My grandmother jumped early on the technology bandwagon, relatively speaking. She had a computer almost as soon as my family did, although she used hers for word processing instead of Wing Commander II. (It was still, however, a computer, which made it more entertaining than socializing with my family when I was young; I used to spend hours in the basement going through the WordPerfect special-character alt codes by trial and error while my parents and grandparents chatted upstairs. I was easily amused by all things electronic).
My grandmother never exactly mastered the concepts behind computers - file organization and management, updating software, installing and uninstalling programs - but she learned how to use WordPerfect and how to respond to emails and how to check cbc.ca. For a while, she hired a local computer technician - Dave, no last name that I ever heard - to tutor her and to fix whatever problems cropped up, but after spending more on him than she spent on the actual computer, she stopped and let things decay naturally for a while.
Then she started calling me, to fix various things. It was easy enough work for me: I got her off Internet Explorer/Outlook onto Firefox and Thunderbird, uninstalled a bunch of system-clogging software she never used, stuck in an extra 256MB of RAM from my old computer, and generally got her old Dell humming along as well as could be expected of a Celeron 1.3GHz.
Then, she decided that my grandfather should have a computer to type on. He's getting quite old, and finds it difficult to write things out by hand; when he speaks, he fumbles for words. She thought a basic computer - a glorified typewriter, basically - would let him get back into writing, which he used to enjoy. So, I helped them pick out a bottom-of-the-line Dell, and when it arrived, I got it all set up for them last Saturday morning.
When I tried explaining to him how to perform basic tasks like opening a word processor or saving a file, though, I was made very aware of the enormous gulf in comprehension that exists between someone who grew up with computers like I did, and someone who grew up with paper and pens. I remember using old UNIX workstations in the library at Codrington Public School, playing Offshore Fishing and some math dungeon crawl using a trackball. I've learned as I've gone along, but computers have always been part of my life, as familiar and omnipresent as math textbooks and calculators.
Not so for my grandfather.
"OK, so, to open the writing program, just move the mouse over to the left and double click on the Writer icon..."
As soon as I heard myself, I realized how strange it must sound to someone else. What's a mouse? Why is it called that? How do you move it? What's a program, and how is it different from Windows? How do you double click? All the questions laughed about on tech support humour websites ("CD player? I thought it was a coffee cup holder!") suddenly seemed to be less funny than they used to be. Not everyone understands computers the way those of us who grew up with them do. No more than I understand the workings of my car engine.
More later.