Why have some older people not adopted Internet?

[SparklyNewMe]

My parents have embraced it naturally somehow, and DM is very active on SM.
PIL have not - similar ages but always scoffed at it as if it was devil’s work. No smartphones. Both were switched on and active in olde age. MIL is on her own now, dependent on DH and BIL for all admin, and simpler things she deals with on her own like finding opening times are harder. But it was 100% choice, not inability, to adopt it, as MIL went to college in her 60s to learn Microsoft Office and has been using Word and Excel for her hobby. But email or internet - dismissed completely.

Yes my mum can use the internet but only wants to use it for looking at stuff and going on facebook and any admin or really basic stuff like insuring her bloody house having car tax she thinks is boring and wants someone else to sort it ie me. My father in law does not have the internet, is nearly 88 and is 99% self sufficient for all his admin. So I think it’s more about attitude really.

Are they long time Daily Fail readers?

My sister in law has the internet but refuses to use online banking because her money will get stolen

But computers have been around since the 1980s, which was 40+ years ago.

Agree with this. My Mum was scammed by someone offering to 'speed up her internet' getting her to download dodgy software. Luckily she realised after an hour (!) and no harm was done. They also get spam emails with dodgy links which I mainly intercept.

There are still a lot of jobs which don't require people to use a computer. Surely you can understand that? Simply being in the workforce didn't mean they needed to use one.

But not on every workstation or in every situation like they are now. You need to think beyond your own experience and realise computers were not ubiquitous even though they were around.

Also it helps when you have people around you using them, showing you new stuff, giving an idea of what is possible, etc. I learned lots about computers just from seeing what other people could do with them, getting ideas about what might be possible and knowing what to look up to find out how, etc. My Mum has much less idea what sort of things phones/computers/internet are capable to doing, so it doesn't occur to her to look it up and find out how

I now work on my own, no children, etc so don't get exposed regularly to new technology in the same way, and it is harder. There are way too many choices, and the effort sometimes to work out what I want is harder. I don't know how to get music on my iPhone as easily any more, for example. There's apple music, there's spotify, there's amazon music, there are a few things I used to have in iTunes that used to come from physical CDs, etc; some need subscriptions, some need internet, some have ads, some let me keep the music longer term, some go on all my devices, and I just can't be bothered to figure it out so I don't really have music on my phone now. If you don't see other people using things, if you don't start to get an idea when they first come out, and you then later on try to understand it, it can seem a bit overwhelming, too much choice, too much complexity, and you sometimes just have less energy to care about it. And I'm only in my 50s, so I'm sure I could do it if I had to.

Don't blame them.

The internet should never have been invented.
It's truly awful for society.

Totally agree. And I think I am allowed to say this because I am probably older than the MIL in the OP.

I was just determined to not be left behind. I absolutely love it that I am part of this techy world, and I know a lot more than many people half my age. I refuse to be Ignorant on anything techy and if I don't know something I google and learn it. The only time I ask my adult DCs for help (rare) is when it is something very new that they will know but I rarely bother them.

I think it is really quite selfish to expect people to run around doing your life admin because you can't be bothered to learn how something works

It's being an in-law. PILs spend all their free time looking for ways to be massively inconvenient to their DILs. True fact.

Apps are much more accessible and intuitive though than home PCs were back in the day when you were learning. So the thing that is being “learned” is completely different.

I think that a lot of older people (eg the ladies at the bus stop) are uncomfortable about carrying round something of high value with them, and anxious about being mugged if they get it out in public, or losing or breaking it.

The complexity of phone contracts, data plans etc doesn’t help. Once you’re actually connected the rest is quite simple but I can imagine an older person finding the setup process so tricky that it puts them off.

Plus, having recently had to start wearing reading glasses I can well imagine that it feels very fiddly to have to peer at a small screen while out and about.

Manual dexterity does reduce and typing on a touch screen can feel very hard. Home laptops can be very expensive.
Some people just prefer human. Interaction.

