There’s
an assumption in many parts of the meetings industry that older people
are anti-tech and therefore can be safely ignored when discussing issues
relating to technology. People should bear a couple of facts in mind:
first, older people are often the ones who, if not actually making
purchasing decisions, hold the purse strings. Second some of them have
been playing with technology for years.
For example, anybody more
than fifty years old probably started work in the early eighties. They
will have seen the spread of fax machines, PCs, mobile phones and the
Web. In a professional context, they’ve seen the arrival of PowerPoint,
the growth of video recording and of data projection.
In other words, they’ve been dealing with technological developments throughout their working lives.
That
said, there’s no doubt that many of them have a less than enthusiastic
view of some of the technology being promoted in the meetings industry.
The reason may be less to do with the tech itself and more to do with
what it does (or doesn’t) do. They’re probably less likely to be taken
in by the hype surrounding some of the gizmos.
For example, why
bother to haul a phone out in order to take a picture of a QR Code? So
it saves you the trouble of typing a URL into your phone but who’s going
to bother to look at an exhibitor’s website when they’re in front of
their exhibition stand already? Most people over the age of 40 probably
can’t be bothered with Twitter because of the lack of content of any
value and the repetition caused by people re-Tweeting links that they
like. And when it comes to Google Glass, as one person put it recently,
‘Do I want to talk to somebody who appears to be watching to see if
something more interesting is coming up on his Twitter feed?’.
These
same older people will probably decide very quickly which event apps
are worth bothering with and which are a waste of time and will have
recognised that virtual exhibitions were a dead loss years ago.
So
perhaps the idea that older people hate technology isn’t so much that
they can’t cope with it but they’ve seen so much of it over the years
that they’re not as impressed as the younger people who haven’t ’been
there, done that’.
Any comments? Email sarah@mashmedia.net
