Here are two nice examples of how the ubiquity of the Internet has impacted two distinct age groups: those who have had the Internet all of their lives, and those to whom it’s still a “new thing”.

One of our neighbours recently celebrated her retirement by buying her first computer, a Macbook Air, and inviting the Internet into her home. Once I’d helped her set everything up she was emailing, web-browsing and printing like a natural.
A couple of weeks ago one of her dogs was attacked by another dog and, knowing M’s ability to fix a variety of wildlife, she knocked on our door in a panic. M explained that she really couldn’t help with a domestic pet, especially one that probably needed surgery. Nonetheless she went round to see if there was anything she could do to help. The scene was intense: the wounded dog was being held by our Neighbour’s sister who was accordingly splattered with a liberal quantity of blood, while our neighbour was hunched over the phone book frantically trying to find the address and phone number of her vet. M was a little surprised by this for a several reasons, not least of which was that people still had phonebooks. “Wait!” she couldn’t help exclaiming, “where’s your laptop?” A quick Google later she’d located the name and address of the vet to the amazement and relief of everyone. It hadn’t even occurred to our neighbour or her sister that the task of looking up a phone number could have been achieved by any other means than the traditional dead-tree method. But what of the generation that have never known a world without The Internet?

Being middle-aged and a code-monger means that my day job frequently involves being surrounded by what I now call “children” (that’s pretty much the only benefit to not being young any more.) We work in the city, but not too near the food action, so we often get together and order food for delivery at lunchtime. Most of the local vendors have switched to using GrubHub for orchestrating orders and in fairness Grubhub do a pretty good job of it on the whole – their cutesy, patronising communications notwithstanding.

One particular lunchtime a group of “children” were ordering Sushi via grubhub when the unthinkable happened: Grubhub went down mid order! Worse still, the vendor didn’t have any other ordering mechanism on their website. Imagine the panic! The Sushi vendor wasn’t totally inaccessible – a reasonably short drive, or a considerable walk away – but on this particular day the outside world was hostile; the ground was covered in snow and ice, the temperature was around -10C, and it was raining. The would-be lunchers were despairing when a slightly older colleague spoke up and suggested they phone the order in! A few seconds of silence followed while everyone considered this bizarre suggestion. “Of course,” said one of the sushi-seekers, “I would never have thought of that!” And the lunch came, and it was good, and there was much rejoicing.