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  • Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸evan@cosocial.ca
    Oct 3, 2026, 3:21 PM

    Personal computers were introduced around 1975 and were widespread in offices by 1985. The Internet was widely available by 1995.

    Yes, there was a cohort of people who grew up and became adults without Internet-connected computers in their lives. Those people are dead. Baby Boomers in their 70s, 80s and 90s used networked PCs 40 years ago.

    The idea that grandmas and grandpas, much less parents and aunts and uncles, are inexperienced with technology is obsolete and meaningless. Enough already.

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Replies

  • Jessamynjessamyn@glammr.us
    Oct 3, 2026, 4:06 PM

    @evan I feel like we've had cars for well over a century but there are still a lot of people who don't know how to drive or do it poorly. Access to technology doesn't necessarily mean experience with it.

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  • Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸evan@cosocial.ca
    Oct 3, 2026, 6:05 PM

    @jessamyn Right. But it would be stupid to say, *because* she was born in the 1970s, she's not experienced with cars. The generation that never saw cars as children and for whom cars became ubiquitous during their adulthood was born before 1900.

    I'm not sure why everyone is hanging onto this one so hard. Do we all like ageist stereotypes that much? Is it so hard to let go of them?

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  • Jessamynjessamyn@glammr.us
    Oct 4, 2026, 1:01 AM

    @evan With kindness, I work with older people and technology every week and am also not a fan of ageist stereotypes. You said "The stereotype that [our elders] are inexperienced with technology is obsolete and meaningless" which was what I was responding to.

    The fact that tech exists around people doesn't necc. mean they will have interacted with it much, regardless of their age. I see 30-somethings who also are inexperienced with tech and it's harder for them b/c people assume they know it.

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  • your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦blogdiva@mastodon.social
    Oct 3, 2026, 6:29 PM

    you are assuming my grandparents and parents were of your same social class.

    my nana sent telegrams well into the 1980s. that was the height of tech communications for most poor Puerto Ricans and latinoamericans of not just her generation, mind you. a money transfer is a telegram and that's how my family circulated money well into the 2000s.

    never forget the class divide. Bill Gates was a capitalist nepobaby who had access to computers from a very early age. that's his genius.

    @evan

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