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Josh is 65 year old former accountant, who recently moved into a nursing home with his wife. He was concerned about keeping in touch with his previous community and reminisces about his neighbors with whom he use to regularly chat with. He misses being in the immediate vicinity of his grandchildren and tending to his garden. He mostly uses his phone as means to communicate with grandchildren and friends, but occasionally gets emails that he checks and replies to on the public computer in the nursing home. He has a facebook account that his youngest grandaughter gran daughter Sarah made him a while ago, but he barely uses it. His profile is mostly empty. He finds facebook difficult to use, but does check the "nursing home's society's facebook Facebook page", that gets updates of various weekend events held by the society. On being told about social networks and how people (including his grandchildren) use them to stay connected, especially facebook, he spoke about how he always found the numerous options, and the changing layout very difficult to get used to.
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- Find trusted peers with similar problems for support and advice
- Establish meaningful relationships in a community
- Keep from boredom and retain mental agility
- Desire to be useful to others
- Shine on a new stage
- Discover new hobbies
- Make new friends
Research for Elderly Studies
- Geezers need Excitement Too http://www.slate.com/articles/life/geezers/2008/09/geezers_need_excitement.html
The researchers at Pew released a report on "Older Americans and the Internet" in 2004, which found that 22 percent of seniors go online while "most seniors live lives far removed from the Internet, know few people who use e-mail or surf the Web, and cannot imagine why they would spend money and time learning how to use a computer." Sometimes I think that they are the lucky ones. More recent data from May 2008 show that 35 percent of seniors now use the Internet. E-mail is the top motivation for getting up to speed. Health information, checking the retirement account, and genealogical research are next in line. Seniors, rather poignantly, look up more spiritual and religious information than the younger demographics.
"Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process," he writes, "are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory." He recommends using larger font sizes and avoiding "hierarchically walking" menus (such as Slate's) that require dextrous mouse-work. So perhaps the Internet will become some Large Type, easily clickable, grown-up version of itself.