If your family is anything like mine, your parents are technophobes who haven't moved on from Pong and electronic calculators. In fact I bet they've got an abacus somewhere in the cupboard. Needless to say the computer in the house collects a lot of dust. Grandparents… that's another story altogether; they don't even have a computer; they've probably never spoken the word 'computer.' But apparently that's a rarity these days as more and more Grandparents have started to muscle in on our fads. According to recent statistics a fifth of all grandparents are on a social network.
The data was gathered via an online survey at myvouchercodes.co.uk .1,341 grandparents were asked,
"Do you have an active account on any social networking websites?"
22 per cent of grandparents over 60 answered yes with 71 per cent of golden oldies on Facebook and 34 per cent on Twitter the remaining 9 per cent are on LinkedIn. I am truly embarrassed that I don't yet have Twitter.
The website also dug into the motives of the pensioners and discovered half of them had been peer-pressured by their younger relatives whilst others had jumped onboard to keep in touch with family and to rediscover old friends; fairly standard reasoning there. It's not the most comprehensive study on the aged, but it highlights that the old misconception that the old are stuck in the past, is, well a thing of the past. It also shows a big fat gap in the market for social networking (both the hardware and the online service.)
Image via- theargus