THE OTHER HALF

About eight years ago, my sisters and I gave my mom, then in her late 60s, a computer with cable modem service for Christmas. Two weeks later, she called me to sadly report that she was taking it back to the store, based on instructions from the local police. Inquiring further, I discovered that she'd gotten one of those annoying Windows 95 messages — “Your computer has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” In her world, illegal had only one meaning, so Mom just assumed the message was from the local police, who somehow — through Internet magic — had detected her PC's nefarious behavior. It never occurred to her that all she had to do was turn the machine off and then back on — after all, rebooting doesn't work for washing machines, cars, vacuum cleaners or any other modern appliances with which my mom is familiar. Unfortunately for service providers, particularly telcos with their low-cost DSL offerings, broadband users are beginning to look a lot like my mom, or at least react as she does. This new user group will, in some ways, resemble first-generation immigrants. These are the folks who never learned to speak the language all that well and therefore relied on their savvy grandchildren to help them navigate a strange part of the planet. Of course, not all of them are that old since this is less a matter of age than of familiarity with technology. In all the discussion of the digital living room, it's wise to remember there is a substantial part of the population for whom pods carry seeds and Google is not a verb.