Are old people ready for the digital conversion?

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:02:09 +0100, "Bill Wright"
wrote:


"Colin Stamp" wrote in message
.. .
Oh boy what a game it's going to be when we start to need residential
care!
We're all totally addicted to motor cars, Sky HD, and the net and every
other gismo we can get our hands on, so those places are going to have to
upgrade their facilities quite a lot!


The trouble is, the people running the places probably won't be
interested in any of that old-fashioned crap...

No, the point is, my generation has grown up to expect new gadgets coming
along all the time, so when it suits us we'll adopt them.

I hope so, but it might only apply to gadgets that bear some
similarity to gadgets we've come across in the past. Something
completely alien may well leave us cold, even if it does offer some
benefit to us - after all, we never needed it before...

Cheers,

Colin.

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:44:14 +0100, Colin Stamp
wrote in
:

Could be. I've no idea what the scale of the problem might be. I'm
just here desperately defending my position on the correlation between
old-age and technophobia...

Perhaps you should be asking if young people are more likely to accept
without question change for the sake of change or change introduced by
those who will profit from it at the expense of those on whom it is
imposed.

Perhaps older people consider that they have little enough time left and
do not want to waste it on change introduced for someone else's benefit.

Perhaps older people have seen good design and know that a lot of modern
technology does not have it where younger people do not have that
experience and are not aware that it is possible to be so much better.

--
Owen Rees
[one of] my preferred email address[es] and more stuff can be
found at http://www.users.waitrose.com/~owenrees/index.html

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:44:18 +0100, Colin Stamp
wrote in
:

I think the wooliness of the word "technophobia" is leading us astray
here. What you describe isn't what I had in mind. My technophobe
wouldn't be blindly afraid or dismissive of anything technical, just
afraid of having to deal directly with it at much more than a
superficial level. For example, they might happily drive a car with
sat-nav installed, but they would continue to use paper maps to
navigate.

To me that suggests wisdom and experience rather than technophobia.
Those who blindly trust sat-nav are more likely to end up in deep
trouble that those who know how to read maps and to navigate using them.

--
Owen Rees
[one of] my preferred email address[es] and more stuff can be
found at http://www.users.waitrose.com/~owenrees/index.html

"Owen Rees" wrote in message
...
For example, they might happily drive a car with
sat-nav installed, but they would continue to use paper maps to
navigate.

To me that suggests wisdom and experience rather than technophobia.
Those who blindly trust sat-nav are more likely to end up in deep
trouble that those who know how to read maps and to navigate using them.

Absolutely. The satnav is an aid to navigation, nothing more. I like to plan
my route on a map, then feed it into the satnav. All the satnav does is read
it out.

It's barmy to rely entirely on a satnav.

Bill

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:35:10 +0100, Owen Rees
wrote:

To me that suggests wisdom and experience rather than technophobia.
Those who blindly trust sat-nav are more likely to end up in deep
trouble

Or even deep water, as regularly featured in the news!

that those who know how to read maps and to navigate using them.

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:44:05 +0100, Colin Stamp
wrote:

No matter how much you try to pretend to take offence, I haven't said
anything more derogatory about elderly people than if I'd noted that
many of them have difficulty climbing the stairs, for example.

Are you now trying to claim I imagined ...

On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:07:37 +0100, Colin Stamp
wrote:

That there will, but if you plot a scatter chart of age against
confusion, I bet you'll see a strong correlation.

That is ageism.

Try this experiment, in the above quotes, replace ...
1) "old people" or "elderly people" with "blacks" or "women"
2) "climbing the stairs" with "doing a decent day's work" or "parking
a car"
3) "age" with "race" or "sex"
4) "confusion" with "intelligence" (or leave it in)
.... and see how they read then.

You may think that you're being rational, but you're not. In fact,
you're not even getting as far as thinking, stereotyping is not being
arsed to think.

Perhaps that was it, I can't remember the details now.

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:29:07 +0200, J G Miller
wrote:

The EURO coins which are most easily confused are the One EURO
and TWO EURO coins, as the Two EURO coin is not significantly larger.

Java Jive wrote:
Perhaps that was it, I can't remember the details now.

If you want an example of a messed up currency in terms of coin size vs face
value, look no further than our own !

--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

In article , Colin Stamp
wrote:
On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:06:18 +0100, Jim Lesurf
wrote:

I'm afraid there's no rules on this.

Actually, if you choose to post in a technical newsgroup, there are.
The default method in technology and science is to base your ideas on
evidence collected by an experimental/scientific process which allows
that evidence to be assessed for how reliable it may be. :-)

My evidence has been collected over the course of my life, by chance
encounters with other people of all ages. Not at-all scientific, as you
say, but better than nothing.

The problems are contained in your use of the word "evidence" and your
final phrase "...better than nothing".

Your "evidence" may simply not have been collected in a way that makes it
more than worthless, or simply misleading. People could use much the same
basis as you give for all kinds of beliefs in invisible fairies. Saying it
is "better than nothing" is another opinion presented as if it were a fact.
Might be far worse than "nothing" if it makes you conclusion twaddle, or
causes you to denegrate or upset others for zero reason.


Being my own experience, I'm rather attached to it of course, but I'm
not above being convinced that I've been wrong all these years - it has,
believe it or not, happened before...

I appreciate the sentiment of your latter statements above. Alas it does
seem to conflict with your approach in what you write elsewhere.

