it is interesting that already in 2015 a fifth of the 65+ people are getting news "often" from the internet. I would take people who claim they don't go on Twitter for politics with a big grain of salt. Most people I think do not really think clearly about what "politics" really means. I would guess that most of those people who don't do any politics on social media actually do a lot of politics on social media. But of course that's just a guess.
Boomer's kid: Mom/Dad, you should get online, you'd find out a lot more about what's going on than you can in a newspaper or on TV.
Parent: Ok, what do you suggest?
Boomer's kid: Social media, here, I'll help you set up a Facebook and Twitter account.
Parent (reading all the crap): Wow, so much I didn't know, this is great!
And then there are those of us who know that like Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything on FB/Twitter is <organic waste material> (actually, had he lived into the internet age, he'd have revised that 90% considerably upward). I get my news from CBC.ca as it's just the online extension of the news I watched on TV for decades. I don't get the newspaper anymore because it's too expensive and delivery here is unreliable. The online edition costs more than the print edition, if you can believe that. I take most things said on FB with a freight train's worth of NaCl.
Consider another reason why some older people get news online: Failing eyesight. It's a lot easier to read a news article or comment section online since you can adjust everything for reading comfort.
I can easily imagine one getting one's news from "traditional sources" but still having one's brain melted in comment sections and those weird grammatically-incorrect chain posts that older people seem to really enjoy.
Care to link to a sample of this "grammatically-incorrect chain posts that older people seem to really enjoy"? I have no idea what you're talking about and I'm apparently one of these "older people" who really enjoys them.
But yeah, comment sections can be brain-melting, particularly when they accompany an article that started the process (I've been on CBC.ca most of the day, mindcroggled at what's going on in our provincial election).
if you're in your mid-50s just getting on Facebook for the first time in, say, 2017, you just don't have the depth of experience with the platform to be able to chock stuff up to the platform being a bit stupid.
I'll admit that I don't understand most of what Facebook does, as I believe that if my RL friends want to have a conversation with me, they can send an email or better yet, pick up the damn phone.
And I think I'm reasonably adept at spotting a scam. They've been around for millennia. It's amazing how so many younger people don't seem to realize that there was a world that existed before the internet and that much of what they think is new and radical has actually been a case of "been there, done that decades/centuries ago".
Boomers are like those gatecrashers who trash a party and leave before cleanup. They will be remembered as the generation that should have known better, but didn't. There has to be a time when "they were a man of their times" stops being a defense of bigotry and myopia, and the boomers are past it.
Oh, thank you SO much.
Everyone should realize that being a boomer isn't a sin or a crime.
You wouldn't know that by some of the comments here. There's a saying that was popular when I was a teenager: "Excuse me for living, but the graveyard's full."
In other words, we're not done yet. Wait your turn.
Is that like upism and downism?
