I like to buy an English-language newspaper every week, but this part of my routine is becoming harder to achieve, as print versions are being transferred online more and more often. This practice is hard on people who are beyond a certain age, and who like the feel, smell, and look of paper and newsprint. In my case, there is also genetic input: one great-uncle produced Victorian township Chiltern’s The Federal Standard for decades (and gave Barrie Cassidy his start) while another was a proof-reader for The Sydney Morning Herald.
The only printed paper I can currently rely on is Britain’s Financial Times Weekend, which has too much emphasis on economics, luxury lifestyle and posh real estate for my taste. But the culture and letters sections are a great consolation. Last week I was particularly struck by a letter written by an 87-year-old woman who said she had poor vision, and that she had to ‘stare through thick spectacles’ in order to interact with today’s world via her computer: she complained that these days it is impossible to contact an actual person when doing even routine business. I am a good way off 87, and am about to collect new glasses, but found myself agreeing whole-heartedly with her complaints about online applications.
In the provincial Greek town of Kalamata the bank manager, dressed immaculately in suit and tie, with the regulation length of white shirt-cuff showing, used to hold court at an enormous desk, empty save for an overflowing ashtray. No longer. This stately figure has now disappeared, and the customer has regularly to battle machines in order to pay rent or keep ahead of bank loans. No teller will give personal service, although they are often forced to help ageing Luddites like me who are baffled by buttons and click requirements and make their frustration obvious. But often no help is forthcoming: recently, an Athenian friend of mine, not much older than I, but widowed and not at all computer or gadget-savvy, was comprehensively blocked from attaining a service she needed because she does not possess a mobile phone.
The FT correspondent made salient and valid points about registering, scanning, passwords and the need to confirm them, but reserves particular ire for two-step verification and the stoppage of access. I’ve never been denied access, but I have been stopped in my digital tracks for reasons I still don’t understand: just recently, while making a book purchase, or trying to, it was a case of ‘thus far, and no farther.’ The problem was solved eventually, but not without much waste of time and a loss of temper on my part.
There is a particular humiliation involved: the digital world often defeats and even excludes worthy citizens who grew up at a time when technology of many sorts was quite different: we had writing pads and pens, bank books and cheque books, and paid cash for most things. Public transport operated on a system involving paper tickets, and so did libraries. Now the cash or card? question has reached even Greece. But one good thing; it is now much harder for business people to evade tax when cards are used so often.
I suppose the FT correspondent has had many low moments as she tries to cope with things that used to be simple. I know I have. Possibly the lowest one came last November, when I was minding my three youngest grandchildren for the best part of a week. This obviously involved cooking at regular intervals. I managed to master the oven, but the stove top had me defeated. There it was: an implacable black surface with hotplates and a few little rings that apparently controlled them.
My elder granddaughter is seven. When I was seven, my family and I lived in a Wimmera township, and my mother cooked on a monster of a woodstove that had to be kept fed with mallee roots and was black-leaded with monotonous regularity. Many decades later, here I am in Greece, and having to call on my granddaughter to solve the mysteries of the stove top, which she did with a very efficient tap of her fingers: she wanted her Greek equivalent of spaghetti Bolognese. She got it and was pleased, but all sense of power had drained away from me. ‘Get over it, Mum,’ said my son. ‘She’s grown up in a digital world, and you haven’t.’
How very true. And how to cope with this? My way is to acknowledge that my grandchildren may perhaps be growing up in a brave new world, but I keep trying to make them aware of an old one that was also brave in its way.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
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