still gets the station they always watched in Standard Definition. The bank still has tellers so they don’t need an ATM. They got along fine all of there lives by not having a cell phone in there pocket. They still print newspapers. And you don’t need a VCR if you know what time your show comes on and just watch it. The music they like came out years ago and they bought it then, so they don’t need iTunes. That and the radio still works.
Retired folks don’t have jobs or kids anymore so they are not in a rush like the rest of us and don’t see the need to have it right now at their fingertips. If they didn’t fuddle around with the old way of doing things they would have too much free time on their hands.
… but presumably, in a life-or-death situation with very intelligently-designed training … anyone of any post-adolescent age (assuming no learning disabilities) can learn this stuff, correct? There’s no physiological barrier, right?
I think that it’s lack of motivation, for one thing. As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed that I’m not interested in playing newer videogames. I’m simply not interested. I start to learn them and I think, “What’s the point?”
I will be 52 in August, and I consider myself an “apprentice senior”, and I frequently have trouble figuring out new widgets–for the main reason that I just can’t see them. Eyesight diminishes with age, and even with bifocals it’s still a challenge for me sometimes to bring into focus, say, the teeny buttons on my cell phone or on the digital camera, or the CD changer in the car. It’s not that I’m “afraid” of new technology, it’s that sometimes I just can’t see the new technology.
I’ve had problems with my memory and ability to think. I’ve gotten slowly better over a long period, and there is a point where aging individuals will find it hard to learn something new. I even found I could ignore background noise like people talking to me, because I was thinking about something, and I couldn’t process two things at once. I’ve found I could learn new stuff in the last 6 months if I tried hard, but I did overload, and it was hard. A couple weeks ago I passed some magic point again, and I can handle everything better, including learning new stuff, and remembering old stuff. My previous problems were typical of older adults, faulty memory and difficulty in learning. Everybody will have it happen at different rates, but you get there if you don’t die young.
It’s not all old people. My 70 year old mother is better with computers than a lot of young people I know. She knows her way around Windows, and can also install software, and do basic troubleshooting (like boot into safe mode and run a virus check) herself.
She also decided a few years ago to make the leap from film photography to digital, and bought herself a digital camera and now happily e-mails pictures all around the world.
She loves her TiVo. Pre-TiVo, she not only knew how to set the clock on her VCR, but recorded TV shows with regularity. Heck, even I can’t do that!
So it’s not all old people. One of the biggest things I admire about my mother is that she rarely uses “I’m too old” as an excuse for anything. She dresses like a teenager, loves to socialize, and is always up for a party. I hope I’m the same when I’m her age.
Part of it may just be the sheer number of features everything has these days. I’m not bad with technology, but I probably still don’t know half the things my cell phone can actually do. (I’m only medium old.)
I think part of it is developmental as well. Some things are simply much easier when they are learned young and it influences brain development for life. My MIL got a laptop a couple of years ago. She is an admitted technophobe but she really wanted to learn how to send e-mail and photos it her friends. One day a week went she would come over, I worked with her and taught her how to use the mouse as best I could, the keyboard (it wasn’t like the electric typewriter she once knew) and a little bit about Windows. She struggled along and managed to get a handful of e-mails sent out over a few months and then just dropped the whole thing.
As it happened, I went to go pick up my 3 year old daughter from day care around this time. They had out brochures for computer lessons for kids two years old and up. I was skeptical but they said that young children can learn computers just fine. Now, I work in IT so there was no way I was going to pay someone to teach her so I figured I would give it a try myself. I download some kids games off the web and called her in. We started with mouse basics and I am not exaggerating when I say she had the old point and click down cold in less than five minutes. In a few more minutes I taught her the standard dialogue boxes evn though she couldn’t read. I think the Windows interface designers did a better job than most people think because she just knew what to do. The whole thing was a small mistake however. She started hijacking my computer that day and I still have to fight for time even though she is still four.
She is very bright but I believe people when they say that most kids can master those things quickly when they are young.
Unlike many people my age, I first learned computer programming 43 years ago, when still a teenager. Though it was rather different those days: you didn’t have these new-fashioned “menu” things on paper-tape punches or card punches, for example. But I’m selective about what I take the trouble to acquire or learn: I’ve never had a cell phone, because I don’t use the phone all that much, but I’ve taken up digital photography in a big way, because it gives good results so much more easily than film photography ever did.
So, while there’s a correlation between age and not taking up new technology, it’s very far from being 100%.
As people age, it becomes more difficult (but certainly not impossible) to learn new behaviors. The brains don’t rewire as readily as they do in young people. Most people as young as 25 can’t learn to speak a new language without an accent (that is, their *own * accent).
