Despite its massively successful integration into the average home, a huge number of adults are still baffled by the home computer. Looking into the future, the problem doesn't seem like it's going to have a solution on the horizon anytime soon.



The key difficulty that I have seen people struggle with involves short term memory of the user. Remembering how to navigate around the operating system on any platform requires an extensive amount of knowledge. To younger users they have no problem at all learning new software and being able to navigate from short term memory as and when they need it.

With age, people often lose their short term memory and this makes adapting to our ever changing computers a massive challenge. In a recent survey over half of people aged 65 years or older in the UK were voluntarily excluding themselves from using the internet. This is the writing on the wall. The younger generation values the internet so greatly that they could not cope without it; the elderly generations find using the internet so complicated, they are willing to forfeit these benefits.

As the baby boom generation approaches retirement there seems to be no let up in the constant stream of new programs and operating systems to learn. Just as they get used to the way their computer works the darn thing changes, and you have to learn it all over again. For a younger person this is not seen as a problem but as progress. For someone who has short term memory problems it is evidently asking too much of them.

The solution so far seems to be team work. The grandparents actually do make use of the internet, but they do so indirectly through their relatives. On reflection it could be argued that exclusion on one level leads to inclusion at another. So in a way perhaps this is not such a bad thing after all.