Having recently bought a new telly, I can only endorse my son's view, expressed in his blog, that the plethora of information about technical products that you don't really understand makes it hard to make decisions about what to buy. I'm not surprised that older people feel they just don't want to know about all the new gadgets they might buy. My wife said we should get this telly with all the things it can do that make it so much more than a telly, because in a few years' time our grandchildren will not want to come to see us if our equipment will not meet their assumptions about the world. Already, our grandchildren are unable to comprehend why our telly can't just show everything they might want to see just when they want to see it.
Stuart Payne's blog on logistics.
It's a feature of old age that one's children's professional activity in completely incomprehensible worlds begins to eclipse one's own feeling of general social competence; I was never sure what logistics (you see it on the sides of lorries) was in general before my son got a job doing it, and I'm still not sure what he actually does; my mother had the same problem about social work. But I see from the blog that the old Sony telly that we used to watch a quarter of a century ago has formed his retail decision-making, so obviously parental behaviour does have long-term implications. It seems that modern domestic equipment, marvellous though it is in so may ways, is just too complicated even for younger people nowadays to keep up with. This is a sign of the rigidities of old age strike ever younger because today's world is so unnecessarily complicated.
I might worry that this why I've had to take so much stuff back after Christmas. But no, as I said to the young man who said he could help me with my wife's new gadget, it's not that I don't know how to make it work, because I can make my own work. It's just that because modern technology can, modern technology does and then it's made itself too complicated to work
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