Puttering Down Infobahn’s Dirt Road
Lawyer Zeke, a friend of my youth and a onetime seagoing swabbie, says that when the information highway is used by a couple of rednecks like Patrick Aloysius Tillery and me, it becomes “the information dirt road.” But then you know how those Southern California lawyers go on.
Mass-mediacrats hyped the information highway thing to death in the recent past, but these days it has become so cliched out that you don’t hear nearly as much about communicating by computer. As computers become as commonplace as answering machines and clock radios, most Americans nowadays find it hard to get all breathless about the stereotypes of the brave new world of on-line miracles. The digital world doesn’t have that gee-whiz, miracle look any more for young people who have always lived in it.
Fortunately for us, there is another kind of people who HAVEN’T always lived in it. For those of us who remember when even answering machines and clock radios weren’t around - i.e., seniors - the excitement isn’t dead. Which is why another digital stereotype needs to be trashed.
It is the media cliche that computers are the exclusive turf of 12-year-old hacker geniuses, that the digital world is only for kids who are naturals at it and that no old geezers of 40 or more need apply. There are several things wrong with that story, beginning with the fact that it just ain’t so: Seniors eat that computer stuff up with a spoon.
“Smart Money,” Dow Jones’ financial magazine, recently reported some startling statistics that Paul Bramell of the Seniors Coalition and I were marveling over last week. He is the chief executive officer of that new outfit of two million elders. The turn to computers has vast significance for seniors organizations that want to keep in tune with their folks.
“Smart Money” reports that 46 percent - nearly half - of computer users today in America are 55 OR OLDER.
A few days earlier, I was discussing that same trend with the president of an even bigger seniors group, the American Association of Retired Persons. Eugene Lehrmann was an expert in vocational education before he retired. In town to speak to area employers about AARP’s pilot program, Experience for Hire, Mr. Lehrmann recalled how he decided to retire when computers came along. “I just didn’t want to fool with that,” he laughed. “Then I got active in AARP, and we started going the computer route. So, like other seniors, I learned it.”
Indeed, AARP is very big on-line now, with its already extensive communications network spreading onto the Internet and easily available with a whole menu of seniors information on the on-line service I like best, Prodigy.
A third of Mr. Lehrmann’s 33 million seniors are still in the work force. And in this era, everyone in the work force - or who wants to unretire and return to it - better befriend the computer. Seniors figured that out years ago.
Which is why NEARLY ONE IN FOUR of us between 60 and 64 owns a computer today. And why computer use among older Americans has been increasing at a rate of 15 percent per year since 1990.
When it comes to creating, retrieving and juggling data, we seniors remember, as the kids cannot, how it was to do that the hard way. Listen to what my old friend Zeke was exulting about just the other night on e-mail from out West: “This old fossil has recently converted his law library to CDROM. I have about 750 volumes of books on six disks … I can ferret out information in a fraction of the time that it used to take.”
For us fossils, the digital thrill is not gone, as you see. Especially when we recognize how much sweat and time we are saving over the old-fashioned way we learned as young-uns. Zeke’s delight at being able to carry his law library in one coat pocket and flick up a needed fact in a nanosecond is echoed by millions of us.
But computers aren’t all work and no play. A half-dozen or so of us who were Navy Department property 45 years ago - it was sending us to college - got back together awhile ago on e-mail. We are having a wonderful time hanging out together again, thanks to the infobahn. When it comes to old-timey gossiping, lying and bragging, e-mail beats the back fence or even the corner booth at the neighborhood bar.
In addition to Zeke and Pat, an old Marine jet jock, there is Charlie, who was a blue-water sailor on a destroyer, and Mose, who came back to college from the 1st Marine Division in 1951. Obstetrician Jim, who was the best man at my wedding and a former jarhead, retired Col. Ted and Navy Capt. Ray are also being called into the fold. The latter two are naval aviators and my old college roommates - my zoomie roomies, as it were.
The class of our old friends group, though not a naval character herself, is Dr. Milly. She earned a doctorate a year ago, a feat of which the rest of us are all proud - perhaps undeservedly, since she did all the work. Dr. Mil is the mother of five grown-up kids, as well as the digital den mother of the half-dozen sixtyish delinquents now scattered from California to Florida.
Dr. Mil is not only the only female in our remember-the-1950s gang, she also is the wisest: She got her doctorate in clinical psychology, which seems an appropriate academic discipline for this group. Even out here on the information highway, we need a highly qualified expert as supervisor.
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