Hello good people,
It dawned on me whilst listening to some Bach MP3s that instant access to information is perhaps a ten year old phenomenon, lots of ‘buts’ about instant, however if your parents/seniors were alive and cognisant today, what developments say in the last 10-15 years would have delighted, fascinated or irritated them?
For the sake of conciseness can we look at material or scientific change rather than sociological or political.
Sent while listening to Gould playing Bach,
Peter
Still beiing alive? 
Actually, mom is. She likes her GMC Envoy.
Skipped to grandparents since parents are still alive…but I think Skype and such similar mediums.
When I was growing up, saw my grandparents every 4 or 6 months. Now, kids Skype with their grandparents all the time.
My Dad collected early jazz music. He’d be thrilled beyond words to have a device that could hold thousands of jazz pieces, with better quality sound, and not have to get up and change the record player after every three or four discs. He’d find Wikipedia a great achievement as well.
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The younger Dopers get off work/study earlier:D
Seriously folks:cool: I wanted to be careful about ages and generations, and their ages. An example. Dad died in '99 and he would have taken a huge interest in the Internet, not so much the technology but the potential. On the off-chance there’s a here-after I hope I can see Dad assessing the Internet.
p
That’s what I was going to say as well, with my parents being alive, and 1 of 4 grandparents still being alive. They’d have liked not so much Skype, but rather unlimited long-distance calling. Both sets only lived about 45 mins/1 hr south of where we lived in Houston, so we saw them all the time, but for some weird reason, calling them was a Big Deal, and we didn’t do it often.
I think my maternal grandfather may have really enjoyed flat screen TVs and DVR functionality- especially the instant replay functionality. My other grandfather wasn’t much of a gadgetry freak- I’m not so sure he’d have really got much of a kick out of post-1989 technology (when he died).
I’m pretty sure my maternal grandmother would have really liked modern-day diabetes drugs and supplies, since she was insulin dependent for decades, and still lived to 82 (died in 1998).
My 89 year old paternal grandmother seems to really like email and digital photography, because it means that she can see photos of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren without having to wait days, weeks or months for the actual prints to show up with someone, or for them to actually mail them. Beyond that, she seems kind of technology-agnostic, since her daily routine seems not to be overly technological other than the aforementioned email and photos.
My biological paternal grandfather would have really loved the fact that doctors now know about, and can treat, the very rare heart condition that killed him.
My maternal grandfather would probably have liked the Nintendo DS…he really liked his Gameboy.
My paternal grandmother’s second husband…don’t really know. He didn’t die that long ago, so…
My 76 and 81 year-old parents are extremely fond of NetFlix. I gave a subscription to them several years ago in the disc-mailing era, and it was one of the most appreciated gifts I ever gave. They now have a NetFlix enabled television and watch streaming movies and T.V. shows all the time.
My mother, who is an extreme bargain-hunter, loves the ability to comparison shop for almost anything on the Internet. She also loves being able to check stock prices, and got an iPhone for the sole purpose of having her financial apps available 24-7.
My father would have loved Wikipedia. Actually, he would have despised it, but he would have relished the challenge of finding and correcting every error in every article in every language.
My mother would love Skype.
Dad will be 88 this year. Last I heard from him, he was planning to get a 100% electric car.
I think my maternal great-grandfather (1839 - 1939) would be amazed at all the technology but dismayed at the the loss of printed newspapers.
My parents passed away only ten years ago, but they were getting into instant messaging with their grandchildren. If they were alive today, I’m sure I’d be helping them get started out on Facebook.
My parents are both 79. They love the Internet, although my mother is the only one who actually uses it. My father never learned how to type, so he asks her to download things and print them off. She’s also on Facebook, just to keep up with the (grand)children, and was really surprised at who she got friend requests from when she signed up. She also asked me what to do about the Farmville invitations, and I told her to ignore them if she wasn’t interested.
My grandmother (1898-1990) would have loved Skype. When I was a kid, in the 1970s, she heard about “video phones” and joked that nobody needed to see her coming out of the shower. Oh, she knew you had to have a connection on both ends, but KWIM? My other grandmother (1915-2007) thought the whole idea of the Internet was really cool, but I honestly don’t think she ever saw it in action; she never lived in an environment where she could readily access it.
In the late 1990s, I was doing some contract work in the town where “1915” lived, and stayed with her. At the time, there was a big thing in the news about kids accessing pornography on the Internet (which at the time was mostly still pictures) and she was complaining about “Kids these days are looking at this Internet, with all this sex stuff!” I pointed to the flowers my brother had sent her for her birthday, and told her that he had ordered them on the Internet, as a way to tell her that it can be used for clean things too, and she said, “Well, I’ll be! All this newfangled stuff!”
You read my grandmothers’ life spans correctly. In 2007, my sister had a blog, and after Grandma died, she wrote, “My grandmothers both lived to be 91. I must come from some hearty lineage.”
I found out on familysearch.com, a genealogy website run by the Mormons, that I have an ancestor who lived to be 101. This was in the 1700s.
My mother tells me my grandmother (1900-1972) would have loved indoor shopping malls since you could shop all day without getting rained on.
One of my great aunts (1900-1996) loved computers because she could use them to keep records on her ancestors.
My mother would have enjoyed the ease of communication we have now. She came from a very big family and I think she felt like she wasn’t able to stay in touch, and keep up with everyone’s lives as much as she would have liked. Facebook would have been perfect for her.
My father two main interests were sports and politics. I picture him with a phone full of apps designed to keep him up to the minute with information on those topics.
My dad died in 2008, but he loved eBay. He was a model airplane kit collector and he loved buying and selling on the internet.
My mother’s father, always learning something, would have loved Wikipedia and the sheer volume of knowledge available at his finger tips.
My grandmother would have LOVED facebook, skype, all the instant “face to face” contact that the computer age offers. She was still alive in the age of personal computers starting to become a mainstream thing, but died before the whole personal media thing took off.
She would have adored having a cell phone that allowed her to get instant pics or videos of something her grandkids (or great grandkids) were doing, she would have loved being able to talk and see her loved ones at the same time. She probably would have adored texting back and forth, even mundane things.
Every time I instant message with video, and talk to my own granddaughter and see her face, I think of my grandmother, and how much she would have loved that.
My grandmother, who just died this past November at the age of not quite 108 years old, loved modern things.
She didn’t know about computers or the high tech stuff, but she postively loved air conditioning, refirgerators, indoor bathrooms and running water, freezers and washing machines and clothes dryers. She said she didn’t believe in “The Good Old Days” life is easier in the now.
My father (age 76) was on Facebook for awhile, and emails regularly, and keeps up online with a community of model-train hobbyists. My mother (age 73) types her own emails but is afraid to press “send,” so Dad has to do it for her.
If my maternal grandmother (1911-2001) were still alive and in sound mind she’d probably be Skyping with her grandchildren…well, by now, great-grandchildren.