What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
Other Stroke Symptoms
Watch for Sudden:
CONFUSION, trouble speaking or understanding speech
Good info to post! Actually, I like that this is now a thing to ask someone whose post is turned to gibberish by autocorrect: it keeps the idea in mind, should anyone need it in real life
“Couldn’t reply to message on Lemmy, was written like it was typed on a keyboard. Literally can’t right now. Too many words.”
What an asshole.
45+ is “older people” to you?
In the US, the average life expectancy is 79.7 years old. Half of that is 39.87, and looking at demographics the median age is even lower.
So yes, 45 year olds are easily older than most people in the US at least. I think that’s a fair statement.
Stop scaring me. I don’t want to think about my death!!
It’s about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely. The amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene. If you can’t bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way, I’m going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just won’t read it. And frankly, if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you don’t need punctuation, then you really don’t have anything to add, so probably just shouldn’t.
It’s about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely the amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene if you can’t bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way I’m going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just won’t read it and frankly, if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you don’t need punctuation then you really don’t have anything to add so probably just shouldn’t
Its about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely the amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene if you cant bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way Im going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just wont read it and frankly if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you dont need punctuation then you really dont have anything to add so probably just shouldnt
In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.
Older people who communicated over text before the internet only did this in one way - writing letters.
As a result their style of texting or emailing is often very long form in comparison.
When writing letters you are limited by how much room there is on a piece of paper.
This leads to using some shorthand which used to be fairly common, but has fallen out of public knowledge for younger people.
You could argue that some of the stuff that younger people email or text informally can be just as cryptic because there is entirely different shorthand that millenials and generations Y and Z use.
If you closely examine how you casually communicate with your peers of a similar age, you will notice it can be just as odd as what you experience from communicating with generations on either side of you.
Young people grew up with MSN and AOL… since when young is 40yos.
I’m over a decade away from 40 and I grew up with it.
Furthermore the context of the use of younger is in:
“In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.”
Which is replying to a post titled:
“What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?”
The use of “Younger” here is not an absolute term, it is a relative term, meaning it refers to people younger than the older people the original poster is referring to, who are in my estimation likely to be anyone under the age of 60 based on what OP describes and my informed experiences having worked in the IT industry supporting users of all ages.
Punctuation
And spelling.
And knowing that ‘e-mail’ never gets pluralized with an S, and a host of other simple things that were lost when they seemingly stopped having Grade 3.
We can drive a stick, make a campfire, tie a bowline or a splint and make an igloo and a lean-to. We fought with sticks, we wore no helmets and if we didn’t learn at school they held us back. Fear us.
damn bro you accidentally posted your facebook post as a lemmy comment.
So you would say that you received 3 e-mail today?
An eee-mail?
Did you also walk to school uphill both ways, barefoot on snow and broken glass?
no, they were our parents, and they never let us youngins (now around 50) forget it
Younger than 45
Oh OK that actually makes sense.
45 year olds and above are digital immigrants. In short, they had an off-line childhood and an online adulthood. They have different speech and writing patterns to you because they learnt and communicated in a different way to you.
Assuming you’re under 45, this won’t make sense, because you’ve never experienced a world which doesn’t have this sort of interaction. You’re a digital native, digital tech has always been there.
In twenty years time, children born or educated after the advent of chat gpt will have the same problem understanding you. The way you write, post and interact will seem clunky and old fashioned. It’s already happening!
The wonderful thing about humanity, tho, is that we adapt and adopt! Consider this - everyone over the age of 50 had to learn something completely new to them in order to be able to communicate with you like this. They used to just talk or write letters. That’s it.
Take into account that those 45 and older were the ones with disposable income when the internet took off
We fuckin invented the digital world, and memes too!
Not sure who the “we” is in your post but Imo the biggest influence on meme culture was 4chan and similar dumpster fire communities of the early/adolescent Internet.
Yes and were in our 40s now. Those teenagers grew up, at least chronologically.
We’re kinda schizophrenic; working normal jobs during the day, but a part of our mind is still a snarky, sarcastic shitposter with a truly horrific sense of humour lol
Your timeline is straight up fucked. In short, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
From my experience, touch typing and using all fingers (home row technique I think it’s called) is less common among boomers, especially men. Even in professional settings I’ve seen men peck at their keyboards with just their pointer fingers. The slowness of this technique might explain the use of abbreviations at the desktop?
There’s probably some really weird graphs to be made of who hunts and pecks and who uses the home row
I don’t have the stats on it, but I suspect that up until about the 80s men would mostly hunt and peck, and women were a mixture, because a lot of secretaries and such who had to type professionally were women. As computers became bigger more men would start using the home row, peaking around the 90s/early 2000s when pretty much every milenial had computer/typing classes (although I know plenty of my millennial peers still hunt and peck) and now it’s on a bit of downward slope with Gen z/alpha who are more used to phones/iPads.
