Pew Research Center reports that older people are almost as likely to embrace technological change as young people:
…innovations in cell phones, email and online shopping are seen as changes for the better by most Americans with positive views reaching well beyond the youngest Millennial generation. These kinds of change are viewed at least as favorably by Americans in their 30s and 40s as they are by those in their late-teens and 20s and, in many cases, it is only those 65 and older who have less enthusiastic views of these innovations.
This is hopefully the beginning of the end for the remarkably widely rehearsed ‘digital natives vs. digital immigrants’ argument.
It’s not all good news for the digital evangelist, though. There’s a considerably more stark – and perhaps depressing – contrast in opinion when it comes to approval of some of the newer web innovations: blogs and social networks. Only a quarter or fewer over-50s see these things as a positive change.
Just 15% of over-65s think the arrival of blogs is a change for the better, compared to 44% of 18–29 year-olds.
However, this lukewarm response to web innovations is likely to be the result of a lack of familiarity rather than experience. In the UK, around 25% of over-50s and 70% of over-65s have never used the Internet (caveat: these are 2007 figures — I’d guess it’s less now, and perhaps less in the US than the UK, anyway). It’s hard to imagine those people giving a positive appraisal of blogs and socnets, when they’ve never read, written, used or been a part of one. Given their response to mobiles and email, they’re as likely to enjoy these things as anyone else, given the opportunity.
(via. Josie Fraser)
picture credit: Tiago Rïbeiro
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