In your editorial of April 13, you note that senior citizens don’t use the Internet as much as the younger folks (“Our View: Welcome more Mainers into a wired world”). You assume this to be a disadvantage.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

We seniors lived most of our lives without the computer/Internet because it didn’t exist.

So, when the power goes out and the Internet doesn’t work, we don’t have to wait until it’s restored.

We can balance a checkbook; pay a bill; make a bank deposit or withdrawal; figure the cost of a purchase using a pencil and one side of a paper bag; do our income tax; read a printed map when we want to go somewhere; communicate in writing using complete sentences of correctly spelled words; save time on the telephone by speaking into it; socialize with friends and neighbors face to face; and mail a letter.

Of course, the computer/Internet can be leisure-time fun, but it can also waste a lot of time.

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Examples: Companies ask us to make purchases, reconcile statements, and pay bills online. To do so, we have to look up each user name and password and remember to change it when the company’s Web site is hacked; remember to close a compromised online account and open new one, and transfer automatic payments to the new account.

We also need updated computer security programs to protect our private information.

We need to be concerned about Internet threats like counterfeit Web sites, Internet scams, and computer viruses, to mention just a few.

It takes time to keep up with all this.

However, we seniors have already spent most of our time. We don’t want to use what remains to us on the computer/Internet again solving problems that we solved years ago without it.

We’d rather go fishin’.

— Special to the Press Herald

 


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