Last Christmas, I tried teaching my 86-year-old mom how to use an iPhone. It was her present — not the phone, but the “training and onsite support” for the phone. After all, I am in this business.
Anyone can hand their mom a phone and wish her well, but it’s a little like giving her a new home theater system and then walking away and leaving her with all the stuff still in boxes; there is little to no chance that she’ll end up using any of it. On your next visit, you’ll find her watching TV as usual, all the high-tech equipment still stowed away.
My mom was motivated, however. So it was my job to be her teacher and guide. The week’s curriculum was a straightforward double-header: helping her learn to make a call and answer a call. I spent one Sunday afternoon setting her up and showing her how to do it. And every day that week, I called her on her iPhone and she answered; and every day she successfully called me. She was also able to retrieve, listen to, and delete voicemails. We were off to a blazing start.
But I knew better than to push too hard.
The first thing I did when I got her iPhone running was to hide as many of the icons as I could. The idea was simply this: get her to use the device as a portable phone first. Her previous cell phone was a clamshell model. She became increasingly frustrated with it. It didn’t ring when a call came in; she couldn’t get voicemails; she got confused making calls; and many mysterious problems would just pop up.
Why encourage the iPhone when my mom could barely handle a basic cell phone? Essentially: consumer culture. There are many more smartphones sold in the world now than those basic models. People just like them more — all sorts of people. So I placed my bet on something a little more complicated but a little more in tune with, and intuitive to, the customer.
The problem was that this particular customer grew up and grew old in a nondigital world. She was in her sixties when the Internet became available to everybody, and in her fifties when the microcomputer landed on people’s desks at work. In addition, she never worked — that is, she never had a job with a paycheck. She didn’t own a computer until about 10 years ago, when she was in her seventies. She had no use for it at home; she had no office where she had to use it.
This forced me to think more carefully about my explanations. For those of us who zip our way around phones, it’s not all that easy to explain what we’re doing. Try it sometime. Pick up your smart phone and watch your fingers as you navigate around, tapping, pinching, swiping. You will begin to see how second nature it all is. Ask yourself why you hit this arrow, or swipe up from the bottom to see the dashboard, or tap a triangle to play voicemail. In other words, try to explain how an iPhone works to yourself. The intuitiveness, the ordinariness, the ease with which you use it every day and every hour, crumbles away beneath you and you find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of lame explanations and bizarre rationalizations. There is a reason it does not come with a manual. Words can’t explain. You have to feel your way through it, close your eyes and use “The Force.” You are a rat in a maze, trying avenues, arriving at dead ends, getting rewards for right thinking. Apple and Google are training you to think the way they want you to think. For most of us, it has become just part of our culture. Because culture is viral, we just pick it up like language. Soon, it’s simply what we do. How we think.
But explaining what we do to an 86-year-old woman so that she can join in? It’s not easy. It’s almost best to describe the functions of an iPhone as a language, a visual language, with its own syntax and vocabulary. Like language, a domain of simple elements, like an alphabet, produces infinite semantic possibilities because you can combine them in so many ways.
The language of the iPhone evolved from the language of “tree menus” that we all used to use, or still use, with Blackberries, landline phones, thermostats, printers, and other devices that have limited graphical interfaces. The tree menus are like rat mazes and much more limited than the iPhone interface; nonetheless, hundreds of functions are possible depending on which choices you make on your way up the branches of the tree.
At 86, my mother wants to learn. She wants to participate, be part of the culture. And I admire her for that. She can’t climb mountains any more; she doesn’t want to take film courses or join a book group; she still reads the entire newspaper every day. She takes very seriously her relationships with her friends and her family and puts a lot of effort into maintaining those relationships. She sees the iPhone as a way to stay connected — and safe — through communication.
And now she is impatient. She is done with simple telephone calls. She wants to text her sons, see pictures of grandchildren, read email from friends, ask Siri how to get to the new restaurant she is taking us to. She will learn what she needs to learn in ways completely different from the way a child learns in school. There is no course for this, no MOOC, no manual.
Having worked in education for 30 years, however, I think it is an amazing gift to witness someone who was born in 1928 adopt a technology that was born in 2007. My mother is finding her way. New pathways are opening in her brain as she collides with the new digital language, hieroglyphs that jump, wiggle, slide, or open into new sets of hieroglyphs. Sure she gets frustrated, but she works her way over and around obstacles. She reads the glyphs, she swipes, taps, taps again, and talks to the voices on the other end of the signal.
She is learning — still learning — because it matters to her. Because she wants to be part of this world, too. And in her motivation lies a lesson for us all. We learn when we deeply want to learn. And our brains can evolve, adapt, change, improve — at any age.
