the internet and its various uses for various ages.

So this week we were asked to interview 3 people of varying ages about how they use the internet. This was a relatively fun exercise especially when it got to the older generations. For this assignment I interviewed my 21 year old tech savvy brother, my mom who has requested I don’t give her age but she fits the second demographic, and finally my grandmother who was my favorite interview. Ill start with my brother.
My brother uses his computer for pretty much everything and when he isn’t near it he uses his blackberry to go on the internet, there isn’t a moment in the day where I don’t see Brad either updating his Facebook status, browsing amazon or Ebay, or watching downloaded movies on his computer. He told me that he also uses it to communicate with his friends that are studying abroad via Skype. He says he is comfortable with communicating on the internet and this is made obvious by our abbreviated conversations with remarks like LOL, LMAO, BRB and many others. he wont admit to being addicted to technology but he is just like many of us in the world and it has changed how his life works, he lives in an apartment with no T.V or cable and uses various sites to keep up with the shows he enjoys. My brother likes the internet because it makes things easier for him, keeping in touch with friends to shopping he says that we are lucky that we get this tool to use but he does agree that we may exploit it too much.
Next is my mom who frequently complains about the internet and tells stories of a simpler time when it didn’t exist. This always makes me laugh. My mom says that she uses the internet for 3 things, Email, Shopping, and doing money affairs like deposits from one account to another and paying bills. Mom said the main ones are for emailing family about important things and doing the bills. She says that the internet has made it a lot easier to pay bills on time and know exactly where money is going and to who. My mom says she has no problem communicating on the internet but when she gets emails from relatives with abbreviations in them she turns to my brother to decipher them. My mom sees the internet as a place where both good and bad things happen but she mostly hears of the bad things like identity theft and people looking for kids on the internet. Mom has a very skewed view on the internet and doesn’t understand why we depend on it so much.
Now my favorite interview because my grandma is very opinionated about the internet and today youth using it. First off my grandma uses the internet for one specific thing and it is Ebay. Every time I visit she has something new she bought from ebay and usually its either a new piece of Mariners or Packers Memorabilia or some gadget she saw on TV. My grandma is well trained in the art of the Bid, here’s the problem though, she can never remember her passwords so she has sticky notes all over the computer reminding her of the different passwords she has on the computer. That is all my grandma uses it for, other than that she is very old fashioned, she would rather listen to the Mariners games on the radio than watch them on TV, she loves Dave Niehaus. She also sends snail mail rather than email and has never owned a cellular phone. Her opinion about the internet is the same opinion about TV and Video Games; it is just another “Idiot Box”. She often tells stories about her upbringing and how my generation is lucky and over privileged, but that doesn’t stop her from sending my youngest cousin to watch TV so he’ll stop crying.
I didn’t learn anything new but I did gather some opinions for myself. I realized that the older generations do t like the internet because it can get really confusing, the most common complaint I heard from my mom and my grandma is that everyday it seems like there is something new that needs to be clicked and that the internet should have some sort of simplification system installed to it so that people will stop getting confused. But I think even then they would still complain about it.