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Bill Hendrick – Staff writer, Atlanta Journal Consitution
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
After flying back from Washington one recent day, 57-year-old Ted Daywalt of Marietta was gathering his belongings when he heard “some nut” shouting from a couple of rows back — and looking straight at him like they knew each other.
“He’s talking real loud,” says Daywalt, president of VetJobs, a major job-finding firm for veterans. “I couldn’t tell at first if he was crazy or whether I might have forgotten his name. It’s not uncommon to see street people talking to themselves, but this was on a plane. Then I noticed he had one of those Bluetooth devices clipped on his ear, looking like something out of ‘Star Trek.’ ”
Daywalt was startled at first and then felt a tad behind the times because the gadget reminded him once again that aging baby boomers and their elders are being forced to cope with rapidly evolving new technologies.
“It’s getting rough for boomers and older people,” says Dr. Bill McDonald, 52, chief of geriatric psychiatry at the Emory University School of Medicine. “Now we’re starting to see people 55 and 60 who’re feeling obsolete and pressured to retire. The world is sort of turning over quickly. A lot get a sense of guilt, feeling they haven’t accomplished enough.”
On the other hand, a minority of aging boomers “are doing well because they are adapters, have family relationships and a life away from work,” McDonald says. “They’ve gotten used to change.”
Typical of these is Jeanne Aniton, 54, of east Cobb County, who “grew up” in the technology industry before switching to the physical fitness business. She gets paid for helping others shed pounds.
She’s seen technology “take over a lot of personal and interpersonal relations, and that’s repulsing,” she says. “I’ve seen people send e-mails to people in the next cube and use PDAs to send messages to someone else in the same meeting.”
Aniton concedes she’s a Bluetooth user, and though she tries to use it only while driving, she sometimes forgets.
“There’ve been a couple of times in the grocery store that I’ve gotten some strange looks,” she says.
Like most older boomers, she’s sensitive to what others think about her use of high-tech gizmos.
“Boomers are busy, but they don’t want to look as busy as they are,” McDonald says. “They’re thinking about taking care of elderly parents, helping their grown children, worrying about retirement, the future of Social Security, about being replaced by younger folks, and this technological craze is almost too much. ”
While stressors such as new gadgets and hard-to-use status symbols like PDAs (personal digital assistants) may be making older folks feel like dinosaurs, he says, they are devices that older folks should try to get used to.
More than half the buyers of wireless Bluetooth headsets, which cost between $20 and $120 after rebates, are being purchased by people 32 and under, says Chris Ambrosio, a researcher for Strategy Analytics in Boston. Of all 190 million cellphone users, he says, only 8 percent or so use wireless headsets — so far.
“In the U.S. to date, 7.5 million Bluetooth headsets had been sold,” he says. “We think that this year alone, 9 million will be sold.”
But there’s at least one major downside to this high-tech feeding frenzy — rudeness, says P.M. Forni, head of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and author of “Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct” (St. Martin’s Griffin, $11.95 paperback).
Forni noted a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found that 69 percent of adults feel Americans today are ruder than 20 or 30 years ago, and constant advances in technology are among the culprits.
“For those of a certain age, it can be disquieting or depressing to encounter youngster after youngster sporting a godlike, gadget-aided indifference to his or her surroundings,” Forni says. “If you are hooked up to all sorts of gadgets, you are implicitly scorning the world around you. You are sending the message that you have better things to do than attending to the existence and the relevance of the world around you.”
But all this doesn’t mean that older folks are doomed to live out their lives in digital confusion, says Eva Kahana, a sociologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who has been studying the elderly for decades. She contends older people are leery of technology, but that a small minority is trying to embrace it, especially the computers they use to e-mail grandchildren.
Also, while many aging boomers are put off by Bluetooth devices, an increasing number are embracing them, such as Shariar Makarechi, 52, an instructor at Georgia Tech. His daughter, Tara Makarechi, 24, who works for the Jackson Spalding public relations firm, even laughs at him for using a headset that she has no desire to own.
“It’s the most embarrassing thing in the world,” she says of her dad’s Bluetooth. “He wears it around the house. He’ll sit in the car or on the couch with a laptop on and wearing his Bluetooth. I think it’s so cheesy. I never know when he’s talking to me, or worse, to himself.”
He defends owning one, and says he’s seeing an increasing number of people his age wearing the headsets.
“I don’t use it on campus. But sometimes I forget this thing is on my ear, and I’m doing something with my hands. Most of the time, people don’t say anything, but you get this really funny look, like I’m nuts.”
Another Georgia Tech professor, economist Thomas “Danny” Boston, says the latest gizmos make him feel his age — 58. Or older.
“I have finally gotten used to seeing people with an earphone in their ear, appearing to talk to thin air,” Boston says. “I have students who walk around with an earphone for an iPod in one ear and the iPod in one hand, while at the same time they have a cellphone in the other hand sending text messages. Then they engage me in a conversation and I am not certain who I am talking to.”
As for boomers, they’re more annoyed than their elders about technology because “there is a lot of fear that they will be fired or encouraged to retire based on technological monitoring,” Kahana says. “There is a lot of evidence that people on the cusp of being old and [who] want to continue working are very concerned.”
Michelle Mindala, an executive with Cingular Wireless in Atlanta, expects sales of Bluetooth devices to keep ballooning, even among the small segment of daring elderly.
“It’s just a natural progression of technology,” says Adam Stubin, another Cingular executive.
Natural, maybe, but not to aging boomers, says Roger Entner, an analyst for Ovum, a Boston research firm.
“It’s true, people with Bluetooths look like half-assimilated Borgs,” he says. “You can also get this wireless technology built into sunglasses. You look like Frankenstein’s monster gone wrong.”
Dan Baugher, a business professor at Pace University in New York, says new-fangled gadgets strike some people as rude “because what they’re being used for is unclear. But they’re useful to those who have them.”
Besides, he adds, what’s rude is a matter of opinion.
“I was in Carnegie Hall once and the pianist stopped playing because he heard coughing in the audience,” Baugher says. “He felt it was rude, but it wasn’t intentional. And people who use wireless headsets don’t mean to be rude, either.”