I work in 911 dispatch, it’s a bit of a thing I’ve noticed with our younger new hires, they’re somewhat less comfortable with keyboard/mouse controls than the rest of us (and for added confusion, we have trackball mice, a lot of them have never seen or used one before or an old mechanical mouse with a ball. A handful of them have barely used mice at all and are more used to laptop trakcpads and touch screens. They catch on pretty quick but there’s definitely a bit of a learning curve.
trackball mice
But why? These were never more popular than traditional mice
I don’t know the reasoning, I’ve always personally liked trackballs so I never questioned it
But if I had to hazard a guess, maybe because we each have 5 or 6 monitors, and it’s easier to just give the trackball a good spin when you have to go from one far edge to the other than it is to pick up and move your mouse a few times or to provide adequate desk space.
They’re supposed to be better at preventing RSI
RSI?
repetitive stress injury i think.
I’ve mostly seen the opposite. older people having taken typing classes while people who started typing very yound never got instruction and even if they had their hands would have been too small at the time. they do get pretty good WPMs though.
Early 2000s we started playing Typing of the Dead in our breaks so we could get the parts of work that needed typing done more quickly.
Still can’t type, I switched to swiping on phones the minute I could.
My mother would mistype and just accept whatever word was substituted in the autocorrect. So I’d receive messages like “what’s times area your striving art under Stevens’s on Saturdays”. Then I’d have to ring her, on the off chance she answered (only turned the phone on when expecting a call), so there wasn’t any point texting in the first place.
Haha aww that is me.
My mother is the opposite. She will make sure to correct every word even it it’s clear what it meant.
I meant „even if“ not „even it“
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns? Every Sentence reads like the just read the Written Word for the first time and wanted to give It a Try For Themselves
I’m not as old as OP mentioned, but sometimes I’ll do it when it’s a word that’s commonly abbreviated or part of a title. Like “Original Poster”.
I’ve had a couple people ask me if I’m German, but no, I just like some of their ideas on capitalization.
In 18th century English they did the same Thing. German too. Nouns were more important
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns?
I’ll admit it’s a weird Habit.
Edit: Nouned.
This is the accepted writing style at my work, and it’s been driving me nuts for years. I’m talking about the copy we put on all our public facing materials. Even our resident linguists hate it, but apparently someone high up thinks it’s industry standard.
Remembering this just made me happier to be leaving soon. They’re so resistant to challenging entrenched habits. I should have seen these signs when I started.
I always capitalize words that locally mean something specific and technical. Like the Group a Record is associated with in the Student table.
Do you mean things like that? Or just capitalizing all Nouns for no Reason or Something silly?
Similar to that. Nouns that have a somewhat specific meaning in our business context, like Investor, Adviser, Product, Portfolio, etc.
My Android keyboard will automatically capitalize lots of common words like target, guess, even-- shit it’s not doing it now, it heard me thinking. I guess it’s brands, but some of them I don’t recognize. I’m going to be mad if it starts doing it again as soon as I leave this thread.
My phone insists on Land. Wtf, phone?
This happens to me when I add a word to the dictionary but it happened to be the first word of a sentence at the time I added it, so it got capitalized and now the dictionary thinks it’s a proper noun
For me. That’s usually autocorrect. If it decides a typo such as accidenta double-space means the end of one sentence, then capitalizes a word, it’s below my threshold to go back and fix. You shouldn’t be confused by random. Apitalization and letter skips from autocorrect, but I’ll correct it when it’s autocorrect sped to to something. Different like this last sentence where it looks like I’m having a stroke
All of my kids messages are super short or emoji filled, my wife, friends and older contacts all text to text me full paragraphs or sentences.
Need some examples
Sounds like you’re a millennial with gen alpha kids. The latest generation is struggling to read and write, while millennials are the best typists
I blame msn messenger for my speedy typing.
Never been called geriatrics before. I can retire now! Nice
@MissJinx @asklemmy I wasn’t sure of the right word to use. Geriatric seemed correct enough. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything especially wrong or bad about my elders. I just think there might be some kind of technological and cultural collision happening that makes me feel like I’m crazy sometimes.
Oh boy, I’m an “Elder” now. Gonna go kill myself realy quick
hahaha jokes aside I see your point. I’m full time online so I don’t have a problem but yes, I only had internet when I was 12yo and smartphones when I was past 25yo so we really don’t have the same education. Someone that is not online all the tine will have a hard time keeping up.
I don’t think that the internet even existed when I was 12 as anything other than dial-up modems and a collection of bulletin board systems. It wasn’t until I was in college that the ‘modern’ internet came online. I didn’t have my first “smart” phone–and I’m using that term very loosely–until I was in my 30s.
