Thoughts on social networks and aging
I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately.
She’s 91 years old. Healthy. Spunky with a large extended family of kids, grand kids and great grand kids. There are people all around in her retirement community. In spite of this she appears lonely and bored…achingly so at times.
I sense she feels isolated from her past and trapped in an ever-shrinking present. Not abandoned certainly–but friendships and networks outside of immediate family that come to visit are just not there. And there is little productive to do.
Her communities, once very large, are evaporating. Connections outside of the family are gone mostly. And to someone whose father drove a horse drawn cab in NYC at her birth, computers are just not truly a part of who she is.
And she is not unique, but an example of many who live between the extended family structure of the immigrant family and the social reality of a networked world that many of us inhabit.
For most of us, social networks have flattened the world and community has taken on new forms, providing a huge umbrella of support. We have Facebook walls, niche interest groups, blog communities, and offline/online connections. We have numerous lingering touch points with contacts and friends in a way that my mother never had.
This is not about richness of life…my mother’s life has been very rich. It’s about something new and extraordinary that the social web has empowered. This ability to create community as a hedge against location, a hedge against aging to some degree and certainly…a hedge against isolation as it engenders friendships in new ways.
My mother’s world has been one of astonishing change…world wars, the great depression, air travel, empowered middle class, electric powered everything, but for her, it stopped at the networked world. We spring off where she stopped and nothing is more compelling or revolutionary that what the social web empowers around people and friendships and community.
My mother sends (some) emails. Plays computer solitaire…so it is not simply technology where we spring beyond her generation. It’s networks and the social possibilities that are the great chasm here. And while we understand intellectually the power of social and community, my sense is that it is just beginning and its power is just getting tapped.
Maybe when I’m my mother’s age…when the baby boomers succumb to old age…the body will not hold us back as much. And will not create isolation or lack of productivity as our physical reality becomes less limber and more confined.
Science has extended our lives and made the middle of life longer, more productive and not much different from the decades preceding. I’m thinking that a networked and community driven, intertwined off and online world, will extend that even further, enabling connections, productivity and support for an even longer, richer period.
Add the science of health aging to the empowerment of community and socialization in a connected world, and we have something new and powerful. Technology usually evolves from one thing to another. The social web and community is a revolution in how we live better…for far longer.
