For this assignment, I interviewed my best friend, Crystal (age 30) for my “young” generation, my mother, Lou Ann (age 49) for my “middle” generation and my father-in-law, John (age 61) for my “old” generation. I was surprised by the results I found, I assumed before doing this project that internet usage would decrease with age, but didn’t find that to be completely true as you will read.
The common ground between all three people’s internet usage was that they all used e-mail as a source of communicating. I found Crystal (young generation) used the internet the most often, in addition to e-mail she used social networking sites, especially Facebook which, she uses quite often to stay in contact with friends and family. She also shops, pays bills and reads the news via the internet. Lou Ann (middle generation) said the only other reason she uses the internet is to search for vacations or look up topics she is interested in on search engines. Her internet usage is minimal. John (older generation) uses the internet daily at work to do research on products he uses. For personal use, he frequently shops online for the best deals and uses the internet to do a lot of his shopping. I found that he uses the internet fairly often for both work and personal use.
When asked how comfortable they were with using the internet for communicating with others, Crystal felt very comfortable since she constantly e-mails and “talks” to her friends via Facebook, the internet is even the way she met her husband, so communicating online is nothing new to her! John’s main internet communicating is done through e-mail at work, while he rarely e-mails for personal use, he does e-mail daily at work. Lou Ann did not feel comfortable with communicating on the internet, while she checks her e-mail and will occasionally send a note to someone or forward something of interest; it is not her preferred way to communicate with others.
Both Crystal and John felt the internet has changed their lives in some way. Crystal (young) felt that the internet is a very valuable resource but, that it has changed her life both for better and worse. Better because of the “ability to bank online and shop without having to deal with long lines and out of stock items and customer service people always bothering you” and worse because she has gotten so used to using social networking to communicate with others that she doesn’t go out as often and feels it “promotes laziness in an already obese society.” John (older generation) felt it changed his life for the better because it makes his job easier since he can find information so quickly and can communicate with his co-workers through e-mail which. He also thinks it saves him time in his personal life since he doesn’t have to shop in stores and can do it from home which is more convenient. Lou Ann (middle generation) did say that she thinks that the internet could be a great tool “if I knew how to use it”, but doesn’t think it has changed her life very much. While it makes it somewhat easier to search for things, she did not feel it would make an impact in her life if she did not have the internet any longer.
I was surprised to see that the older generation seemed more comfortable and used the internet more than the middle generation. I think a large part of this is due to the fact that my father-in-law uses the internet in his work and this has made him more familiar and comfortable with it, where my mother still doesn’t really understand what she can use the internet for (other than the basics). What I found very interesting is that my father-in-laws job is working with machinery, something I never thought would require the use of the internet, but ties in with the Wood & Smith reading “Increasingly, scholars of the “information economy” report that knowledge work is replacing industrial work” (page 147). I think that Crystal (younger generation) seems to be “typical” of the younger crowd who have grown up with the internet and it is almost a necessity in their everyday lives. Crystal said something I thought was very true about how when our children are old enough, the internet will have changed so much that it will be completely different than what we have learned. I find that true already, my oldest daughter (6 years old) uses the computer every day in school, it is one of the required activities that they have where they go to the computer lab and use educational software as an additional source of learning. Even at this young of an age, children are being exposed to the computer and it is commonplace to them.
Reading both your blog and others it's obvious that e-mail is the common thread across the board but as I read your blog about Louann and John it occured to me that it depends not just on age but life circumstances. Many people in the workforce nowdays are required to be able to use the internet. It's hard or maybe even intimidating to use a new technology and unless forced by work one may not take up the challenge.
ReplyDeleteI am fascinated that you found someone in the older generation who frequently uses the internet. All of the older people I know and interact with never talk about how the internet is used at their jobs so it remains a mystery to me if they use it. And when you talk about how the older generation is more comfortable I was also shocked. But then I thought that our generation is worried about stuff that happens on the internet meanwhile the older generations fell like they have nothing to fear.
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