"As an aside, when younger people say older people don't get technology, I think its usually a proxy for social disagreements"
Could be, but I think to a large extent it is that older people tend to assume things that are just not true. Example: my mom asked if I would be able to communicate with her during my upcoming trip to Europe, because she was concerned that there might be "international rates" for the Internet. This is the same woman who is able to use Fedora for daily tasks and who has been using command-line ffmpeg to transcode personal videos for her various devices.
To "get technology" can mean a lot of things. It could mean knowing how to use a terminal. It could just as easily mean understanding that a desktop computer can do all the things that a TiVO can do, or that the Internet does not have any long distance fees, or that the intended use a computer is irrelevant in a conversation about the possible uses of a computer. I would not discount such poor assumptions -- hackers are repeatedly bitten in the ass by law enforcement agencies and judges who have such misconceptions.
Could be, but I think to a large extent it is that older people tend to assume things that are just not true. Example: my mom asked if I would be able to communicate with her during my upcoming trip to Europe, because she was concerned that there might be "international rates" for the Internet. This is the same woman who is able to use Fedora for daily tasks and who has been using command-line ffmpeg to transcode personal videos for her various devices.
To "get technology" can mean a lot of things. It could mean knowing how to use a terminal. It could just as easily mean understanding that a desktop computer can do all the things that a TiVO can do, or that the Internet does not have any long distance fees, or that the intended use a computer is irrelevant in a conversation about the possible uses of a computer. I would not discount such poor assumptions -- hackers are repeatedly bitten in the ass by law enforcement agencies and judges who have such misconceptions.