I continue to puzzle at why “the elderly” is used with such abandon especially on social media and notably amongst health professionals and people working in the technology industry. Our ageing population represent a victory for better nutrition, better housing, and the welfare state. People in later life offer wisdom, experience, perspective and a wide range of skill sets and capacities.
Why are we not embracing and utilising the wealth of knowledge and experience of older people to develop, deliver and support digital services rather than making assumptions?
So I thought I would ask Twitter about the mysterious “the elderly” tribe!
As I frequently comment “age is a statistical category not an identity. Strangely people aged sixty plus are not one homogeneous group, we are as varied as individuals in any other sector of the population and our different life experiences inform our perspectives as consumers. Older people may have similar needs physically but these do not erase life experiences, preferences and orientations.
A gentle reminder that baby boomers (generally considered to have been born between 1946 and 1964) have expectations and aspirations shaped by:
1953 Francis Crick and James Watson discovering the structure of DNA.
1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his historic “I Have a Dream” speech
1993 work on the Human Genome Project started
1969 Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon
1971 Launch of the Open University
1973 Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is released
1998 Google founded
1998 Launch of Apple iMac
2001 Launch of Wikipedia and the first Apple iPod..
2004 Facebook is founded
2006 Twitter was created
Do feel free to vote in the Twitter poll and I will update this post when the results are ready In the meantime the search for “the elderly” tribe continues!
And just in case you have missed this!
bonklesoul
Ermy
shirleyayres
Connecting Social Care and Social Media 