No, I’m not talking about the generation that came of age during the Great War; or the young lives that ended prematurely during either of the two World Wars; or the Yazidi girls abused so heinously by ISIS; or the Bosniak massacred by the Bosnian Serb Army; or the generations suffering ongoing inhumanity in any number of troubled nations, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, to name just three; or the A-level students whose 'lives have been ruined' by a flawed algorithm.
I’m talking about the elderly who have been ignored, shunned, and frozen-out of everyday life, their independence and confidence eroded by the insidious creep of technology.
I’ve warned of this for a while, criticising banks for closing branches and shunting everyone on-line, resulting in an increasing number of elderly being unable to manage their finances or, if they do, falling victim to simple as well as sophisticated fraud, the banks turning their backs on their customers until forced, by negative PR not altruism, into the minimum of action.
Local Councils, who are supposed to oversee care of their elderly, are also guilty. I remember when my Mum phoned Milton Keynes Council, a while ago now, asking for an application form for some-such-whatever, only to be told to download it from their website.
“I don’t have a computer,” she announced.
“You can pick up a form up from our offices,” she was told.
“I don’t have a car,” she seethed.
“The bus stops close to our office,” she was told.
“But not close to my house!” she snapped – this is Milton Keynes after all.
Reluctantly, the penny-pinching, short-sighted Council popped one in the post.
By the way, Mum – now a nonagenarian – used to have a
computer, but her broadband supplier was TalkTalk and her broadband supply fickle; she got kicked off-line too often and lost patience if not confidence.
If that wasn’t bad enough, her data was hacked under the stewardship of
Baroness Harding, who now lands all these top jobs with the Government. Ah yes.
There’s nothing like rewarding failure. A-level students should have kept quiet
and accepted their lower grades and they’d have ended up at the top of the
tree, because that seems to be how it works these days.
But back to grumbling about the digital age. More recently, cash has been abolished by many outlets because of Covid-19, or that is the excuse. In truth, banks, shops, everywhere, have been looking to ditch cash for years because getting to the bank is a right royal pain because there are fewer branches left in town, and blaming the virus is a Godsend. Mum has a credit card, but forgets the pin, and the touch-and-go doesn’t always work, so what’s she supposed to do? Use an iPhone that she doesn’t have? Heck even I don’t have an iPhone. My mobile makes phone calls, sends texts and has the most delightful tinkling ringtone that sounds like wind chimes, and that’s as advanced as it gets.
The latest supposed digital solution to modern-day problems was dreamt up by Mum’s GP surgery. Anyone would think they didn’t have any elderly patients; if they did, they wouldn’t have completely shut down their telephone lines and made everyone contact them via their website. Mum wanted to phone her GP this morning about her changed prescription, but was met with this voice-message telling her to log on. If she was prone to swearing she’d have told them to bog off. Instead, she phoned me in a distressed state and I had to take over yet another facet of her life, and today she became that little bit less independent and her confidence took yet another knock.
Thanks very much, technophiles – or should that be 'technofails'. Mum will probably require social-services’ intervention sooner than she might have done if she were still allowed to pick up the phone, pay by cash and transact her affairs with pen and paper. Hence digitisation, promulgated on the pretext of saving time and money, will end up costing everyone more.
But I shouldn’t complain. Mum had it easier in her younger days. From a working-class family in the far north of England, she won a scholarship to a good university in the 1940s. Some achievement that. She didn’t need teacher-inflated grades or positive discrimination to get there. She actually benefitted from the best ever tool for social engineering, levelling the playing field, closing the gap, for nurturing otherwise lost generations.
She went to a grammar school.
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