Recently, there has been talk of a “Facebook for the Elderly,” called Connected Living. Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that what you have heard is incorrect when it comes to this specific site.
Connected Living is actually a service catering to those who are elderly and are in nursing homes. Their mission, as taken from their website, is to “bring the extraordinary benefits of leading a connected life to entire populations who were left behind the digital divide.” For those of us who moan and groan about our parents or grandparents inability to join the “digital age,” here is the opportunity to bridge that gap. The Connected Living service teaches elderly clients how to interact online via email, Facebook, online dating and more. Not only can Connected Living help them communicate with family that may live far away, but they may also find ways to meet people their own age with the help of this service.
After hearing about this site, I called my grandmother, Suzanne Grainger ’56 to see what she thought.
“We want to connect with people our own age, with our interests, in the hopes of making new friends,” she said.
After the death of my beloved grandfather in 2009, it was incredibly important to my grandmother to maintain an active social lifestyle. Luckily, she is incredibly technologically savvy with email and could even Skype when one of my cousins was abroad in Costa Rica. However, for many older people who lose spouses, starting over can be difficult.
“It used to be such a terrible thing to go online for a date. It doesn’t have the stigma that it used to,” Grainger said.
That is what makes Connected Living such an important company. The website says that it “improves the quality of life for seniors.” I am not sure if the fact that there are nineteen million seniors that are not online is necessarily a bad thing, but I personally believe that staying social is a very important part of a person’s quality of life.
For some of us “young’uns,” it may be difficult and even a little weird to envision our grandparents using Facebook, other social media sites or even dating sites. I would point out, however, that life, especially social life, does not just abruptly end after a person’s fifty-fifth birthday. According to my grandmother, her life had just begun. And with the conversion of a lot of social interaction to online venues, it is unrealistic to expect our grandparents not to grow and change with the times. Some may not want to, but then again, I am eighteen and I refuse to use Instagram, so what does that say about me? It is all a matter of personal choice.
“But I’d still be wary of communication with people you meet on a website,” was my grandmother’s closing piece of advice. She’s always right, isn’t she? •