That said, I think there is a big difference between choosing to do things the old way and refusing to adopt new ways when the old ones become unavailable, burdening others with needing to help you.

@NigelHarmansNewWife but who taught the kids in 1980s school how to use the computers..... the adults. Who are now in their 80s or older.
Yes the vast majority of jobs - especially manual ones - had no need for computers but what I meant wasn't about work places. It was about life.
The children of the 1980s grew up, got home computers and many of their parents will have had plenty of opportunities to use and learn how to use one even if they didn't own their own one.
My first comment on this thread was about people being stubborn. The only old folks I know that genuinely have no clue how to use a computer are the ones that are as stubborn as anything and refused to embrace this technology 30/40 years ago when they weren't "old".

Your poor mum

for a lot of older people it’s often not “won’t” but “can’t”

most technology is still designed to be used by fully able bodied young people. Touch screens can be hard if your fingers are athritic, screens are very small which means the text is tiny (of course you can zoom but see earlier point about touch screens not always easy to use), voice activation software is designed to ‘hear’ loud clear voices - quiet, quavery voices not so much

Also think of how much tech has changed over the last 20 years. It’s difficult to imagine how it will look in another 20 years and how easy or not it will be for all of us to keep up

Confidence reduces as you get older.
You don't see it in yourself, but can definitely see it in others. DH is 55, works in software development and manages a team... capable, tech savvy adult - and spent 20 min filling out an electronic form yesterday. You could hear the lack of confidence in his "does this mean xyz?" etc.

My next door neighbours 84 + 86 come round to get tech advice when on their phones (I am younger, so they see me as an "expert" 😂 ). Often just needing the confidence to press the button that says "press here to confirm".

So even if you have the gadgets, have grown up doing these things, aging CAN get in the way. And that is not ageism, just opinion gathered from much anecdotal evidence.

My Mum is mid-70s. She wasn’t at school in the 1980s so she wasn’t exposed to computers. Just because computers were around, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people came into contact with them. She worked as a cleaner. Buying a PC would have been a pipe dream for her, she could barely pay her bills.

I bought her a laptop for her 60th which was the first time she’d had real access to a computer. It caused so much stress that I was I hadn’t bothered. It hardly came out of the box. She had a smartphone for a few weeks but she’d call me all stressed out to drive over (2 hour round trip) because “someone has turned the ringer off” (ie. She has put it on silent). Any attempt at troubleshooting remotely resulted in a near nervous breakdown. She has very bad eyesight and peripheral neuropathy so it was just too small for her to use. She still asks me to go round to “tune the wireless in” for her.

But ironically, she always liked the sound of talking to people on Twitter so I bought her a tablet and set her up a Twitter account (and an email address so I could set the Twitter up). It’s literally the only thing she does online and she’s got tens of thousands of followers! It’s completely bizarre. Yet she still walks two miles to the nearest cashpoint to check her bank balance. 🤷🏻‍♀️

So they always have exactly the same grocery order? OK, that puts a different spin on things.

@StrawHatLuffy the "internet" and "computers" are not the same thing though.

In my dm’s case it is stubbornness. She is only just 80 and worked as a secretary/typist most of her life so knew her way round a keyboard and would have found using a computer easy. She always point blank refused. My father always kept up-to-date using online banking and social media and he was older than my mother (passed now.)

Now my dm is in ill health and very isolated. She can’t even get to the shops so my siblings and I do 100% of everything and have done for ten years.

My dad in his 70s then, enrolled on a computer course at evening classes, however, although he managed a bit of emailing, he really couldn't get to grips with doing anything else. Online shopping wasn't a thing back then.

He also struggled a lot with a mobile phone, despite many lessons, couldn't text and was just about able to use it to make a call. No way could be manage a smart phone.

He wasn't thick or resistant to using technology, he just couldn't really work it properly despite out best efforts.

Not all elderly people just "don't want to" use computers, smart phones etc. some of them just really have difficulty with getting on with it.

