I was at my monthly meeting of SA (Silversurfers Anonymous) on Tuesday. When it came to my turn to bear my soul, it just all flowed out, so I thought I would share it with you. I started with the obligatory confession, ‘I am a Silversurfer’. For the uninitiated that’s an older person who spends a lot of time using the internet usually hopelessly hooked on search engines and online shopping. When you embrace all that techy stuff in your senior years, you also, of course, expose all the gaps in your knowledge. I had to admit to the whole room that Tik Tok remains a bit of a mystery. Has it any connection to ‘Tic Tac’ - the sign language bookies used to use at race meetings in the old days? And as for WhatsApp - I keep thinking of the Bugs Bunny cartoons when I hear that word. How many messaging platforms do you need? But the main thrust of what I had to say was about how my silver surfing impacts on my communication skills. We have two grown up daughters. The older one and I communicate every morning regular as clockwork. We don’t speak, we just share our Wordle score for the day. My other daughter stays less than 100 yards away but we communicate mainly on Messenger. Her cryptic requests often baffle me and I end up phoning her to work out what she means. We have a family group chat that definitely shows up the generational divide. When someone sends a message it usually results in a torrent of responses back and forth from the younger members, leaving this oldie with a severe case of pinging in the ears. It’s may be my age but if someone tells me something and doesn’t ask a question, I don’t feel any need to reply (not even a thumbs up). My wife and I used to sit at nights watching the TV. At least we were both watching the same programme. Now we sit with the TV as background and our heads buried in our iPads.
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CategoriesAuthorAlastair Osborne is always left, sometimes witty and totally Labour
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February 2024
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