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Anita Creamer: Seniors eager to bridge digital divide
By Anita Creamer - acreamer@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Story appeared in LIVING HERE section, Page D1
Dressed for computer class registration in a lovely peach-colored pantsuit, Maria Fries peers at the form on her clipboard.
At 84, she's the exception to the rule, and God bless her for that. A stark generation gap divides the computer-savvy from the technophobic, with research indicating that only a little more than a third of America's oldest seniors have ever surfed the Internet, compared with 70 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds – and 89 percent of young adults.
But statistics aren't destiny. There's a lot to be said for the capacity to learn, or at least the willingness to try.
And so Fries sits at a long table at the Ethel MacLeod Hart Senior Center in midtown Sacramento, carefully filling out an enrollment form for another session of SeniorNet computer classes that begins Monday.
"I'm retired," says Fries, who lives in an apartment in Land Park. "I'm widowed. My six children are all grown. They gave me a computer on my 80th birthday and told me, 'Mom, it's time to go back to school.'
"My husband and I were married 57 years. When he died, it was like part of me was gone. What saved my life was the computer."
Seniors and computer literacy have been in the news ever since John McCain, 71, told the New York Times: "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon."
Do we require a president who Googles and texts? On the one hand, not necessarily, considering that executives tend to have people to do their online research and communication for them. And besides, the leader of the free world has a whole lot on his plate already.
Yet on the other hand, it's not too much to expect our leaders to be intimately acquainted with the developments shaping our world in the digital age.
To pretend otherwise amounts to a huge denial of reality.
The 20 local seniors gathered in this large Hart Center meeting room to register for SeniorNet classes are at least making the effort. They weigh their skills along with their options: PowerPoint or File Management? Word Processing or Windows Vista?
The Hart Center has hosted SeniorNet, a nonprofit computer education group with 130 learning centers around the country, since 1993.
"At first, a lot of our seniors worry that they'll break the computers," says Chandra Dawson, owner of Know Tech Now and a volunteer SeniorNet teacher since 2004. "I try to dispel them of that fear."
Let's give these seniors points for not allowing the intimidation of the unknown to keep them from enrolling.
Manoa Nakaseivomo, a 57-year-old retiree who immigrated from Fiji seven years ago, wants to learn more because he's found that computer skills can enhance his work on behalf of local charities.
"Everything's done by computer now," he says. "E-mail and the Internet and everything."
Exactly.
Andrew Monroe, 56, says his computer skills are limited to a working knowledge of solitaire.
"And I can look up a few things," he says.
You have to start somewhere.
Maria Fries, meanwhile, has become a computer veteran.
"I'm an ongoing student," she says. "I started with the beginner class, and then I took Internet and e-mail. I must admit my mind is getting slower. It takes me longer to digest the information now.
"But my kids are proud of me. I send them e-mails all the time, and they e-mail me. And now I make my own cards. Nothing stops me now."
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