Challenges for the Elderly
The elderly may have gone through significant change in their lifetime. The last hundred years have seen huge cultural and social change on a global level. Many people in their sixties can remember a time when there was no television or electricity. Technology has been advancing at an increasingly accelerating rate. To keep up with this technology is difficult for young people but it provides greater challenges for older people.
Drucker (1995) wrote about the “knowledge society” and claimed that knowledge will be learned long after formal schooling. Perhaps there will be challenges for everyone to keep abreast of this knowledge and ways of acquiring it. There is currently more and more emphasis by all sections of society, business, schools, government services, and banks to automate their services. The elderly and everyone else are being asked to use more and more technology in everyday life. For example, retail banks are moving many of their traditional front-line work to on-line services. Even within physical banks, face-to-face teller services are increasingly being replaced by machines. This presents unique challenges for the elderly and for society in general. Some of the elderly may not want to use this technology; some may not know how to use it. Trentin (2004) analysed the purposes for which elderly persons used the Web, and found that they mostly accessed news, local authorities, government bodies, sporting or cultural associations, banks / financial sites, health sites or specific third age sites, and tourism and library or museum sites. More recently, they are beginning to use “Skype” to contact younger relatives who are geographically removed from home. Agudo, Angeles Pascual, and Fombona, (2012) make the point that “the elderly use ICT as a form of education; that these generations of the elderly need and want to learn.”
The ability to change may also be a factor. Many of the elderly grew up in a very different social world. Communication was predominantly verbal. In an era before the arrival of e-mail and SMS, the written word perhaps had more power. Although older people can learn, the way they do so may be different from younger generations and their worldview may be considerably different from younger people. Many older people put great time and effort into writing letters, a lot more effort than many people today do in writing an e-mail.