The Digital Age Gap... Facebook vs. my Grandparents

A fascinating problem has come to my attention... my Grandparents have lost a level of communication with their Grand kids.  It’s not due to a lack of effort on their part.  They did and do correspond via letters and telephone, for instance. They travel to spend time with us and attend family events, they also host numerous family events for everyone to enjoy.  Anyone who has met them knows that they are the coolest Grandparent’s on the planet.  When the evolution of email developed and faster internet speeds came about, they changed from dial-up to high speed connections so that they could be a part of emails and keep in touch with family downloads.  These massive update emails used to include large paragraphs of details of our lives so that we, as an extended family, were connected.  They were “in the loop” so to speak.  Photos were shared via email, responses were a part of them as well.  They’ve been PC users and Mac users.  They’ve used multiple OS’s.  Tech savvy Grandparents.

But something has changed everything, a technological development that snuck into our lives and altered the way we get our information... facebook.  The immediate power of social networking and feeds has completely changed the way we, as a large family communicate.  It happened very fast, in just a few years.  Instead of paragraphs of data, through singular emails, my cousins, siblings, parents, aunts and uncles are connected through social networking means and now we receive updates instantly, daily, and have a much better immediate sense of how each other are doing.  When something important happens, it hits our accounts, our feeds, our email inboxes, our iPhones and Blackberries.  We call, we chat, we share and respond multiple times a day with each other.  We tease, we chuckle, we share stories, and debate the latest political issue.  No matter where in the world we might be, we are connected.  My brother and I even sang Happy Birthday to my Mom on a facebook video message last year; family that was connected saw it.  Those not on the site did not.

Unfortunately, my Grandparents were not prepared for this change and they have been somehow technologically left out.  The other day I was catching up with my grandfather who started to share a story, without thinking I related, “Oh yeah!  I totally saw that post the other day!”  My assumption was that everyone in the world knew this information, at least in the family right?  But unfortunately my assumption rendered his oral retelling of the story and our conversation over.  I already had comprehensive knowledge of the event, and he wasn’t a part of the original information flow.  He was frustrated.

I didn’t immediately understand what had happened or why he was insulted until later when it was explained to me that Grandma and Grandpa aren’t on facebook.  I realized, they probably feel disconnected.  No more big emails, no more photos, no more updates, it’s all hidden from them on a seemingly complicated social networking site.  It’s not like they’re un-invited either, it’s just something outside of their comfort zone.

Now it would be easy to suggest that they should just join but if you really think about it, it’s just an overwhelming task right now.  Email was a challenging thing for them to adopt, and I’m so impressed as how cool they were for embracing it years ago.  They still use it, but at it’s core, email works conceptually like sending a letter by way of computer, it’s simple.  In contrast, the concept of cascading link feeds, complex interfaces, segmented usages for photos, messaging, chatting, video, and status updates can be daunting to someone who was born before the invention of the television.  They’re cool enough and smart enough to pick it up technically, but this seems more like a generational gap than one of ability.

And so what are we to do?  As a family, we ARE still communicating, we are still connected, in someways even more than through our old emails, we ALL just adopted a medium that they’re not comfortable using.  Have we left them out or is this more of an evolution of tech communication that is supposed to happen?  How can those who find facebook challenging still connect in a facebook world?

In an effort to keep them updated, I’ve started to go back to basics with them.  Emails, phone calls, and visiting seems to be a great way to solve this problem, a lot of fun too (my Grandparents are wonderful storytellers and fantastic cooks).  But I wish there was a way I could help them more.

Do you have suggestions?  How do you connect facebook, to a non-facebook person?  With Google Wave on it’s way, is it even worth it?  Or how should we all just get back to basics and ditch the computers wholesale?

What are your thoughts?

P.S. Love you Grandma and Grandpa...