Granny @ Work

By Karen E Riggs, Routledge, New York 2004

This book did not set out to be about people over fifty finding new relationships with their under thirty-year-old children and grandchildren. And, to be honest, that is not the main thrust of the book. But it is an interesting and important side theme.

Four years ago Karen Riggs, the author and academic, began an intriguing experiment with her final year university students. She announced that there would be no textbooks and no tests in the senior seminar. The twelve students cheered at that, of course. But then she explained what they would be doing over the next 16  weeks:

Each student will find a 55-plus-year-old and work with that person to explore the Internet. Each week the student and their 'old' partner will visit a cluster of web sites and analyse the experience. One week the assigned sites would be about ageing and health, then financial websites, then news, then government sites, and so on.

The students didn't cheer at that. One quit on the spot. But the remaining eleven grimaced and got on with this odd  assignment.

What prompted the experiment was Riggs' fascination with the difference between the so-called Digital Natives (those under 30 who were born into the world of computers and video games) and the rest of us who are Digital Immigrants.

The immigrants have had to adapt to a technological landscape that arrived after their formative early childhood experience. Even though the take-up of Internet access among the over 60s has been significant - in the United States, Riggs reports, that age group spends more time on the Internet than any other age group - they remain immigrants. And like most immigrants, digital immigrants retain an 'accent', telltale signs that they started somewhere else - for example, wanting to read instructions, printing out hard copies to edit.

The 'natives' choice of their intergenerational partner was interesting. It tended to be a parent or grandparent the student wanted to be closer to: "it was an excuse to have my mother all to myself"; "I wanted Dad to get to know me better"; although one very practical young woman chose Dad so that she could spend one evening a week back at her parents' home and get the laundry done at the same time as her  'homework'.

Working together week after week to explore the Internet proved a more complex and emotionally draining task, for both partners, than one might have predicted. For students, being the expert in a relationship where the older person had always had more authority and more 'wisdom' required new sensitivity and skill.

The elders, in turn, had to handle being tutored by these young upstarts. Interestingly, many disliked being directed to 'ageing' Internet sites and rebelled, wanting to find other sites. One father actually decided against retirement as a result of these elder sites. Some of the oldest partners found the Internet an unrewarding environment and one student came to the conclusion that his grandparents' lives were quite full enough without the new technologies.

What the exercise with her class demonstrated was that real intergenerational collaboration does not happen without sustained effort. Riggs other research on age-stereotypes and the work-related experiences of the over-fifties confirms this  point.

On the other hand, the work makes it abundantly clear that an age-integrated society is what we should aim for, not narrow ghettoes where people talk only to people born around the same time. How limiting would that be!