trendpreneur

I’ve been gently pushing my family into new, uncharted technological waters for as long as I can remember. My father proudly announced to me last Christmas that he was on Facebook, my mother’s a level 70 shaman and my grandparents made their first video call via Skype today.

You know something’s mainstream when your family starts using it. However, there’s a common theme to the above three examples — my father got Facebook because colleagues at work suggested it, then didn’t use it. My mother primarily started playing WoW to get closer to me, and my grandparents are using Skype to keep in touch with their son who’s abroad.

While this theme might apply for many other families, at some point down the generations using online services to connect with people becomes a matter of discovery, not re-connecting. At what point does this change? Is it a matter of your socio-cultural background, job and technological aptitude dictating whether you poke around on Facebook for old school friends, or is it simply an age thing? When do chatty older women cross the line from being friendly in WoW to being gregarious? Of course, no answers, but it’s interesting to think about based on observations.

On the same theme, someone recently remarked to me that ‘older people’ running businesses didn’t really understand the Web. I’m not sure this is a true or fair generalisation — it’s more people who are fairly hidebound, especially those used to corporate environments and procedures, and who are doing just fine without making an effort online.

Do things need to change? In some ways, yes; people are increasingly looking for information online, of course, and some things will effectively cease to exist in the eye of the customer if they don’t have a presence there. However, not every business is in this boat; my local corner shop doesn’t exactly need to have a Twitter account, although it’d be useful to look up its opening hours, and something that caters to less internet-savvy customers is probably communicating just fine with its desired audience already, although an online presence might expand its customer base.

There is a need, and it’s being filled by various initiatives, to convert ‘offline’ information such as opening hours, sales, events etc to online information — should I have to serendipitously walk past Waterstones to find out about a signing, or should the hive mind of the Internet tell me? Should I navigate endless directory listings to find something that is close to me, sells newspapers, and open at 6 on a Sunday, or should I simply leave the house? Strange concept, but sometimes the old ways are the best.

It just intrigues me that my grandparents are tech-savvy enough to have video calls with their children, fire emails to and fro, scan in images and print out Christmas cards, write and print letters, and yet they simply don’t use the Web at all. My grandmother would rather phone someone up than use an online helpdesk or shopping site, and she’s blissfully unaware of the nest of dangers when it comes to shopping online simply because she doesn’t do it. If she wants to find opening hours, she gets out the Yellow Pages — if I do, I look online. That’s a generation gap for sure, but what happens to more traditional businesses when even my grandmother learns to Google?