Meet the wired retired

Wired, retired and so hip it hurts

4 August 2007

Oldies have taken to the digital age, says Amelia Torode, and so have their grandchildren. It’s the middle-aged professionals who fear and resent it

Earlier this year they got a swish black 80GB iPod that they connected to their Flickr account. My heavy first-generation iPod looked a little old and grubby in comparison. Not only could their shiny new iPod house pictures of their grandchildren, but they could carry around all the classical CDs that they had ripped on to their computer and they could download video podcasts for free. Now avid podcast subscribers, they watch everything from foreign language courses to guided trips around art galleries to French political debates. Embarrassingly, despite working in the digital industry, I have only ever listened to one podcast, Ricky Gervais.

Finally they decided that it was time that their own mother, 78, joined the digital revolution. She is now the proud owner of a brand new Mac. She has recently become a dab hand at instant messaging with her great-grandchildren. She thinks it is the best present she has ever had. It was such a cool computer that we had to go and buy an identical one for ourselves.

Could it be that the wired retired are the new digital trailblazers?

Not only does this demographic group have the money to invest in new technology, they also have the time to invest in understanding how to use it and, perhaps most importantly of all, they have a compelling reason to use it — their grandchildren.

So who are the modern-day Luddites?

We can be proud that our young people are not Luddites. Those under the age of 24 constantly astound me with their level of technology knowledge even if they don’t consider themselves to be ‘techie’. Teens and tweens happily hack and modify their mobile phones, ‘modding’, getting them to do things that even the engineers did not envisage. They all seem to know basic HTML web-coding, not because they are desperately interested in coding per se but because it allows them to pimp their MySpace page. They are downloading American movies and TV shows for free from sites like BitTorrent and Alluc months before they are released here and they consider it absolutely bizarre that anyone would choose to access a site like iTunes and actually pay for music.