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Originally Posted by elSicomoro
Today, I blew the minds of a group of old men by advising them that they can get the stuff they used to get in Playboy on the Internet for free. I then amazed some of them even further by explaining Wifi to them.
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In college, I took a really stupid class on the "digital divide," i.e. the inequalities inherent among social groups with and without ready access to the internet. (The subject itself has the potential to be interesting, but this particular course wasn't.) One of the projects was to volunteer in a computer class at the local senior center. This guy in his 50s would teach the 20-minute lesson to a room full of 70- and 80-year-olds, and then the college kids would walk around helping anyone who was having trouble.
The teacher was mostly clueless about modern computer use himself, as he hadn't been a professional programmer since the 70s. But he was volunteering his free time, and the level of the old people was "how do I use a mouse?" so it was okay. But he was trying to get them to do things like use Outlook to manage their appointments (because, you know, retirees have so many important business meetings to attend,) and put "fun stationary" backgrounds in their emails. The moment he left the room, we began a polite but firm mutiny, informing everyone that actually, their grandkids would
not appreciate it if they sent emails with graphics, and would be more likely to delete them.
Instead, one of the college guys suggested somewhat loudly to his old person that there was a way to clear his browsing history--say, if he wanted to buy his wife a birthday present without ruining the surprise. And for the first time, the class was very interested. Thus, we taught them all how to hide their porn searches. It ended up being a nice community service project after all.