I have a hypothesis that I’m staring down the path my boomer relatives took. New technology kept not being worth it to them, so they never put in the work to learn it, and every time they fell a little further behind in the language of the internet – UI conventions, but also things like the interpersonal grammar of social media – which made the next new thing that much harder to learn. Eventually, learning new tech felt insurmountable to them no matter how big the potential payoff.
There’s also the explore-exploit tradeoff: the younger you are, the more you should explore and accumulate new knowledge; whereas the older you are, the more knowledge you’ve already accumulated. Insofar as you expect additional information to only have marginal value, you should mostly exploit your existing knowledge.
So from that perspective, I’d say what these older relatives need is not so much better instruction, but a genuinely excellent & strongly motivating reason to learn some specific new thing. For instance, is learning how to use Youtube really worth their time and energy, when they have a perfectly functional TV in their living room?
I feel that way about lots of technology which only seems like a shiny new thing without enduring value. (And lots of it is even profoundly negative, e.g. I would be much better off if so much of the Internet wasn’t so incredibly addictive.)
In contrast, I do consider a small subset of technology and related skills as total game-changers, e.g. I’m sooooo much faster at touch-typing than at hand-writing that it affects the ways I think and communicate. Similarly, I tried voice commands on smartphones a few years ago, and was just thoroughly unimpressed by the quality back then; but it’s very obvious that this tool will eventually become good enough (or has already?) that it will become another game-changer in my ability to take notes, and to think, when I’m not at my PC.
From the outside, it does sound admittedly hard to tell the difference between shiny vs. game-changing technology.
On a more personal level, however, that part is easier. For instance, our family’s WhatsApp chat group would be a powerful incentive for my older relatives to learn how to use smartphones and this app, if they weren’t already fluent with technology; and similarly, there was talk among my relatives of uploading photos of their babies (/ grandchildren) to a privately shared Google Drive, which is again the kind of thing that would strongly motivate the grandparents to learn about that technology if they didn’t already know it.
There’s also the explore-exploit tradeoff: the younger you are, the more you should explore and accumulate new knowledge; whereas the older you are, the more knowledge you’ve already accumulated. Insofar as you expect additional information to only have marginal value, you should mostly exploit your existing knowledge.
So from that perspective, I’d say what these older relatives need is not so much better instruction, but a genuinely excellent & strongly motivating reason to learn some specific new thing. For instance, is learning how to use Youtube really worth their time and energy, when they have a perfectly functional TV in their living room?
I feel that way about lots of technology which only seems like a shiny new thing without enduring value. (And lots of it is even profoundly negative, e.g. I would be much better off if so much of the Internet wasn’t so incredibly addictive.)
In contrast, I do consider a small subset of technology and related skills as total game-changers, e.g. I’m sooooo much faster at touch-typing than at hand-writing that it affects the ways I think and communicate. Similarly, I tried voice commands on smartphones a few years ago, and was just thoroughly unimpressed by the quality back then; but it’s very obvious that this tool will eventually become good enough (or has already?) that it will become another game-changer in my ability to take notes, and to think, when I’m not at my PC.
From the outside, it does sound admittedly hard to tell the difference between shiny vs. game-changing technology.
On a more personal level, however, that part is easier. For instance, our family’s WhatsApp chat group would be a powerful incentive for my older relatives to learn how to use smartphones and this app, if they weren’t already fluent with technology; and similarly, there was talk among my relatives of uploading photos of their babies (/ grandchildren) to a privately shared Google Drive, which is again the kind of thing that would strongly motivate the grandparents to learn about that technology if they didn’t already know it.