“Old age” is made up–and this concept is hurting everyone
&gt; And don’t try to tell me the real issue is that older people aren’t tech savvy. Maybe that stereotype once contained a grain of truth—in 2000, just 14% of 65-plus America used the internet—but it’s no longer the case. Today, 73% of the 65-plus population is online, and half own smartphones.<p>This is interesting to me, as while it certainly is true it doesn’t come close to saying what the author is trying to make it say imo. Yeah my grandparents have smartphones, I still wouldn’t call them tech savvy.<p>I work as one of a small team of developers in a rather old (demographically) vocational company, and while our team doesn’t do IT work per se, all the employees over 50 can’t tell the difference between the Dev team and IT support. They have no clue, and explaining it to them is impossible. Further, it’s a constant pain point for me working with older people on software related issues, especially when it comes to user interface details. Management is constantly pushing for interfaces to be as plain, simple, and stupid as possible to ensure that all employees can use internal tools without needing assistance.<p>Older people today do engage with technology but that doesn’t make them “tech savvy” and in my opinion they probably never will be. Subsequent generations (mine being one of the first) had the benefit of being introduced to computers at a very young age so to us it’s as natural as riding bike or making grilled cheese. I think that, no matter what we try to do, there’s no way to make older generations be “tech savvy” because they were deprived of that early exposure.<p>I think older people absolutely do have a desire to be tech savvy, I just don’t see how we get there. I’ve thought about this often but I don’t know what the solution is. Overall great article, and I’m probably a lot dumber than anyone who works at MIT AgeLabs so my opinion probably should be taken with a grain of salt