Yoohoo, Mommies!

Karen is right., She didn't say seniors are "boring." I used the word boring because her description of what some of her senior family members and friends do with their time sounded downright boring to me.

Why is this so important that Karen needs to scream. Is she getting upset?

You didn't have to actually say "stupid." It was pretty clearly implied in what you did say.

And since this is the second time in a month that you've accused someone of purposely twisting your words to try to get people mad at you, perhaps you should review your own posts. None of us need to twist your words to get people mad at you. Your own attitude does that all by itself.

Elizabeth

But that you have clearly implied, many times over the length of this post, including when you said that *your* parents don't have to rely on the internet for human contact (like some people do).

Elizabeth

Most people hate having words put in their mouths.

Cheryl

I would clarify that it is the Pew Research Center's 35 percent, not mine. Also, you snipped the part where the researchers observed that computer use is heavily skewed by economic status and race, and if you look at the sorts of folks likely to be shopping for discretionary crafty doo-dads like clothes for Barbies or Webkinz, you're likely to get quite a bit closer to the group that the PRC found to have 75 percent computer usage.

Best wishes, Ericka

No, Karen is just fed up with the number of times that someone else throws an insult out, and then every subsequent poster attributes it to Karen without bothering to go back to check who actually said it.

Thank you for publicly taking responsibility for your word. Perhaps now Sheena will acknowledge that it was one of her fellow seniors calling seniors "boring" and not one of us young-uns.

I simply don't see that Karen implied anything untoward. She said again and again that her parents don't have a need for a computer, which, as useful as I find the things, I consider an entirely uncontroversial and innoffensive statement. And no one has yet provided any information whatsoever to show that she is incorrect when she says most seniors don't use computers.

Cheryl

The part that you snipped, DIPSHIT:

Three-quarters of white college-educated people is clearly a majority in that context. But I have not seen, as you claim, anyone saying that a majority of seniors are online. I have seen people questioning your statistics and saying that their experience leads them to believe otherwise. You're the only one making absolute statements.

And HOW DARE you snip a post without indicating that you've edited it in order to make it look like I was responding to something I wasn't responding to. You accuse others of twisting your words when they didn't in the least intend to do so, but you do it ON PURPOSE. It's good form to snip for brevity and clarity, but it's a totatl breach of nettiquette to snip content from the middle of a discussion without indicating that you have done so.

But that's just the point. You generalize from your personal observations and then get pissy when others counter with their personal observations. The article Ericka quotes shows that Lucille and Sheena are no more out of line with their personal observations than you are with yours. But you still don't understand that the issue is GENERALIZING from those observations, do you?

Elizabeth

Doesn't make the housebound among us "boring" -- I know a number of housebound/bedbound people who rely on the internet for human contact who are quite interesting, just physically disabled and find it difficult to get out to in-person meetings.

Note that Lucille has admitted it was her word, which now you and everyone else are placing into my mouth because you assume that I was the one who said it, or that I meant "boring" when I was trying to communicate "lonely" and/or "isolated". For health reasons I spend most of my time home alone, and since most of the people I know in this town are employed without a lot of free time to visit with invalids, I don't get a lot of human contact, but no one has ever called me "boring".

I stand by my statement that other people's words are often put into my mouth and no one checks the archives to see whether I was the one who actually used that word.

And especially when the words they never said are then used to attack them for having said what they never said.

As I mentioned last week, in another group where the moderator rules with an iron fist, she has repeatedly gone back through the archives trying to find where I said whatever was the subject of the battle, and been unable to find where I said it, only where I was accused of saying it. She can't scold me for starting a fight when the evidence shows that the flame war was in fact started by someone saying "Karen said..." what the archives prove that Karen never said. (Posts are numbered, so she knows that I didn't go in and delete the post where I said it.)

And here I'm being attacked for saying "boring" when it was actually Lucille's word. But, hey, why check for correct attribution when we can simply launch an attack and lead everyone to believe that it was Karen who said it?

And, again, I thank Lucille for standing up and taking responsibility for her own word instead of letting everyone continue to believe that it was my word.

That's not actually what I was objecting to. Rather it was your statements that people purposely put words in your mouth to stir up trouble for you, to prolong arguments with you, or to get other people mad at you. I think that you are completely incorrect when you make those accusations.

Elizabeth

You know, if this were happening to me on a regular basis, I would start rereading my posts very carefully for underlying messages before sending them. Unless of course, I was looking for plausible deniability.

Here again, it looks like you are implying that someone did this on purpose in order to make you look bad.

But heaven forbid that you take responsibility for the things you said that led Lucille to use the word "boring." And I will note that both Lucille and Sheena were offended long before Lucille ever used the word "boring" in response to your description of how your parents spend their days.

Why is is always everybody elses fault when you get into these things?

