Everything Old is New Again.  Or to be more accurate, make that EveryONE Old is New Again.  In case you haven't heard (or haven't talked to your mother lately.  Shame on you.  Call your mother!  Now!), senior citizens are rocking the Internet.   

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that social networking among American internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled in the past year, from 22 percent in April 2009 to 42 percent in May 2010.  But wait.  It gets better.  For those ages 65 and older, use of social networking websites grew a whopping 100 percent. By comparison, the number of internet users between the ages of 18 - 29 who use social networking websites only rose by a mere 13 percent.  Big thumbs up for the AARP.   Big thumbs down for the demographics of the “Jersey Shore” audience.  Although come to think of it, there really isn’t a reason to give a thumbs up to ANYTHING that has to do with Jersey Shore.  But I digress.

"E-mail is still the primary way that older users maintain contact with friends, families and colleagues, but many older users now rely on social-network platforms to help manage their daily communications," explains Mary Madden, author of the Pew report. Older Americans are becoming increasingly computer literate, and that means they're also becoming more comfortable using the Internet. This has the potential to boost e-commerce, computer and gadget sales as well as subscriptions for high-speed Internet access among this population.   

While Apple doesn’t track age demographics of the folks who buy iPads, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that the iPad has become an incredibly popular “first computer” for many seniors.  Do you remember your first time? 

Industry experts say that part of that appeal is the user-friendliness and user-forgiveliness (Look, Ma!  I just made up a word!) of the iPad.  Its controls are highly intuitive, and that “panic button” on the bottom is very comforting to new adopters – if you get lost in the world of iPad (or worse, accidentally find yourself on Snookie’s Facebook page: “Snookie here!  Wanna know what I did today?  Ummm…me too.  I can’t remember.  Oh well. I guess I’ll just go shopping for more trashy clothes, and then get suckered punched in  a bar.”), just push that button, and you’re back at the home screen.

Well, alrighty then.  The Pew report is all well and good, but I wanted to put this theory to the acid test.  Or more precisely, to the Mother Test.  So I went out and got Mom an iPad.  Truth be told, I wasn’t expecting much.  This is a woman who still hasn’t completely figured out how to make a call on her cell phone: “I have to charge this thing?  Why?  I push what button and talk where?”

Imagine my amazement when we powered up the iPad.  First thing Mom did was to turn the iPad from portrait to landscape orientation, completely expecting the screen to flip into the proper perspective.  Which it obediently did.  “The print is larger this way, so it’s easier for me to read it,” explained Mom.  It wasn’t that anyone had told her that was an option – she just expected it to happen.

Next, she slid her finger along the unlock button, watched the various icons pop into place, and then used her fingers to expand the size of the icons so that she could decipher which one she wanted.  “I saw someone do that with their iPhone in a restaurant,” she said. 

Okay, I’m now figuring that I’m living out that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movie, and Mom’s corporeal form has been taken over by some techie geek from a distant galaxy.  Isn’t this the same person who still goes to the teller at the bank because the ATM is too complicated?

But within the hour, we had created an email account, zipped off a few emails (I LOVED the immediate responses from friends and relatives: ”WHO is this?  On email?  REALLY???”), and uploaded some photos.  It’s true.  The iPad’s intuitiveness is perfect for a first-time web surfer.  Hang 10, Mom!

Mom's on a roll, and I wanna see just how far we can ride this wave. 

First up, YouTube.  Amazing.  Within moments, Mom is scrolling through her favorite artists, tapping and clicking and streaming video.  We watch the Andrews Sisters belt out “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”  We hum along as the Glen Miller Orchestra strums out “In the Mood.” 

And with these videos, I discover something else unique to the newly initiated Senior Citizen YouTube fan base.   The video quality of these things SUCKS!  Shot on film and poorly transferred, these videos are using a miniscule amount of the iPad’s high def screen.  To me, the Andrews Sisters might as well be three large guys in WAC drag – their features are so indistinct and blurry that they could all have beards and mustaches for all I can tell.  Glenn Miller is a highly pixilated blob in a blue jacket, waving either arms, tentacles, or a baton in front of a room full of other pixilated blobs holding what are either musical instruments or weapons of mass destruction.   But Mom doesn’t care.  The music is great, she’s getting to pull up her favorite songs free and on demand – and she’s never seen streaming video before, so she doesn’t expect anything else.  It’s only the rest of us jaded, spoiled social media users who assume that we are going to be able to see every mole (real or cosmetic) on Katy Perry’s face in her “Teenage Dream” video.  Although come to think of it, it’s not her face that most people are looking at. But I digress.

Back to Mom and her iPad. 

Now I’m going for the Gold.  Time to introduce Mom to search engines.  And what better way to do so than to have her type in her own name?  Let’s mix education with narcissism. Hooray!

Pull up “Yahoo!”  Type in Mom’s name.  We both eagerly peer at the screen, as row after row of matches appear.  “Vivian Wu Naked!!!!”   “Vivian Wu nude photos” “Vivian Wu hot nude pix!”  Awkward.  Suddenly, I’m not having so much fun anymore.  Um….Mom…is there something that you want to tell me?   Come to think of it, I was WONDERING where you got the money for that new car…

But thankfully, Mom’s newfound internet skills did not end up revealing her affiliation with the world’s oldest profession.  Turns out that there is a popular contemporary Chinese actress who happens to share Mom’s name, and who a few years ago starred with Ewan McGregor in Peter Greenaway’s erotic drama, “The Pillow Book”.  Which solved one area of confusion but created an entirely new one.  Mom now wants to know how she can search for items that relate only to her, and not to just anyone with the same name.  Sorry, Mom.  The internet is great, but there are still things that just haven’t been figured out yet.

So from my own little qualitative experiment of one person, I can personally attest to the fact that the iPad is a great first computer for senior citizens who want to test the online waters.   And as good as that news is in terms of making the internet accessible to more people, the Pew report also found some sobering statistics about older folks and computer usage. Despite the rise in social networking activities, Pew's research found that seniors over 65 are among those least likely to have high-speed Internet access at home — less than one-third of them have broadband.

Access and adoption go hand-in-hand, and this is an area that we at ZeroDivide continue to focus many of our efforts.  We recently received two Federal Stimulus Funding grants to address this very issue – for more information on those grants, please visit: www.zerodivide.org

And don’t forget to call your mother.