Hard to believe, but true: Of the people aged 70+ in our country, 10 million have never used the Internet. Another 10 million users have never purchased anything online. The Bremen Professor Herbert Kubicek of the Institute for Information Management Bremen (ifib) at the University of Bremen therefore calls for the immediate provision of 330,000 tablet PCs to be made available to senior citizens and retirement homes.
Twittering, chatting, sending e-mails, surfing on websites, shopping online – that all goes without saying for young and the young at heart. But the elderly members of the population are much more reticent about participating in such online activities. Moreover, they receive little help in getting in touch with the Internet world and dealing with it. “20 million elderly people in Germany are missing out on digitalization,” says Informatics Professor Kubicek. Together with his colleague Barbara Lippa from the Digital Opportunities Foundation, he has now published a study with new research results on this “age gap”.
Herbert Kubicek calls on politics to make massive investment in digitalization “to go” for senior citizens: “Against the backdrop of our rapidly aging society, it would be more than negligent to continue to do so little in this area.” Many millions of older people in Germany are still offline. “They have inhibitions about using these technologies or security concerns. But unlike children, for whom billions are promised in ‘digitalization offensives’, they receive precious little support!”
Evening courses on the use of tablets in the community college, says the research team, would probably not do much to change the situation. What older people really need on their way to the Internet are customized concepts and offers: “Not courses with mixed participants, but rather coaching in small homogeneous groups” is the proposal put forward by Kubicek and Lippa. In addition to regular practical exercises, there should be other consultation opportunities, where you can still get help and advice after the training course. In their study, which has since appeared as a book, the authors have elaborated ten principles for the age-appropriate promotion of digital literacy.
