Forget your Mother Blogging, your Grandparents already are!
Forget shuffleboard, needlepoint and bingo. Web logs, more often the domain of alienated adolescents and home to screeds by middle-aged pundits, are gaining a foothold as a new leisure-time option for senior citizens.
There’s Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal, Dogwalk Musings, and, of course, the Oldest Living Blogger.
“It’s too easy to sit in your own cave and let the world go by, eh?” said Ray Sutton, the 73-year-old Oldest Living Blogger and a retired electrician who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It keeps the old head working a little bit so you’re not just sitting there gawking at TV.”
This touches on something I discussed in a previous post I made about how blogs are valuable to every demographic and how it's more of a communication medium, and not just a website or journal. There are as many uses for a blog as there are people who understand their value as a communication tool.
If a teenager is using email less than any other demographic due to it being too cumbersome and ineffective, then why wouldn't those same benefits apply to older demographics that have an even harder time dealing with the more complex and cumbersome aspects of technology and the Internet?
Bloggers say their hobby keeps them up on current events, lets them befriend strangers around the globe and gives them a voice in a society often deaf to the wisdom of the elderly.
“It brings out the best in me,” said Boston-area blogger Millie Garfield, 80, who writes My Mom’s Blog with occasional help from her son, Steve Garfield, a digital video producer. “My life would be dull without it.”
Blogging can bring family much closer together, and it may be the first “new technology” your Gram will be able to even somewhat effectively use.
Mari Meehan, 64, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has been blogging since July. It’s given her a voice in her small resort town where, as a relative newcomer, she felt rebuffed in her efforts to get involved.
Inspired by other local bloggers she’d found on The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.) newspaper’s Web site, Meehan discovered it was easy to get started.
“If you can read, you can do it,” she said. She titled her blog Dogwalk Musings and based it on the premise that she would write about her thoughts during morning walks with her St. Bernard, Bacchus. Her posts range from nature sightings of a kildeer’s nest with four eggs to rants about local and national politics.
It's super easy, and rewarding. If anyone has the time and something to say it's the senior citizens of the world. If your kids are doing it as well as your parents… why wouldn't you? The growth in this demographic is a clear sign of the potential penetration of these tools across all of them.
Three percent of online U.S. seniors have created a blog and 17 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Compare that to online 18- to 29-year-olds: Thirteen percent have created blogs and 32 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to Pew.
