For older people, being online can be a lifeline

So much of our lives are online nowadays. No matter who you’re dealing with, whether it’s your electricity supplier, the local council or maybe a community club you belong to, chances are they’ve said at some point to contact them by email, check their website or stay in touch through Facebook.

People rely on the internet so much you can be at a real disadvantage trying to stay in touch and up to date if you’re not also plugged into the various ways the internet is used to connect people.

The same is true in our personal lives. If you are online but have a friend or relative who isn’t, when you set up What’s App groups or a group email they miss out on so much. In my experience this is particularly true for elderly people who are often less confident of going online and who are often wary of doing something wrong and getting into trouble.

The problem though is that for many people getting online and getting used to how it all works just isn’t that simple. Most of us are used to mobile phones, both for calling and texting, and they’ve become a really handy way of staying in touch with our friends and family, but getting used to accessing your bank account or finding your way around websites on a phone can be daunting. Will you break your phone? Accidently delete your accounts or let in fraudsters? What is What’s App anyway?

Add to this the confusion about how to get online….mobile phones are only one way of accessing the internet! Laptops, PCs and tablets all work slightly differently and when someone is thinking about using the internet and social media all these options and the new words people use to talk about being online can be really off putting.

Because the internet has been around for a while now everyone assumes that we all have a level of knowledge and understanding of how it all works online which simply isn’t true for everyone.

What if I break the internet?

There’s no getting away from it - the internet is here to stay.

What we’ve seen over the last few years though has been how useful it all is. We particularly saw this when Covid hit and we were locked down and shielding. Using online shopping, chatting via Zoom calls, getting our news and relying more on emails to stay in touch became far more necessary than before - and presented a steep learning curve for many people. Who’d ever heard of Zoom before? See this feature on internet use take-up by older people during the pandemic to see what I mean.

But this necessity bred invention and throughout the pandemic lots of people realised just how brilliant online life can be.

When thinking about going online, my Mum once asked me “What if I break the internet?” I reassured her that this really isn’t possible and it made me think about just how little she understood about how life online works. She found adapting to new things a real challenge - especially getting her head around all the jargon and acronyms. She was particularly worried about breaking her phone and her tablet - expensive items that she didn’t want to ruin by doing something wrong online.

Needless to say that once she was up and running she found being online to be a real lifeline. She loved seeing her friends and family on Facebook, emailing, chatting, shopping…..there was no stopping her. Getting her off of her tablet became the new challenge for me and my family…..!

Helping my mum and friends get over these worries and helping them embrace all the wonders that the internet has to offer is why I decided to set up Senior Surf. I’m really looking forward to helping other elderly people get comfortable with life online and realising how freeing, interesting and just generally useful the internet and life online can be.

So if you have a mum, dad, grandfather or grandmother and they lack confidence with their smart phone, laptop or tablet, or you want to introduce your elderly parents to online banking... give me a call.