Elizabeth (that's a rhetorical question. I don't need six paragraphs justifying your victimhood in response)

While I haven't found the PRC's specific statistic for white, college-educated women, for the past several years men and women have run neck-and-neck for computer usage, so one would expect that figures would be quite similar, even though I would expect fewer women in that age group to have been working outside the home in recent years than men. Women in this age group report more hours of recreational computer use than men, on average (according to stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). It's also known that children are pushing a lot of the computer use by seniors, providing expertise and even hardware to encourage communication.

Medicare found that 47 percent of medicare users owned a computer in 2005 (likely it's significantly higher now).

Note also that "grannies" needn't be over 65. If you go down to the next age grouping, 50-64 years old, computer and internet use soars to 70 percent (according to the most recent PRC data). So, the majority of *those* grannies are using computers.

I don't think we're just talking about men who've come out of high tech careers.

Best wishes, Ericka

Addressed that separately in the next post about the likelihood that white, college-educated men were professionals who'd used computers at work before turning 65.

As opposed to my parents, who did NOT use computers at work, are coming at it as complete novices, and having never really seen the usefulness of computers in action, don't see the need to buy one now.

The only up-close experience mom had with computers till Neighbor C's kids bought her one, was Neighbor B (a little older than me), a dingbat who downloaded whatever attachment was sent to him, and therefore half the time his computer was out of commission with multiple virii, and waiting days or weeks for his son to have the time to fix it so that two days later he could infect it again. A combo of B's never worked right, and C doesn't know how to do more than e-mail with hers, hardly the greatest sales pitches in the world!

Quite frankly, Mom's right, when I was there and looked up a transport schedule online, by the time I googled the URL and clicked through to get the correct page loaded, it probably would have been faster for her to just phone the terminal and ask "what do you have arriving around 3 PM?" It was the fun of "playing online" versus an equally-effective method of picking up the phone (which, in stormy weather, would've been required anyway, to verify they were running in the storm, information that wouldn't have been reflected on the year-old schedule on the website).

But, I've owned a computer for more than 20 years, and have been working on them on a daily basis for more than 25 years, and I can't run my business without one, so I'm more willing to juggle my budget and my daily schedule to allow for a computer than someone who's getting along just fine without one, and really doesn't do anything that she needs a computer to do.

Please don't take my responsibility over a word as an apology. I merely wanted to clear up a misunderstanding.

I took your original message to be demeaning and insulting to senior citizens, and I still feel that way, but my mother taught me to fight fair.

No? Go back and read Lucille's and Sheena's statements that almost every senior they know is online.

And they're not "my" statistics. I was so enamored of how everyone else's statistics supported my statement that seniors are the age group "least likely to have a computer" that I never got around to looking for my own.

Fine, a majority of white, college-educated males are online; I can readily agree that's likely even without a statistic to back it up. But my initial statement didn't differentiate between rich white men and poor black women or anything other than by age group.

All the statistics provided by other people have shown that, in fact, just as I said initially, seniors are the age group "least likely to have a computer". Even the highest number for "over 65", not broken down by race/income/education, proves that only a minority of seniors have computers.

We can break down statistics any way you want, into as minuscule categories as you like: 100% of Canadian seniors named Sheena who dub themselves Lucretia are online. 100% of seniors over the age of 80 who are my parents are not online. But taken as a whole, my initial statement stands, that the over 65 age group is "least likely to have a computer" and no one has provided any statistic to prove that statement wrong. Lucille's attempt to prove it wrong served only to provide the statistic that 22% of seniors are online, versus a much higher percentage of under 65s, which is exactly what I said it would be: over

Anything about "a majority of seniors" versus "half of seniors" versus "a third of seniors" versus "22/29/35% of seniors" came in after I made my statement which still has not been proven wrong.

In Sheena and Lucille's social circles, computer use is apparently significantly higher than among my family and their social circles. Good for them. However, the 22% statistic offered up by Lucille proves that it's not "my crowd" who are the aberration, because the 1-in-5 I'm seeing both among my family and my parents' neighbors is precisely borne out by that 22% (+/- margin of error).

You addressed it separately while making it look like it wasn't what I was referring to when I spoke of a majority.

But you're extrapolating from two data points without any evidence that they are representative of their sets. Neither my step mother nor my father used computers at work, but both use them now to do their banking, some shopping, and to stay in touch with their kids. My father is an 88 year old college educated white male and his wife is a 78 year old college educated white female. I don't think they're representative of their class, either, but they balance out your parents and invalidate your point.

And, by the way, my mother, who was a stay at home mom until she was 50, bought a PC junior way back when just because she could. But that says nothing at all about the propensity of 50 year olds in the 1970s to own computers.

Elizabeth

You mean reading them looking for any little thing that someone with a bone to pick might be able to twist around in order to pick that bone?

I'll do that on legal documents, but internet postings aren't that important for me to look at for three hours to see what someone with an ulterior motive could possibly read into a simple declarative sentence.

Absolutely, but my apparently inflammatory statement specified I was discussing computer use "over 65", and not the 40-year-old who is biologically a grandmother.