Child's Play

A small disaster may soon befall the Straits Times. My father is beginning to master surfing and email. The online edition of the Straits Times invites readers to send their spontaneous comments through buttons provided at the end of many articles. For someone like my dad, who has decided views on many things, this is a dream come true. He can now shoot off letters to the editor at the click of a mouse, article by article. On a good day, I'm sure he won't stop at one.

My father has always had an interest in gadgets. One of my earliest memories is of an open-spool tape recorder that lay at the centre of my mother's complaints. Apparently my father bought it around the time I was born. It was state-of-the-art then (which is another way of reminding you how old I am now). She never understood how that thing could be priority at a time when extra expenses were in sight with the arrival of a new baby – me.

But an abiding interest in gadgets, and a steady accumulation of them through the years, has also been a "plus". He has more or less kept pace with the bewildering changes of the last 50 years, through one technological revolution after another. He doesn't feel left behind, unlike many of his age. And now with the increasing talk of the internet, far from feeling that he's too old to learn -- a very common attitude -- his impulse is that he wants to be on board.

Over the last year or so, various pieces have come together. With the help of my sister, he now has his own computer corner, with a notebook, an extra keyboard, modem and printer. Collecting hardware is one thing, learning to use them, however, is another.

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Very often when we approach a new piece of equipment, we find it to be a lot easier to figure out when we have some familiarity with the previous model. There's a certain logic with how the buttons are laid out and what they do, that is carried over from old to new. For example, on my computer, when I want to play a music CD, I get a picture of a CD player on my screen. The track buttons, the volume control, etc, resemble those on the physical CD player in my other room. Instinctively, I know how to operate my CD player on my computer. But if someone missed out on physical CD players, he would be stumped by the virtual CD player on the screen.

It is costly trying to keep up with every step of technological evolution. Besides the financial cost of buying new stuff when the old is still working fine, there is the hassle of migrating over to the new. So most people stay with what they are comfortable with, and rouse themselves to change only when the old has broken down, or when they are too embarrassed with the jalopy. But the longer they stick with the old, the harder is the transition to the current technology.

Then again, "old" is a relative term. For most young people, the "old technology" to be junked means anything with last year's date on it. Their elders stick with the tried and tested for ten years at a stretch, skipping two or three stages in the technological march. As a result, it is easier for the young to climb onto each new technology bandwagon as it arrives. This is certainly the pattern with the internet in Singapore; it is generally the kids and the twenty-somethings who are connected. Over fifty, and people ask, "what are we doing trying to get onto the internet?" My father and I were confronted with this expectation in a rather amusing way when we tried to set up an account for him.

We had just loaded the free-surfing software from Starhub into his computer. The next step was to register his account, which involved filling in a personal profile. Among the questions were his age and sex. Then, the survey asked for his occupation. He couldn't find "retired" among the options. Obviously, Starhub didn't expect retirees to sign on. Ageism! The nearest he could find was "homemaker". So there you have it: a nearly-80-year-old male homemaker.

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Stories abound about how kids take to the internet like fish to water. My sister recently sent an email to my father saying how her 3-year-old boy has figured out how to do things with a click of the mouse she never thought possible.

Conversely, older adults are known to find it harder-going when learning new tricks. Why is this so? Different reasons have been offered: "more set in their ways", "slower reflexes", "greater fear of failure".

I think the root cause lies in being wiser, or rather, the flip side of being wiser. It's yet another example of the timeless dictum, that being human, each one of our strengths is in itself also a weakness.

The older we get, the better we are at working out 5, 10 steps ahead, the consequences of our actions. We do it so well, it becomes second nature to us. We have different terms for the same phenomenon – the older are less impulsive, they are more understanding, they are more experienced (meaning they can better predict what will happen next). But put them in an environment that is so new to them that they can't foresee 10 steps ahead, and they are like fish out of water. It's a very uncomfortable environment.

Thus we hear these questions as we try to teach the older adults how to operate computers, "Hang on, what do I do next? Then what's going to happen? After that, what will I get?" There's an anxious need to know exactly what will happen and what to do, many steps ahead.

Computers, alas, are multi-functional machines. Firstly, at every stage, there are manifold possibilities. Secondly, actions and responses do not quite flow in a linear way. Sometimes the controls loop back! If you want to remember, at every stage, all the possibilities, and then the next stage, all the new possibilities again, the 'options tree' will become so complex so quickly, the human brain cannot cope anymore.

You cannot approach computers the way you would approach a task – do A, then do B, then do C. You have to approach them they way you approach play. At any stage, there are any number of possibilities; you just have to reassess the situation and take it one step at a time. The trouble with humans is that as they grow older, they get better at handling tasks, but they forget how to play.

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It's a good thing that for my father, except for email, he doesn't have any tasks to do on his computer. It's back to play. I bookmarked a few portals on his browser, and a number of news sites, including CNN, the South China Morning Post, the Straits Times and BBC online. There is also Alistair Cooke's Letters from America, which he enjoys tremendously.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that online newspapers are wonderful learning arenas for adults. You can click here and click there, and chance upon interesting things. You don't have any particular destination -- in other words, no task objective. Hence, you're under no pressure, since there is no measure of "success" or "failure". But all the while that you're surfing, you're picking up, subconsciously, the navigational logic and the skills of the world-wide web.

Even in email, my father uses a web-based mail service, that it may feel like the same web environment. I've set it as his default page, so that he always gets an easy look at his mailbox every time he goes online. It's better than having to switch back and forth between an offline mail program, and a dialler.

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The problem is, none of his friends are online! Who is there to email (save the poor editor of the Straits Times)?

It's the network effect with a vengeance. The "network effect" is just nice name for a simple truth: a communications system is useless when few are connected to it; its usefulness grows exponentially as more people are linked up.

I wonder to what extent this absence of older people on the net is true in other countries. I suspect it isn't quite so clear-cut in countries with higher internet penetration such as the US. I have seen a few Americans and Australians in their sixties and beyond, online. Are they also considered exceptional in their countries? Probably much less so than Singapore.

Why is the receptivity of older folks to the internet different from country to country? Culture, language, educational levels of the older generation? These are obviously important factors. Would someone ponder about them please?  Me?  No, I just want to go play.

© Yawning Bread 

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