By Teresa A. Martin
When you think about blogs, you tend to think about hormone filled teens or angst filled college students or passionate political partisans ... but it turns out that an awful lot of bloggers out there fall into the category of elder-bloggers.
That is, the senior population is populating cyberspace with a huge range of view and opinions, belying the myth that technology is only for the younger generations. The Associated Press called it the ‘hot new leisure activity’ for retirees and it appears to be a global trend.
Blogs are nothing more than a way to talk to other people and create a community conversation. Better, yet, it is a conversation you can participate in from any location, on e your own time and schedule, and at your own pace.
Blogs aren’t difficult. All it takes is an online connection, a little time, and a desire to create a voice and you are up and running. Blogger is one of the post popular blog tool. In about 3 simple steps you writing and posting, no additional technical knowledge needed.
Some local Cape organizations, like the Dennis Senior Center, are exploring blogs. Theirs is hosted on Cape Cod Today. A quick search finds hundreds of individuals -- Sliver Fox Whispers is just one of many many personal sites that fit the elderblog category. There are blogs about daily life, about growing tomatoes, about traveling in RVs, about well, about just about anything. Age, you see, doesn’t necessary define life’s interests and the elderblog movement reflects that diversity.
We are social critters and we use social space to both define ourselves and connect with others of like mind and story. There are two phases of life where factors converge to make social outreach especially critical. One is, of course, adolescence and early adulthood. In high school and college we are busy defining who and what we are, and creating new connections. The other is post-retirement, where many people are re-defining themselves and creating new networks and connections for their next-stage lives.
At both these phases we’re at a place where we have the time to position ourselves, to reach out, and to express our opinions. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that bloggers are heavily represented in both of these generations.
The Web is indeed a web of information. Elderblogs often serve as jumping off points to intersections on the web, pointers to everything from senior dating sites (with “1000’s of pictures and videos of beautiful seniors”) to hard core information sites about Medicare and legal information, to jokes, to well, again, you name it. If someone in a community cares about it, there’s pointer to it. And if that pointer comes from a blog, it’s almost as if your friend referred you there.
And that’s really the core of blog – community. They are places where people gather and compare notes and interact and connect. They are one part of a whole larger social trend that lets us overcome time and space to continue to meet our very human need for other people.
The web is nothing more or less than a reflection of who we are and we create applications that inevitably express that. Elderblogging? It's one more logical piece of the human condition puzzle.
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