Age Is Just A Number

It was my birthday last week. As usual, I only got a handful of cards, which doesn't bother me much since I have never made much of my birthday; the last time I did was when I was forty. The only thing that concerns me as I get older is that time seems to go so much more quickly. Oh, and the aches and pains that seem more frequent, albeit that most of them are fairly trivial. It is inevitable that with age come issues with one's health and I suppose that (touch wood), I have been fortunate. I'm on tablets for high blood pressure and to control my cholesterol, but that makes me fairly normal for my age I suppose. I had a growth cut out from my tongue a few years ago that had me worried while waiting for the biopsy results; fortunately it was benign, so compared with many of my peers, I've been lucky.

An inevitable consequence of getting older is an inclination to look selectively at the past. There are some people who look back wistfully and believe that everything was better years ago, while others embrace the changes they have experienced and write off all that came before. I sit somewhere in between; there are many things that were better in my youth just as there are many things that are so much better today, and of the things that were better in my youth, a lot of them were better simply because I was younger. Actually I consider myself to be very fortunate to have been born when I was. In terms of the new technology that we have seen in the last twenty years, I was old enough to really appreciate it and benefit from it, while not being too old to be daunted by it. Many of my parents' generation have undoubtedly been bewildered by the pace and complexity of the changes in technology and by the ways in which the new technology has invaded their lives. The internet is now so completely integrated into our lives that being disconnected from it is almost physically painful to some people, and our increasing reliance on it for both our work and our entertainment has probably now reached unhealthy levels. And, to borrow an expression from a TV advert for an internet service provider, becoming an 'off grid spoon whittler' is becoming increasingly  less of an option.

Get broadband or be a spoon whittler.

Over 46% of the world's population have internet access, but there are nearly six million UK adults who have never gone online and in a world in which goods and services are increasingly only available online - or at least are becoming more and more difficult to access without an internet connection - there is a large group of people who risk being excluded from accessing these services or at least disadvantaged. On a trivial level the growth of internet broadcasting - Amazon Prime, Netflix and the like - means that those who rely solely on terrestrial TV broadcast have increasingly limited options. More importantly, as organisations like local authorities and utility companies move progressively towards offering access to information and services exclusively through their websites, the older generation and those in social housing (of the six million UK adults not online, 4.1 million of them live in that type of accommodation) are having their lives made more difficult due to their lack of access. And even for many hundreds of thousands of people who do have an internet connection, they may be excluded from some services that require higher download speeds than are available to them. So while, for the moment at least, I can consider myself able to cope both in terms the technology available to me and my grasp of it, who is to say how long that will last?

There is plenty you can do on you local council's website. One day, you may not be able to do it anywhere else.

Some changes are inevitable and I am happy to adapt to many of them. Sadly, however there are some changes that come along that are irksome, and technology is one of those where it is easy to feel that some changes are not for the convenience or benefit of the consumer, but for the advantage of the suppliers. Take Apple products. There is a lot to be said for Apple; for instance I think that their customer service is second to none, but their constant refinements  and new releases (of both hardware and software) make it difficult not to become somewhat vexed. The iPhone 4 was released in June 2010 and while six years is not a long time, in terms of technology it is an eternity. I got an iPhone 4 a year or so after it was released, and there is no reason why I should not still be using it, if I wanted to. As it happened I switched to a Samsung phone two years ago, which is probably just as well since my old iPhone, which I have kept and have been using to run a few apps, like the BBC Radio iPlayer, is becoming increasingly useless. My iPhone is running an old version of the operating system and doesn't have enough storage space left to upgrade to iOS 7.1.2 and guess what? the apps I tend to use it will not work with the version of iOS that is on the phone. Thus I'm in possession of a piece of kit that I can only upgrade by deleting the very apps I want to use to free up enough space to install the new operating system.

The iPhone 4, once cutting edge, now pretty much redundant.

This built in obsolescence is not confined to Apple, and with the frequency with which people upgrade their hardware, be it phones, tablets or laptops, second hand gadget shops are full of relatively new equipment that their owners have deemed past its sell-by date, either by choice or by necessity. I have now decided that my old iPhone is ripe for consigning to the scrapheap, but I might as well get something for it rather than just bin it. Selling it to someone like Mazuma would get me £15, or I could sell it to Apple, who will give me £75, but only in vouchers to spend on their products, a handy way of locking the consumer into them.

It may be a cliché to say that age is just a number, but as time goes by the age at which we define people as 'old' increases, and not just because people live longer than previous generations, but at least in part because of the demands made on us by the way the world, particularly technology, changes. By necessity as well as choice, we stay younger longer.  And whereas twenty years ago I had no clue as to how important the internet would be - we had only just acquired our first PC then and only went online in 1999 - who can tell where we will be twenty years hence? What technology will we need by 2036, and what skills will we need to operate it? Increasingly we need to be more adept and capable, particularly in embracing change and new ideas, well into our old age.