In essence you have simply presented your personal beliefs as if they were
true in reality. In doing so, you imply one group of people have inferior
ability to another. This is may be described by a term like 'bigotry' or
'prejudice' or '-ism'. My own experience is that I have encountered
people doing this in a varity of ways with assertions like, "I have
met a number of distingushing property of subgroup and..." followed
by assertions applied to them as a group. This sometimes is associated
with variants of, "Although some of my best friends are same property
so this isn't property prejudice." Presumably in the belief that this
second assertion somehow makes the previous one sensible.

Problem is, that the assertions may simply be opinions chosen as a
result of error or (unconscious?) bias. e.g. a selection effect where
you noticed those who fitted your assumption and overlooked those
who did not.



I'm completely happy that my view is reasonable. I'm even happy to
give you my reasons for holding that view if you want to inspect and
dissect them (I see, by your rampant snippage that you've largely
declined to do so, by the way). I'm also ready to change that view if
you or anyone else can come up with a convincing argument, but I
don't feel obliged to provide you with "scientific studies" any more
than I expect them from you.

Your point seems to be that you will believe whatever you fancy

Have to stop you there - Not "what I fancy", but what my experience
so-far has led me to believe.

Problem as above.

unless someone comes up with evidence to the contrary. I doubt that is
a particularly reliable method. It is pretty much the same approach as
those who argue for invisible fairies at the bottom of the garden on
the basis that no-one can "prove" they don't exist.

If they have actual experience of invisible fairies at the bottom of
their garden, then they are fully correct to believe in them, and to
require rational explanations for the "fairy effects" before they are
convinced otherwise.

But if - like you - they can offer no assessable evidence or show that they
have even bothered to collect any that might stand up?...

When discussing technical or scientific ideas the normal approach is
not to assume something without the ability to check if it is
*supported* by evidence, and that the evidence can be assessed for
reliability. Indeed, from Occam, the idea is to remove any assumptions
which you don't actually need to explain what you observe.

Let's just say I have formulated a hypothesis based on my observations.
If anyone wants to dis-prove that hypothesis, then I'll listen carefully
and make up my mind based what they say.

Unless you first can show some evidence to point to your hypothesis being
anything more than a random opinion on your part no-one else has to take
what you say as having any worth. We can all make up an infinite number of
hypotheses consistent with our personal ignorance. That does not mean
anyone else has to take them as being worth considering.


This is also not a normal approach in science and technology. More
common perhaps in debating societies where the aim is to score points
by the end of the evening. :-)

Putting forward hypotheses and listening to any resulting criticism
seems quite reasonable to me.

Which, alas, confirms what I wrote above.


Also, previously you wrote....

On 18 Oct in uk.tech.digital-tv, Colin Stamp
wrote:
On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:10:48 +0100, Java Jive wrote:


Not *just* technology, but technology none-the-less. However, I
wasn't particularly talking about dementia. Elderly people who still
have all their marbles will still have a higher percentage of
technophobes amongst their numbers.

Your assessable evidence for this assertion of 'factoid' is?.... :-)

Nothing assessable by anyone other than myself ) I reckon it's fairly
obvious from the context that I was stating my opinion and nothing more.

Your "nothing more" here seems to overlook the way you presented your
personal opinions as if merely stating them made them reliable accounts
of reality. i.e. Opinions stated as 'facts'. The distinction between
opinion and fact is a fairly important one, particularly when you are
making sweeping comments about entire groups of people.

As you say, though, it should be easy enough for readers to spot when you
were presenting your opinions in this way.

FWIW I have no idea if older people differ as a group from younger in terms
of 'technophobia'. I suspect it depends what you mean. So I have no reason
to say your claims must be wrong. But you seem to be making them on a
declared basis that makes them functionally indistingushably from prejuduce,
and/or using terms so vaguely as to be misleading or meaningless.

Slainte,

Jim

--
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On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:44:18 +0100, Colin Stamp
wrote:

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:58:07 +0200, J G Miller
wrote:

On Sunday, October 19th, 2008, at 00:53:07h +0100, Colin Stamp claimed:
And the scatter chart I suggested will then show no correlation
between age and technophobia - just as it should.

Ain't necessarily so.

You have failed to take into account the following points --

1) Do technophobes have a tendency to die at a younger age
eg we did not bother with MRI scans when I were a lad,
so why should I bother with one now?

I think the wooliness of the word "technophobia" is leading us astray
here. What you describe isn't what I had in mind. My technophobe
wouldn't be blindly afraid or dismissive of anything technical, just
afraid of having to deal directly with it at much more than a
superficial level. For example, they might happily drive a car with
sat-nav installed, but they would continue to use paper maps to
navigate.


2) As people age do they become technophobic
eg we used punched tape in my day, so why should I learn
how to burn Blu-Ray disks?

That's more the group I'm thinking of. Today's luddite might well have
been yesterday's whizz-kid, and no less intelligent for it. These
people shouldn't skew the result of my hypothetical scatter chart
though. It should still give a good idea of whether or not there is a
correlation between age *now* and ability to cope with DSO.


(Silly examples, but I hope you get the point.)

Incidentally, it seems to me (entirely without any scientific
empirical data) that there is a tendency for older women
to embrace new technology which their husbands ignore.

And I seem to recall that the DVD revolution (over VCR) was
powered by women consumers, not men, rushing out to buy the product.

Now, I don't know about that...

Cheers,

Colin.

I'm around mature citizens in my job (I take the old buggers to
hospital appointments) and the majority of them have mobile phones and
seem to know how to use them. OK, they do tend to punch in the number
they require rather than using the memory, but nether the less they
use them with no problems.

Marky P.