Meet the wired retired

Wired, retired and so hip it hurts

Amelia Torode

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

So the real Digital Luddites lie, I believe, somewhere in between our web-saturated youth and the wired retired. It’s the busy professionals, too frazzled from family, too washed out from work, who are simply too tired and scared to engage and explore new digital technologies. They feel they have enough technology to contend with during working hours to let it interfere with their leisure time.

Laughing with dinner-party guests about their profound technical inability, these people wear their Digital Luddite badge with faux-shame. It’s a sorry state of affairs. But just as cracks started to appear in the original Luddite movement, I think that cracks are starting to show here too. The most seismic crack could well be Facebook.

When the Facebook craze hit I invited all my friends to join. Well maybe not quite all my friends. One good friend, actively vocal in her loathing of technology, fell off the list. I simply did not have the energy to sell her on social networks. Every time in the past we had talked about sites like this she made her feelings abundantly clear.

Last week I received an email from her. Apparently she had received close to 40 Facebook invitations. Grudgingly she was giving in.

‘You win,’ she simply wrote. There is hope.

Amelia Torode is head of digital strategy, VCCP; www.ameliatorode.typepad.com.