Technology over the years has continued to challenge the human capacity for processing large amounts of information more quickly. The outer reaches of this capacity were found, I think, in some computer systems designed for fighter pilots to provide such large amounts of information that the brain just kind of shut down at a certain point.
People getting set in their ways as they age is a timeless observation but the information age just makes it more stark.
I can assemble a cabinet with shelves, do my income taxes, make a quilt top with hundreds of pieces, and fix a complex recipe, but (I think) it’s because I can see them come together. The parts are all there, in front of me. I can see where I’ve been and where I’m going. If I make a mistake, I can see where I went wrong.
But my cell phone, PC, software – when I give them a command, then what I’ve done before and what I have yet to do aren’t there for me to look at. They’ve disappeared. I have no choice but to start all over, because I can’t “see” where I went wrong.
If my phone instructions were on a flow-chart, maybe I’d be able to get my messages.
I just read an article that said that $100 billion dollars of consumer equipment is returned annually because “it doesn’t work.” When surveyed, people said they had spent an average of 20 minutes trying to make it work before giving up.
There are learning curves to any new equipment, but the learning curves for many new pieces of electronics are enormous. It’s so easy to put in new functions that they are engineered in, because people overestimate how much they will use them. Things that don’t have all the bells and whistles are deemed inferior and not purchased. Yet once home, people don’t want to spend the time and effort to learn all these functions.
That’s not an explanation for why punching in the high definition channels is too much. I have a friend who’s a retired college English professor and she relied on the tv booklet that came with the Sunday newspaper. Now that it stopped she won’t use the onscreen guide or check TV Guide online. I don’t understand why not, exactly, but the phenomenon exists. I know I don’t want to have to learn all the functions on my cell phone.
Now for my WAG. Learning something new is a chore. When you’re younger, everything you do is learning so it doesn’t seem like that much of an effort to add on one more thing. With age, you expect instant familiarity with the way the world works. Even 20 minutes of effort is a frustrating and unneeded chore. Worse, it’s a reminder that you’re getting old, out of touch, out of date, and your skills are failing. Who needs that?
Electronic devices are too complicated. That’s why the world swooned when Apple introduced its i-Phone. It looks like something that is intuitive enough not to have to go through as much of a learning curve. Most products are not designed; they are engineered. Engineers add function; designers add usability. The two seldom overlap. Really, the world is harder than it was in the 50s and 60s. I’m old enough to remember.
I’m 37 and consider myself average tech-savy however I’ve found myself lately to not want to invest the time in learning how to work devices since they become obsolete just way too fast.
My first cell phone had my entire address book in it and I knew every function on the thing. Nowdays I go through cell phones like toilet paper and just don’t have the time to put everyones name in there and learn all the phones functions. It’s just a waste of time.
Same with my DVR unit. It can probably do a lot of miraculous things but I’ll never know. By the time I learn how to do them they’ll come out with a newer box.
By the time I learned how to use Napster correctly they shut it down.
After I learned all the functions on my Pioneer CD head unit it promptly died a couple years later.
Maybe old folks are just tired of having to learn things over, and over, and over.
Yep, strange, slightly scary, but true. My kid figured out the point and click thing at a very young age (two) as well. I was suprised, but pleased that I no longer had to walk him through everything. (On the other hand, I feel guilty–now it’s so easy to sit him down in front of the computer and let him play for an hour or two while I do my own business. But on the other other hand, computer’s much more interactive than TV, so maybe it’s okay? Maybe? :dubious: ) Anyway, in short order he’s figured out how to maximize windows, how to close them, how to get back to the previous page, how to navigate specifically to whichever game he wants to play, and so on. It’s kind of freaky. He also likes to surf around on youtube, which is making me start to think about censorship issues… :eek: There are things on there part of me would rather my two year old not be able to see.
Anyway, concering toddlers using computers and surfing the net and so on: I wonder whether this might not have radical consequences for the way kids think later on in life. I mean, I had to learn as a teenager how to think of myself as occupying a “cyberspace” where I can “point” and “click” at things. In other words, I learned to think of the cursor as an extension of myself relatively late in life. What about someone who learns this little trick at the tender age of 2? Could this have psychological implications later on?
Did you try starting Mom off with Solitaire or did you go straight to emailing photos? I believe that MS leaves its crappy, antique (unchanged since 3.0, at least, and I’m assuming it’s still in Vista because it’s in XP) game of Klondike in every new version of Windows because it’s a game every old fart has played IRL and it teaches basic mousing, including double-clicks and click-and-drag.
) Anyway, in short order he’s figured out how to maximize windows, how to close them, how to get back to the previous page, how to navigate specifically to whichever game he wants to play, and so on. It’s kind of freaky. He also likes to surf around on youtube, which is making me start to think about censorship issues… :eek: There are things on there part of me would rather my two year old not be able to see.