This is the way my local cable company is promoting next month's switch to digital TV. A smiling senior citizen.I suppose it's because that is the demographic that is most frightened by new technology. That has to be the reason, because for everything else, they use kids, young adults or turtles.
Technology scares people of that generation. That's strange because they are the generation that has seen the greatest advances.
My mother was born in 1924. She has lived through 84 years of technological advances too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say, everything from television to air conditioning.
Whenever something changes or something new comes about, it's always old people who have the most difficult time with it. When the power went out, her VCR would blink 12:00 until I could get over there to set the time. Now, she has a DVD player that automatically re-sets, so she always knows what time it is.
They are the generation who has undergone the biggest hardships and seen the biggest improvements over their lifetime, so it can't be the technology. It has to be their age.
I can't help but wonder if I'll feel as out of touch when I'm 84.
1 comment:
My dad was born in 27, my mom in 34.
My mom is telling her great nephews now about things- getting listening to the Shadow and Little Orphan Annie- on the radio, what it was like to be the first family on their block to have a TV- and it was a black and white, her grandmother had an ice box-how people reacted to the deaths of FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK, what it was like to see Neil Armstrong land on the moon.
My dad tells the boys about seeing Dimagio, Gerhig, and games as a boy seeing the Bklyn Dodgers, the old Giants with the run around the world-
True my parents are luddites when it comes to a computer, my mom giggles and laughs when one of her nieces or nephews sends pictures of their grandbabies in the email- she thinks it's a miracle.
I think of my grandmother- and her mother going from houses with no electricity to electricity, tv's, phones- to someone on the moon and it's amazing.
We need to recall where we came from to know where we are going.
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