Survey Says...

For this week’s blog, I interviewed my girlfriend, age 25, my mother, age 54, and my aunt, age 61. I emailed the questions to my mother and girlfriend, as they are both frequent internet users. For my aunt’s responses, I had to interview her in person, as she has neither email nor internet access.

My girlfriend primarily uses the internet for checking email a few times a day, shopping, finding movie times, and checking Myspace. She isn’t comfortable with the internet in general and tends to avoid blogs, chat rooms, and the like. She is wary of talking to “creepy” people online. She thinks that technology has absolutely changed her life and loves the convenience of having such quick access to information (actor’s pages on IMDB.com, for example) but hates that she often finds herself wasting hours online accomplishing nothing. She has similar feelings about television. She uses the internet, but not as much as her friends do. She is frequently frustrated with technology and often feels that she dislikes the internet because of it.

My mother uses the internet at home for email and shopping online, as well as to make travel reservations. She uses it more extensively at work, where she is the Payroll Supervisor. At her job, she uses the internet to contact banks, lawyers, insurance companies, and anyone else her job requires her to get in touch with. She said it is much easier to email to get a question answered than to “play phone tag all day.” She also uses it for IRS payroll forms, state and federal tax information, worker’s compensation claims, and online banking. She is very comfortable with the internet, but is wary of emails that come from sources she doesn’t recognize. The IT department at her employer makes sure that the company’s spambusting software is up to date. Mom “loves” the internet because it has made her job much easier by eliminating a lot of paperwork and expediting processes.

My aunt has practically no experience with the internet, or computers for that matter. She’s been a waitress for nearly 40 years so her job has not required her to use much technology. She works at a local family-owned restaurant where they take orders on paper pads and hand them to the cooks; there is no computerized ordering system. About as close as she gets to a computer is the credit card machine at work, which she still admits she sometimes finds frustrating. She’s never really had any interest in owning a computer or getting on the internet. She’s heard a lot of bad things about porn sites and child predators. The technology has not changed her personal life very much, though she sometimes finds it hard to get in touch with a company or take care of business when her only option is to do so online. She recently renewed her food handler’s certification and I basically had to ask her the questions and put the answers in for her, she had no idea how to do so.

In chapter 8, Wood and Smith discuss fragmentation, or the loss of cohesion within a community when members aren’t all communicating in the same ways. I definitely see how this kind of divide can develop. My mother and my aunt are only six years apart, but I tend to think of my mother as more modern and intelligent because she can utilize the forms of communication I am most familiar with. I tend to see my aunt’s inability to do so as a sign of age or disconnectedness. She seems almost an entire generation older than my mother because she clings to forms of communication that seem archaic to me. I almost feel as though she is incapable of learning to use the internet, it seems like an indecipherable concept to her.

I think the degree to which one is required to use technology is a huge differentiating factor in how people feel about it. Judging by their interview responses, my mother seems far more savvy than my girlfriend who is 30 years younger simply because she is forced to use the internet at her job on a daily basis. By comparison, my aunt’s job requires almost no interaction with technology, so she has been able to remain ignorant without negative consequences.

I wonder if my mother and my aunt’s circumstances were reversed, would I still see my mother as the smarter of the two? It’s interesting how people’s use of technology influences the way we see them.