Sixty-plus and signed in is a good way to be

The social networking universe may not be seeing a flurry of senior netizen ‘sign ups’ but their presence in this e-space is growing and how! From poking friends they lost touch with over five decades ago, tweeting about standing in long queues to pay bills and getting their daily dose of Farmville to browsing through online albums with sepia-toned pictures, being  web-cool is no big deal for them. In fact, for many from the grandpa and grandma generation, being on Facebook, Twitter or Orkut is slowly becoming an addiction and an engaging one at that. Some find it a creative alternative to plain old e-mail. Several families I know have up to three generations on social networking sites — while ma and grandma may be on each others friends’ lists, that 18 something grandkid wants nothing to do with immediate family, at least online.

If Bangalore’s elders were considered net savvy earlier, they’re now taking a quantum leap when it comes to social networking. A lady I know in the 60-plus demographic is active on the Bangalore social scene. She’s been on Facebook for over two years now and on her friends’ list are her son’s friends and her daughter-in-law’s friends, too. Her knowledge of applications that the service has is astonishing. “I’ve also joined Twitter and I spend a good amount of time trying to come up with creative tweets. The biggest plus of social networking is that I was able to find friends from my school in Ooty and now we are having a reunion after more than half a century. There are so many online groups and blogs for senior citizens like me and its fun to be a part of it all,” she says.

It’s not unusual to see posts or tweets about one’s parents joining social networking sites these days. When veteran political leader and Uttarakhand Governor Margaret Alva joined Facebook, one status message was from her daughter Manira, which said:

“Welcome Ma. Great to have you cross the tech divide, finally.” Manira, who says her son is helping grandma with her FB account, even got several comments for her status message.
One group of 60-plussers who had a popular band called ‘The Mustangs’ back in the 1960’s in Bangalore, had a reunion after 40 years, a few months ago. Several band members have social networking accounts and pictures of the band then and now are proudly posted online. They also have a group on Facebook and their description reads: The band that rocked India in the 60’s and came out with the first Western LP in India. A band member told me that of the 70-odd members of their online group, a large number are youngsters. Another group member’s daughter posted this message on her father’s page,

“Wow Dad… So proud of what you have achieved with the reunion.”

“I recently came across two sites just for grandparents on facebook and twitter — http://www.facebook.com/Grandparentscom and http://twitter.com/grandparents.com , which seem to be very popular with people above 60. That means we are a growing force. I tell my friends that if their grandchildren want an RSS feed of their tweets, I can show them how to set it up. “I love being a click-chick,” says a feisty 70-year-old I met at the library.