I also remember when Windows 3.1 came out, and oh boy, that was neat! Suddenly I didn’t have to program batch files to configure memory in order to play games!
Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
What always makes me laugh about posts like this is the knowledge that soon you too will hit that terrible 45 and become “geriatric”. Your text messages and emails (how quaint) will suddenly become incomprehensible and everyone will claim you are giving them a stroke just by existing <rolls eyes>.
The clock is ticking… faster than you think.
That’s an incredibly bad faith reading.
Anyone younger than 45 is going to have greater digital exposure and be more adept at electronic communication. The older you are, the less likely you are to be frustrated with how geriatrics communicate because the more familiar pre-digital communication styles will be to you.
That’s an incredibly naive answer.
I’m well aware that I’m somebody else’s elder. I meant it matter-of-factly, like “geriatric pregnancy”.
a) You made a gross generalization that cannot be attributed to a particular age group in a consistent, reproducible manner. “Old” in itself is of course an imprecise term use primarily in relative terms.
b) If as you assert, then you used the term incorrectly. The commonly accepted medical definition of “geriatric” is 65 years or older. When used in a general way to mean “aged” it is not “matter-of-fact” but a generalization and by it’s nature relative.What you really mean is “people older than me that I find annoying” similar to “boomer” or, in your case, your specific non-factual and colloquial use of “geriatric”.
IOW, attributing your annoyance to some vague age group is roughly as ridiculous as attributing your annoyance to the color T-shirt someone is wearing. Or what country they come from, race they are… etc etc etc. It’s a pointless, meaningless, and often highly localized stereotype.
It’s not the attributes of the person, it’s the behavior.
I’ve observed the same thing. The phenomenon is real, even if it’s a generalization. How would you communicate this idea in a polite way? “A certain way of communicating by text that is predominantly displayed by the geriatric population”?
“A certain way of communicating by text that is predominantly displayed by the geriatric population”
You don’t. It’s still a pointless unprovable stereotype.
Is it really unprovable? A quick search online for me reveals a lot of spilled pixels on the subject of how age is correlated with communication styles in various media. I think Gretchen McCulloch wrote about this even.
I don’t see why it’s bad to talk about these things. I’ll admit, OP’s language here was rather inflammatory. But some people say what you’re saying regarding ebonics, yet AAVE has become one of the biggest fields in linguistics today. “Stereotype” doesn’t necessarily mean “problematic to acknowledge.”
@enbyecho @asklemmy Well, geriatric pregnancies start at age 35, so it’s really a flexible adjective. If you took it incorrectly, that’s on you.
Based on the mixed responses I’m getting, it is not an established stereotype that older people write emails and text messages poorly. If I knew it was then I wouldn’t have asked if others had similar experiences to mine in the first place.
…what do you mean…
Nope, I find people older than me are more likely to write with full grammar and the younger ones use internet-specific grammar.
ikr!
This seems to stem from when we had dumbphones that didn’t even have T9 predictive spelling.
Meaning that if you just wanted to type a common message like “I am on the train, 25 min away” would mean pressing the following keys:
Empty spaces is use to indicate a slight pause.
4,4,4,0,2,6,0,6,6,6, ,6,6,0,8,4,4,3,3,0,8,7,7,7,2,4,4,4,*,*,0,2,2,2,2,5,5,5,5,0,6,4,4,4,6,6,0,2,9,2,9,9,9
I used t9 in high school. In retrospect it’s obviously unusably clunky, but I do miss being able to text totally blindly in my pocket or something.
I tried using T9 from time to time, but it often sucked for me, probably because I needed to use it in Swedish and it wasn’t that well developed for it.
T9 was so bad that I don’t even understand that they threw these phones on the market.
I was there for the whole GSM phone era and the most obvious thing would have been to release a blackberry type thing with a slide out keyboard.
T9 just adapted the earlier lettering that phones already had on the numbers. ‘1-800-COL-LECT’ Never intended you to type it as ‘1-800-222666555-555332228’, you’d just dial 1-800-265-5328. but that’s what you’d have to do to write it with T9.
Well, that is not all it did, it had a dictionary to do predictive text, and the Swedish one was never really good.
The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it’s almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.
I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn’t always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.
I always read now and even back then people complaining about t9 and how shitty it is…
I don’t know, I loved it on my Sony Ericssons. The implementation of it was really nice.
Granted, I did use it on my native language, so maybe in English, it is shitty, but it was a must have thing to turn on for me after a while (when I discovered and realized how it works. before that, it was just some strange black magic)
Just started typing, and if I waited a bit, a list of words came up and could use the dpad or joystick to select a word. only annoying thing was a popup, if the word did not exists I was trying to type, but then I could just add it with two button presses and that’s it.
