Disruptive Technology
This post is made possible with support from AARP’s Disrupt Aging. All opinions are my own.
On the first day of my first post-college job, my boss pointed me to Lotus Software manuals stacked two feet high next to my bulky new computer and said, “Start reading.”
It was 1988, the days when you still trudged across campus to the single “Computer Center” and fired up the revolutionary boxy beige Mac Plus computers to do your homework, when landing a roommate who had an electric typewriter was still cause for celebration, when you pondered why hard plastic squares were called “floppy” disks.
I had landed that first job at an IT consulting company in Germany on the strength of my German fluency, not because I had any idea of what IT Consulting even meant. Our clients were large German banks and manufacturers whose IT investments ran into the millions of Deutschmarks. Theoretically I was in their marketing department, but in a small company, I soon learned, everyone does everything, including programming.
Two years later I found myself sitting on the floor inside a storage area of our booth at a gigantic German computer convention, writing code alongside the “real” programmers. Meanwhile other, less tech-savvy members of the marketing team demonstrated features of our software that was literally being written while potential buyers watched. We’d crack open the closet door and whisper, “You can do geographic filtering now!” or “Don’t click on ‘Search’ for a second, we’re compiling back here!’” and “If you click ‘Filter,’ you will get the Blue Screen of Death!”
Getting thrown into the deep end of the tech pool at a young age was a harrowing experience in many ways, but I would never, ever trade it. Because it taught me a life lesson that allows me to disrupt aging in an important way: I still love learning new technology. That first job taught me that you can always find a way to figure it out, and it’s highly unlikely you’re going to break things in the process. If you’re in the AARP demographic, you’ve also bounced back from a computer crash or two, and you know life goes on.
This “older people can’t learn new tech” myth is such a load of horse crap. Those of us in Generation X literally grew up alongside Apple Computer, were the first generation of Atari players, and envied the kids lucky enough to have one of those early, brick-sized cell phones; we’ve been on the leading edge of personal computer technology our whole lives.
Our Baby Boomer older siblings feel just as frustrated about being dismissed as tech no-know-hows. According to a study done in the UK by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson on “The Elastic Generation” of women between the ages of 53-72, almost three quarters of the participants “hate the way their generation is patronized when it comes to technology.” Sixty percent of respondents say they find tech “fascinating.”
But it’s easy to glom on to this notion of self-identifying as “too old for technology.” That’s how I avoided Snapchat forever. Then one day I put on my big girl pants and forced myself to get an account. After a few months I dropped off – not because I didn’t understand the technology, but because I do, and see no need for it in my life. On the other hand, when I took a headfirst dive into podcasting and all the related technological underpinnings last year, I had the opposite response – where had it been all my life?! (Oh, right. Not invented yet.) If I hadn’t learned the Zencastr recording tool and the Blubrry podcast hosting platform and the Audacity editing app, do you really think I’d be chatting with MTV icons from my teenage years like Martha Quinn and Kathy Valentine? No. No, I certainly would not.
Learning new technology isn’t always easy – but those bulky Lotus manuals have been replaced by a million YouTube videos and Facebook user groups where helpful people have asked and answered your question a million times before. You are only ever one Google search away from an answer.
A recent study by Dropbox found that compared to Millennials, older workers use just as much technology but actually feel less stressed by it. The author’s explanation for the counter-intuitive finding rings true to me: the younger you are, the more likely you’ve always had “an app for that.” Those of us who remember those cross-campus marches to the computer center, the miracles that were the first fax machines, and the hernia you gave yourself trying to carry your first “laptop” computer on a business trip are likely to have a lot more patience when technology doesn’t work right.
Or to put it another way, the day I get “old” is the day I’m too jaded to delight in the Mac and Cheese delivery app on my iPhone.
Learn more about AARP’s initiative to Disrupt Aging When Life Gives You Lemmas
