Computers Fill Elderly’s Age-Old Needs
On a hilltop in Laguna Woods, hundreds of gray-haired seniors head straight past the sparkling swimming pool and meandering golf courses for Leisure World’s hippest and liveliest scene: the computer center.
Six days a week, this white stucco bungalow is abuzz with people compiling family histories, entering sweepstakes, e-mailing far-flung grandchildren. On rows of terminals that display large print, they trade stocks, play games, download jokes and surf the Internet with as much verve as teenagers. Electronic greeting cards with their cheerful tunes are wildly popular here.
Computer labs already occupy three rec rooms in Leisure World, and a fourth will be added as soon as the card club, with its dwindling membership, finds a new place to meet.
“A lot of people who had absolutely no interest in getting up in the morning find value in getting up and learning something here,” says Joe Schwarz, president of the Leisure World PC Users Group. His and another computer club boast about 3,000 members--about one of every six who live in this active retirement community.
The enthusiasm for personal computing is palpable at senior centers and retirement communities around the country, where those who came of age before there were electric typewriters are now clamoring for computer classes.
Increasingly, elderly Americans are embracing technology as an elixir for their ills and a treasured link to the outside world they refuse to leave behind. And computer companies are courting them as never before.
Harry West lived without a computer for nine decades. But these days, the 97-year-old former garment business owner spends three hours a day on a high-end computer in his flat in Leisure World. He’s learning to manage his finances on the computer. It’s easier to see than the thin ledger lines of his checkbook, he says, and the mouse is easier to maneuver than a pen.
West meticulously catalogs his growing collection of rare coins on a Microsoft program and doggedly monitors his investments on Yahoo. Even as the New York native talks of having to cancel a much-anticipated trip to the East Coast because of his wavering mobility, he keeps in touch with his friends there and around the world by e-mail.
Computers are “a tremendous window that’s been opened” for seniors, West says.
It’s no wonder that senior centers have waiting lists for their computer classes. Web sites aimed at seniors also are burgeoning. Popular ones such as Seniors.com and IGrandparents.com offer chat rooms with aging celebrities, reviews of movies appropriate for grandchildren and rallying points for preserving Medicare coverage.
“Computers started out with this image of being highly technical and too much for older persons,” says David Peterson, professor of education and aging at USC’s Andrus Gerontology Center. “But older people are taking to computers very well. They seem to learn as rapidly as other adults.”
To be sure, people who are 65 or older are still less likely to be wired than younger folks. Only 13% of them have Internet access--less than half the rate of the general population, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s project on the Internet and American life.
But the study also shows that seniors who do have access are among the most avid users of the Internet. On a typical day, 63% of them will go online, compared with 54% of those younger than 30. Though they’re more reluctant to spend money or buy stocks online than most, older people are as eager as anyone about e-mailing; half of the online senior population will send and receive e-mail on any given day.
More than other groups, seniors often describe their use of computers in intimate terms, belying the notion that the online world is impersonal and unfeeling.
Al Holtz, 72, marvels that he can submit articles to the Saddleback Valley Jewish War Veterans newspaper by e-mail--and the computer will check his spelling! Yet he also worries about computer viruses and conveys his irritation that there is really no way to stay abreast of the latest technology.
“How in the hell do you keep up with this frustration?” Holtz grumbles. “You’d have to go to school full time.”
But once they learn the basics and get over their initial fears, many seniors find that computing can be loads of fun. Indeed, at Leisure World’s PC club, computing is as much a social affair as it is a way to play solitaire without having to reshuffle the cards.
Even on an evening when a Lakers championship game was on TV, several hundred people gathered for a demonstration of popular Web sites at the club’s monthly meeting.
Women with fresh coats of lipstick and hoop earrings eagerly volunteered to work at the Leisure World computer expo this month. Men, in clean shirts and sandals with socks, schmoozed about the latest bargain-priced luxury cruises they have booked on the Internet.
With the grass-roots intensity of a student body president, club leader Schwarz, 79, urged his fellow computer enthusiasts to lobby the Leisure World authorities for high-speed access to the Internet. So far, only half of the community is able to sign up for the service, and people have been slow to enlist, in part because they don’t understand the benefits, Schwarz believes.
Virginia Payne needed no such prodding. The 73-year-old former accountant and her husband, Bob, operate four computers between them. With digital imaging software, she designs scenery for Bob’s model train set.
It’s all great fun, but not nearly as important to her as the ability to keep company with her recently widowed sister in Arizona via e-mail. That connection--which her sister, Irene Clark, resisted at first--has been a lifesaver, the two sisters say.
Just one week after Payne gave her sister a tangerine-colored iMac, Clark’s husband of 55 years died suddenly in their home. The shock was overwhelming, says the 74-year-old Clark. She would wake up at night and send electronic messages to her children and her sister, able to find an outlet for her grief even at times when she wouldn’t have dreamed of making a phone call. “It was really comforting,” Clark says.
It’s people like Clark who are now drawing computer companies’ attentions.
Until relatively recently, tech companies sought to grab the “low hanging fruit,” customers who were willing to take on a large share of the responsibility for learning how to use their products, says Craig Spiezle, founder of consulting firm AgeLight in Clyde Hill, Wash.
“They didn’t necessarily want that first-time customer because of the support burden that they represented,” says Spiezle, who is helping Microsoft Corp. develop a strategy to bring the over-60 crowd online.
But as the market growth for home computers has slowed somewhat, those same companies are now seeking to generate new business. With seniors in mind, Compaq, EMachines and others will soon be marketing low-cost, non-computing devices with easy-to-use e-mail and Internet capabilities.
For Suki Berg, 83, it was the threatening prospect of her own physical limitations that propelled the artist from the vibrant, work-filled studio that is her home to the artificial light of the computer center.
Berg is a highly regarded painter and printmaker. But heart surgery a year ago has stolen her stamina. The giant canvases she proudly stretched herself are sometimes too much to handle.
“I don’t want to give it up,” Berg says. “But I’m thinking I might have to do more on the computer.”
On a recent morning, she begrudgingly toted a case full of slides and prints to the computer lab to be scanned into the computer. “This is my first work on the computer,” she says somewhat critically as an image rolls off the printer.
“This is a way out for people who are creative. . . . I hope I won’t be confined to it, but I’m preparing myself. . . . I have so much to live for. I can’t bother being 83 and thinking I don’t have much time.”