One friend's mum is 94 and is brilliant, another friend's husband 75 can't and won't use their iPad or laptop and my friend does all the technology stuff when he requests it, which does really annoy her I have to say. Basically, he's useless!🙄

I have two stories. I had a friend/neighbour who was in his late 80s. He was pretty lonely so I would drop in for a chat and a cuppa. His days consisted of just watching TV, all day every day as he couldn't get about much. I jokingly said we should get him some wifi installed, and he had no idea what it was or what I was on about. I then, on the hop, had to try and explain what the internet was and how wifi worked, which is surprisingly difficult to summarise when you're not expecting it and it's alien to someone while a part of your day to day life! This was almost 10 years ago and he has unfortunately passed away now, but I often think his mind would be absolutely blown if I told him about the new-ish developments in AI and TikTok (he was delightfully open minded and curious).

The second is a woman I know who is only 70. She can't use a computer, doesn't know how to type, only has a brick-style phone and not a smartphone, and she's stubbornly resistant to change. It's almost like she's proud of it. It makes it problematic because she's independent and widowed, so on her own but manages her life fine. But modern life assumes that people do use email and the internet, so when she has to do life admin, it really makes it difficult. She had to ask her friend to set her up with an email address (which she has never logged into), as she couldn't renew some insurance without one!

I'm not sure if her attitude has been impacted by her life/relationship history - she's been married a few times and kept 'traditional' husband/wife roles, so the man of the house always dealt with that kind of stuff, and she didn't bother to learn because she didn't need to. Now she's on her own, and I'm sure life feels overwhelming at times where 'the internet' feels like an extra hurdle to get her head around simply to complete a basic admin task. I suspect it's isolating as well. Her friends of similar age have all got with the times and don't have these issues. But it seems awfully young to miss out on a huge component of modern life that would help her immeasurably, purely because of some kind of stubbornness/overwhelm.

I think it’s easy to underestimate when you’re young how much more difficult learning these things becomes when you have to learn them as an old person. We got my late mum an iPad but I got almost daily panicked calls because she’d forgotten how to use it, or she’d had some scam email she’d taken seriously, or something wouldn’t load. It gave her so much stress. She struggled to believe that “you’ve won an iPad” or “You have an outstanding fine to HMRC, click this link or have your bank account suspended” weren’t real and she’d be very distressed for a long time afterwords even after reassurance. I would show her how to do things over and over again but still she would forget or couldn’t grasp it. And this was an intelligent woman who coped perfectly well in every other area of her life.

When people have lived most of their lives in a world that was very different, when things were done face to face or by letter, it’s harder to adapt than we think it is from our younger perspectives. But it’s sad, because she couldn’t navigate the best out of the doctors unless I did an econsult, struggled to get the benefits she was entitled to etc, unless we did them for her. Some older people cope with embracing it, but for those that don’t, navigating the world must be incresingly hard. Because technology has made a lot of things (such as live bus timetables) simple - if you can cope with using it. If you can’t, all the paper information that used to be everywhere has gone and life is a lot more difficult than it used to be.

DF left us about the time we got a home computer so never used it, he lived the life of a hermit after that so I doubt the internet was top priority, when I eventually tracked him down many years later he had never used the internet and could barely use his big buttoned dumb phone because of poor manual dexterity

@Anonym00se no one had to buy a computer to have access to one though.
Places like libraries have had public computers from the 1990s - obviously not all libraries but by the 2000s it was pretty standard.
Which is 25 years ago now.

Well within variation.
But the point is Mum knows what she wants to buy. She can choose between full fat or semi skimmed milk. She can decide does she want 1 lemon or a bag of 4. And occasionally it does all go wrong and we need to sort it.

If they need some kind of electric radiator, as has just happened, they wouldn't be able to choose from the myriad of options out there on Amazon or the whole internet. It is too much decision making. They used to drive to nearest town, go to eg Currys or John Lewis, talk to someone, see things in the shop, and choose. They can't do that now.