A 98 year old man is emailing his grandchildren to keep in touch with them. A 50 year old mom doesn’t have a PC. Parents are a weird thing: as we are young they are (in our eyes) the wisest and most up-to-date persons in the world. As we grow up we discover that’s not always the case, and we also discover Google and we get to that point in life when our lives are connected to the internet, but our parents are still in the land of 8 o’clock news and primitive cellphones.
Recently I was browsing the web and I stumbled across this article about a 98 year old man uses the internet to keep up to date with things that are important to him. And I think that is brilliant! For some reason it makes me very happy to know that older people keep adapting to our always changing world and I have a real strong respect for them. And it also made me think about how my parents are trying to adapt to this internet-dependent era. The answer? Well…. there is some potential but it needs some work (and by “some” I mean “a lot”). What I did notice was that if you want something to change, you have to change something yourself. You can’t expect those around you to suddenly change if you don’t do something to make the change needed.
As I was growing up, after I got my first PC and started loosing nights just staying awake and clicking away, I was the go-to person for anything computer related. Sending a mail, searching something Google, creating a table in Word, moving a file from the PC to a memory stick, those were all things that my parents asked me to do for them and I, as a young and enthusiastic child, was more than happy to help them.
When I got older and I first moved away from them things changed a bit: my father was pretty good with Word editing and sending emails even before that, and my mother, as I left, learned how to write a mail by herself and how to attach something to a mail, although she would still call me from time to time to make sure she got it right.
But we would still see each other really often and on those occasions I was the IT guy once again. Then my father had to go on a business trip to China for a week, and when he got back he was pretty convinced that a laptop or a smartphone would have helped him more on that trip. So I helped him get a smartphone. And introduced him to WhatsApp, emails on the phone and Google searches. Surprisingly enough he started using them and remembered what I once told him: “If in doubt, Google is your friend!”. I wish I would have had the same luck with my mother. While my father called me and called the telephone company to complain when his mobile internet was down (which sounds like a teenager move) my mother can’t really see the difference between having or not having an internet connection on her smartphone. She’ll read her whatsapp messages one or two weeks late, I would get her’s late as well, but she doesn’t really mind it. She likes her phone cause she can take photos and can make phone calls.
Then I moved further away from my parents and now the cheapest way to communicate was Skype. So, I thought them how to Skype. My mother likes the idea, and when she has time she might call me on Skype for a few minutes and still ask me how to save a file from her computer to her memory stick (drag&drop isn’t exactly her strong point), but now she uses her phone to get email notifications that she reads from her PC. So I guess that’s ok.
My father had another approach. Not having much time, he wanted Skype on his mobile phone. I was surprised, shocked, but willing to help. So earlier this year I got him an iPhone 4S. I was pretty confident that he could handle the transition from Android to iOS, but I didn’t expect what happened next. He actually loves his phone now. He calls me on Skype sometimes from his phone to ask me about different apps he found on the app store, he sends me random photos of things he finds funny on WhatsApp and mail, he started using the mail app on his phone almost as much as he uses it on his computer. And that says a lot. Not to mention that now he is a passionate YouTube user. He doesn’t have an account (yet) but uses it to find all the long lost songs of his childhood and sends some of them to me via email.
And, both my parents have random moments when they decide they want a Facebook account. And weird enough I find that kinda scary.
But I think my father will end up just great in this digital, always online era. My mother…she will struggle a bit, but if she is happy with what she has, for me it’s all that matters.
How are your parents holding up? Are they online as much as you or do they prefer to stick to the traditional newspaper for news and classic phone for talking?
RaduThinks 