Your Browsing Experience

Every blog should take into account its audience. For example, I recently learned that when you "import" a blog into Facebook, the only clue that the note you're reading isn't a random note is a small link at the bottom that says, "View original post." So I think I'm just going to have to include the word BLOG in my first several posts, and many links to my blog (s).

But there's a fundamentally different problem I have to deal with, and that's the "old geezer" and "geezer-to-be" schism. I'm realizing that normal blogs, which geezers-to-be feel are an extension of the self (remember Xanga?), are not as intuitive for old geezers.

I have some theories about this. "Old" is when you're old enough that you think you shouldn't have to learn any more, and for anyone who turned old before the Internet came around, there's limited progress that can be made. Not because once you turn 65 or 70 or 90 that your brain stops working, but because you think all this stuff that you didn't need before you shouldn't need now. Old geezers don't want progress.

I'm sure I'll be the same way eventually. I'll have just retired from Supreme Court-hood and will say to all the young whippersnappers around me. "Automatic altitude adjustment on my flying car? But there are so many options to it... Do I want 'Wind Optimization'? And 'Nature Preservation'? Or maybe just 'Fuel Efficiency.' I just want to fly! You know, back in my day, we didn't have to make all these choices. There was manual and automatic, sure, and then hybrid, but nothing complicated like this..."

But I should bring up some examples, because I'm pretty sure we geezers-to-be don't understand the depth of old geezers' inability to use technology.

My mom had a conversation with my sister that brought it to my attention after my first post. "'Can you believe it?' she joked with Melanie. 'Will actually expects people to listen to a song on Youtube and read his version of the lyrics. At the same time.'"

I had hoped that everyone would understand tabbed browsing, so in one tab you're waiting for the New York Times to load and in another tab you're cruising Facebook to talk to friends you're friends with. But I hadn't considered that using two tabs at once could overwhelm someone. If it's just a problem of unfamiliarity, then all I have to say is that if you click on a link while you're holding "Ctrl" then the page will open in a new tab. But if it's a problem with capacity, then I have no solution.

If all you want to manage is one thing at a time, your browsing experience is so much different than mine. I feel lonely if I only have one tab up. My homepage used to start with four websites (accomplished by using the "|" sign between addresses in Firefox's homepage options). I routinely IM several people at a time while writing on people's wall, scrolling through the news, and reading the latest on a few blogs. With a Wikipedia tab up for convenience if I need to look something up.

Or look at my little joke about links at the top of this post. The savvy reader would see the words "many links to my blog," see that there were many links, and would assume (correctly) that they all linked to my blog. That's a joke, see, because all those links are redundant. It's also funny because so many links look like advertising, but it's useless to advertise your own website on your website. And if the savvy readers weren't sure, they would move the mouse over the links, notice that in the bottom of the browser they all pointed to the same website, and would also get the joke. And even if they didn't do that, they would hold Ctrl and open each one in a new tab, and then see that the tabs were all the same page.

But the old geezer, being adventurous enough to trek beyond the safety of one page, would click on the first link, be directed to the same page, and then be confused why it didn't work. After a few attempts, they would frustratingly be defeated until they got to this paragraph and lamented being old.

And all I can think of right now is that when I was in China, I learned the word for "generation gap." But I never learned how to say "exacerbated by technology." Maybe I should pull up another tab and google the translation.