Interviews

The three people I chose to interview were my brother who is 20, myhusband who is 36, and a family friend who is 65. 

My brother uses the internet to play games, keep in touch with friends on myspace, and just search around the internet.    He is very comfortable communicating on the internet with both friends he knows and with people he plays his games against whom he doesn’t know.  Because of his age, technology hasn’t changed the way he lives his life.  Most of his teenage years there has been internet so he is quite comfortable.

The next person I interviewed is my husband.  He takes classes through Clackamas Community College so the primary reason he uses the internet is for school work and email.  He completely admits he is technologically challanged, and I can agree with that!  He isn’t comfortable just surfing the web or doing searches.  He feels like he may break something.  He does have a myspace and does feel comfortalbe communicating but won’t communicate outside of the people he knows.  Technology hasn’t really changed his life.  The main thing he says it has changed is that he can take classes online instead of in a traditional classroom.  If it wasn’t for the itnernet he wouldn’t be able to go to school.

The last person I talked to, Tom, is 65 years old and gets around the internet just about as well as my brother does!!!  He uses the internet to keep track of his families finances, keeping up with current events, emailing and keeping in touch with family as well as playing games online.  He communicates quite well and showed me a couple things when we talked.  He thinks the internet has make life a little easier, now he doens’t have to subscribe to the newspaper, and makes information more readily available for anyone to find. 

I thought I would see that the younger generations were the most comfortable with communication on the internet, but I was surprised that Tom knew so much.  It showed me that although some technologies are new, older people can learn to naviage just as easily as younger people can. 

In our Woods and Smith book on page 157 one quote really stood out, “During the late 1960s and early 1970s, few people imagined that the average person would need personal access to a computer; fewer still thought that “head-in-the-cloud” reasearchers hired by a company that made copy machines could offer society anything of much substance.”  Tom completely agreed with this.  We ended up talking about how technology has changed since he was a young boy.  He stated that he would never have imagined a computer the size of a book when he was a young child and is amazed at the changed in the last thirty years.

I really enjoyed hearing the different responses from the different age groups.

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