Aging, living and the technological age

I spent some time visiting old friends of the family, my grandmother's friends, people who get extremely upset if I do not call the moment I land regardless of my purposes being here. Many of these people are between 50 and 90 years old and I happen to know a number of them where taking time to visit is a requirement. Oddly enough even in these, largely reminiscent conversations technology emerges as a curious actor. Everyone, including my grandmother's 87-year-old friends, owns cell phones. They all know about the Internet and marvel at the technology. Curiously, for these grandmothers and grandfathers, the internet is where you find people if you somehow lost contact with them some other way... I have heard several stories of being found and expressions of the fascination of such technological access to people...

The cell phone of course is the most important of these technological inventions, where the ability to be connected fits a huge need beacuse the times are more dangerous and connection to friends and family has become (or is seen as) that much more important. The internet is present even when not directly used, the secondary and third order effects imminently visible even in informal conversations over tea with friends of my grandmother who had never seen a computer but know about this new thing and at times even experience the echo of its effects. For example, one 85-year-old's brother found their address and then initiated contact - the original search conducted through internet. To many of these people, the internet seems unreachable financially but imminently usable and important regardless.

Slightly younger people (50s and 60s) of course use the internet, beginning with email and then discovering informational sites and odnoklassniki... the prices and access of course are limited... but the potential is there... riussian resources are availble and in some limited way the reach is expanded. the news are everywhere though and information in confusing. In the end it is a matter of whom you trust to get information and here, it is mostly about people who are nearby... the Internet is a source... but it is important as a novelty, as a way to find things out, but confirmation always comes from those near by because the local expertise is far more palpably present. For the older generation, the Internet is a wonder, a way to connect, to reconnect with people who have left... people who were and still are important as memories and as ties that still mean something. The older people get here, it seems, the more they turn back to their initial ties from 'back then' when things were simpler, when age and health were more manageable and when life was at least more straightforward. In the confusion of changes, the older generation is trying to hold on to the past through the technologies of the present.