Came of Age Before Computers

This website looks at some issues faced by "COABC's". These are elders, often our parents, who find themselves isolated on the other side of the digital divide because they came of age before computers. Nancy Strider examines the impact on daily life that results from lack of skills, access – or interest – in electronic tools like computers, email, and cell phones. She also makes positive suggestions for using the internet itself to facilitate a more lively engagement in the face-to-face world.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Making friends with my shadow

This 5 1/2 minute video was made by a fellow student and friend, Genevieve Cloutier. She is in her twenties, and pointed out to me that younger people also struggle to maintain balance in regard to technology. She and I plan to do a documentary this summer to explore the topic more deeply. In the meantime she did this piece where I talked how the digital divide, culture jamming, this blog, and about the "duhhh" factor.

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One of my roles on Melanie’s project was video documentation, using my little digital camera. I made ”The Waldo Interview“. In the first two weeks it got over 2,700 hits. See the April 18, 2008 article.
When Melanie’s project first started getting media attention, I reworked a slide show I’d done as a class assignment into 1.5-minute video form called ”The Making of 'Where on Earth is Waldo' “. By the end of the month it had had 1500 hits. See the April 12, 2008 article.
I uploaded the 2-minute video "Shutdown Day - One Year Later" to YouTube on March 24, 2008, the anniversary of the 2007 event. By the end of April there had been over 5,750 views. I had two articles about Shutdown Day right after the first one, in March and April 2007. There are also two articles in March 2008.
In February 2008 I became one of the "Pirates of the Seabus". Here is a little video of just over a minute.
My playful 3-minute video "Disappeared Phone Booths", is embedded in a January 2008 article. The video stars two of my neighbours.
In a January 2008 article, my friend Cole tells a personal story in a 1.5-minute video called "Where have all the phonebooths gone?".
The video "Ready" takes just over a minute to unpack the fact that I lug a lot of electronics around. It is embedded in a December 2007 article.
Marlene Franks describes her experience getting telephone support for her computer in 2.5-minute video called "Bogged DownLoad". See the article in July 2007.
The first video I uploaded to YouTube was about my dad, a 1.5-minute one called "Fred's Bench". See the article in March 2007. In June 2007 I uploaded another one "Fred’s Spot", showing my extended family where he wants his ashes scattered.

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Nancy Strider

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License

I guess flashmobbing has been around long enough for there to be "classic" events. Here is "Frozen Grand Central" where two hundred people froze for five minutes while others speculated about what was going on.
In January 2008 "Geriatric1927" posted the video "Help for the Elderly", which he describes as: "A request for help in my attempt to introduce and encourage … elderly people … to embrace the Internet”. Among the video responses was one by a product design student who is making this theme his graduation project. One of the video responses "Mom Watches Bach's B Minor Mass" demonstrates the benefits.
This is a short and funny video about the Digital Divide called "Old People vs Technology"
John Cleese made ironic ads in the early eighties, during the introduction of home computers. This one compares a portable computer to a fish.
Here is a link to an hour-long webcast seminar called "Crossing the Digital Divide". Delivered to a group of seniors, it uses simple language and demonstrations to "introduce … the major issues involved in buying computers and other digital gear”.
Laptops become toboggans and tennis rackets in "Alternate Uses for Your Laptop" , the promotional video for Web Shutdown Day - March 24, 2007.
Anyone who has had to ask for tech support can laugh at "Introducing the Book" about a medieval Help Desk
In my article about Time Magazine's "Person of the Year", I talk about how I got inspired to make videos for YouTube when my brother, who lives in Africa, put a simple one of his children playing on Korkobite Beach up there.

Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer? That is the challenge posed by Shutdown Day . Here is the link to the site for 2008. Shutdown day 2008 is May 3.
In February 2008, in the article "Pirates of the Seabus", I gave the website for the Vancouver Public Space Network . Their Facebook group alerts you to upcoming events, including flashmobs.
In January 2008 article about Geriatric1927's campaign to improve computer access for seniors, I followed up on the design student Ben Arendt, and who sees a professional opportunity for himself in designing well for seniors. Ben pointed me to the European Union’s official website "i2010" . And here are two sites about the launch of a billion-euro European research initiative: "Aging Well in the Information Society", and "EU launches tech plan for elderly"
My January 2008 posting "Looking for Kindred spirits on the Internet", and a related video shows a website called “the Payphone Project” which examines the worldwide loss of payphones. The May, 2007 article “Not everyone’s willing to hang up on pay phones”, looks at the situation in British Columbia, where we have lost a third of our payphones since 1999.
My December 2007 article about the Internet as a "Construction Site" talked about the skillful short comedy videos on the Tremendousaur site which makes ironic use of the "look" of various video and film formats, including reality TV.
Widespread frustration experienced by those calling Help Lines is examined in the June 2007 article Customer Call Centres: Who Gets Your Worst Service Vote?
As mentioned in my 2006 article about bookclubs, here is a link to a part of the Vancouver Public Library online catalogue which gives links to bestseller lists.
As described in the February 07 "Happy Birthday" posting, here is the link to the site for Free Conference Calls which my sister Janet found for using to organize ourselves for the care of our parents.
Here are two sites related to the discontinuation of the print version of TV Guide Canada in October 2007: the Canadian TV Guide online edition itself , and commentary about the loss on the blog Cyberjournalist.net
A December 2006 article described my experience creating a blog for the tiny congregation of Christ Alive Community Church in downtown Vancouver.
In 2007 I was involved with the City of Vancouver’s long-term pilot project "Arts, Health and Seniors", where four groups of artists and seniors engage in creative work ranging from puppetry to digital storytelling. Here is a link to the Peer Reporters Blog. I helped show people how to publish their articles, and was a contributor myself.
In 2006, the City of Vancouver's Parks and Recreation department initiated the Lines of Life Project where seniors gain skills in digital photography by taking photos of other seniors. The photos are captioned by lines written by the photographers, about wisdom already gained. I taught digital photography to the group from Killarney community centre.
In fall 2006 I became interested in blogging through helping a senior named Linda to create her own one, Fiddlehead Farm Memoirs

In April 2008, when our first sign that Melanie Cole's Waldo site was becoming known was 4,000 hits on her site from Brazil, I started getting comments on my blog in Portuguese, and then Spanish. I used a free online translation site to reply called AltaVista Babel Fish. You type in your message and click on the appropriate "from-to" combination. It's a good idea, though, to run their translation back into English to make sure you really wanted to say that!
Remember when a Megabite was big? Now large source files are a sales feature on electronic devices such digital cameras. All three of the email programs I use have a size-limit on attachments. One of them won't send files over 2 MB. For a while now, I've uploaded photo files to websites which help with photo file management, sending links to friends rather than the file itself. You can also do basic improvements like cropping and red-eye removal. There are many options, but two popular ones Flickr and Picasa
A fellow student told me about an alternative way to send big files, using a website called YouSendIt.com which has a free "Lite" option. Another way to get around the size-limit on email attachments is to upload the big file up to a website which holds it, and emails a download link to the destination person. Up to now it seemed to me that the only way to be able to do this was using a rather ponderous method using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software.
In my January 2008 research for my article about Geriatric1927’s "Help For the Elderly" initiative, his website provided a link "BT Internet Rangers" for a website for teachers to help young students to effectively teach Internet skills to their grandparents. Resources include a “techie timeline” which graphically shows how much change the elders have lived through. Also there is a downloadable "invitation" to a mutual commitment with the elder, sample lesson plans, and report cards.
In my March 2008 article "One less oops. A success story" I talk about my delight at being able to, in a small way, subvert "Andrea", the robot voice of my cell phone company. Here is a website called gethuman.com a zesty culture-jamming site about automated phone systems. As well as providing a list of "secret" phone numbers for bypassing the automation, it suggests actions one can take to improve customer support.
Playful people without the money to get on a plane can spice up daytrips in their own city using games suggested in the Lonely Planet's website about Experimental Travel. All it takes to see your home in a new light is "an open mind, a sprinkling of guts, and an appetite for liberation."

Came of Age Before Computers

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Making friends with my shadow

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