The chatterati’s most recent TV obsession is Adolescence, a new series about an apparently nice 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. It turns out he was being bullied on social media and watching a lot of disturbing online content. Nice middle-class parents come away from the programme worrying if too much screen time might be a pathway to murder as well as – nearly as bad – a second-rate university. The cast, including Stephen Graham, have been on an appropriately earnest press circuit. Keir Starmer has convened a round table.
These kinds of internet cautionary tales often focus on teenagers, but the people who are truly at risk online are the over-60s. Anyone born after 2004 is younger than Facebook, and for them social media is as much a fact of the universe as drizzle.
Credulous oldies, on the other hand, are still dazzled by the cave of wonders. Teenagers watch four hours of disturbing videos and maybe stab one classmate; grandparents watch four hours of Facebook videos and ruin Christmas forever. Wealthy Nigerian Princes, the healing effects of turmeric, the risks of vaccines, virus alerts, fake customer support emails, celebrity friend requests, chemtrails, life insurance, Brexit: there has never been a scam or conspiracy promulgated online that grandparents have not fallen for harder than their grandchildren.
The process can be alarmingly fast. One minute Aunt Helen is googling whether Dominic Sandbrook is single, the next she is at breakfast mumbling darkly about Bill Gates and talking about how all the real news is on Telegram.
For younger relatives, it can be upsetting to watch an older loved one fall down an online hole. They blame themselves: what if they had never reset that router? They lament the passing of the good old days, when grandparents read books, played outside and followed the advice of Which? magazine. But it’s no use dwelling on the past. With time, money and iPads, boomers are ripe for exploitation. No amount of cajoling from the younger generation will put the genie back in the box. We only hope Stephen Graham is working on a sequel, a four-part series in which it is gradually revealed that a retiree from Sussex has spent his life savings on an anti-littering cryptocurrency supposedly endorsed by Richard Hammond. The title could be Senescence.
A new company, Boom, wants to bring back supersonic travel between London and New York. Flying back from New York at the weekend, however, I realised that the problem is that the overnight flight is not too slow but not long enough. Six and a half hours – less with a tailwind – leaves no time for a kip, especially once the crew have gone through the rigmarole of handing out the horrid little meals. As I trudged bleary-eyed through Heathrow at dawn, I conceived an alternative airline, SnailJet. Customers would pay more for the privilege of two extra hours in the air, possibly a couple of laps of Ireland, and no meal. They would arrive much better rested.
Train planners make the same mistake, thinking everyone is obsessed with the stopwatch. HS2 was sold on the promise of improving travel times. Advocates ought to have framed it in other types of convenience. £80bn is a lot of money to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster, but it is a small price to pay for decent wifi. What is an office – or home – these days if not a comfortable chair with wifi? To paraphrase the bluesman Howlin Wolf, transport should be built for comfort rather than speed.
I was intrigued by a piece in Maclean’s, the Canadian magazine, arguing that for young people astrology has become “the new therapy”. The article cited a survey showing that 45 per cent of Canadians aged 18-34 “definitely or probably” believed in astrology.
I wouldn’t be surprised if British figures were even higher. At any gathering of the under 40s you are never more than a few metres away from someone prepared to argue that “if the Moon can affect the tides and women’s periods, it can definitely affect your personality.”
I think this rise is precisely because astrology is nonsense, not despite the fact. Reveal you have turned to Christ or Buddha for comfort and you will have to field tedious follow-up questions. Mention Mercury being in retrograde instead and people might roll their eyes, but you won’t have to talk about Israel or abusive priests. Sounds sensible to me.
The chatterati’s most recent TV obsession is Adolescence, a new series about an apparently nice 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. It turns out he was being bullied on social media and watching a lot of disturbing online content. Nice middle-class parents come away from the programme worrying if too much screen time might be a pathway to murder as well as – nearly as bad – a second-rate university. The cast, including Stephen Graham, have been on an appropriately earnest press circuit. Keir Starmer has convened a round table.
These kinds of internet cautionary tales often focus on teenagers, but the people who are truly at risk online are the over-60s. Anyone born after 2004 is younger than Facebook, and for them social media is as much a fact of the universe as drizzle.
Credulous oldies, on the other hand, are still dazzled by the cave of wonders. Teenagers watch four hours of disturbing videos and maybe stab one classmate; grandparents watch four hours of Facebook videos and ruin Christmas forever. Wealthy Nigerian Princes, the healing effects of turmeric, the risks of vaccines, virus alerts, fake customer support emails, celebrity friend requests, chemtrails, life insurance, Brexit: there has never been a scam or conspiracy promulgated online that grandparents have not fallen for harder than their grandchildren.
The process can be alarmingly fast. One minute Aunt Helen is googling whether Dominic Sandbrook is single, the next she is at breakfast mumbling darkly about Bill Gates and talking about how all the real news is on Telegram.
For younger relatives, it can be upsetting to watch an older loved one fall down an online hole. They blame themselves: what if they had never reset that router? They lament the passing of the good old days, when grandparents read books, played outside and followed the advice of Which? magazine. But it’s no use dwelling on the past. With time, money and iPads, boomers are ripe for exploitation. No amount of cajoling from the younger generation will put the genie back in the box. We only hope Stephen Graham is working on a sequel, a four-part series in which it is gradually revealed that a retiree from Sussex has spent his life savings on an anti-littering cryptocurrency supposedly endorsed by Richard Hammond. The title could be Senescence.
A new company, Boom, wants to bring back supersonic travel between London and New York. Flying back from New York at the weekend, however, I realised that the problem is that the overnight flight is not too slow but not long enough. Six and a half hours – less with a tailwind – leaves no time for a kip, especially once the crew have gone through the rigmarole of handing out the horrid little meals. As I trudged bleary-eyed through Heathrow at dawn, I conceived an alternative airline, SnailJet. Customers would pay more for the privilege of two extra hours in the air, possibly a couple of laps of Ireland, and no meal. They would arrive much better rested.
Train planners make the same mistake, thinking everyone is obsessed with the stopwatch. HS2 was sold on the promise of improving travel times. Advocates ought to have framed it in other types of convenience. £80bn is a lot of money to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster, but it is a small price to pay for decent wifi. What is an office – or home – these days if not a comfortable chair with wifi? To paraphrase the bluesman Howlin Wolf, transport should be built for comfort rather than speed.
I was intrigued by a piece in Maclean’s, the Canadian magazine, arguing that for young people astrology has become “the new therapy”. The article cited a survey showing that 45 per cent of Canadians aged 18-34 “definitely or probably” believed in astrology.
I wouldn’t be surprised if British figures were even higher. At any gathering of the under 40s you are never more than a few metres away from someone prepared to argue that “if the Moon can affect the tides and women’s periods, it can definitely affect your personality.”
I think this rise is precisely because astrology is nonsense, not despite the fact. Reveal you have turned to Christ or Buddha for comfort and you will have to field tedious follow-up questions. Mention Mercury being in retrograde instead and people might roll their eyes, but you won’t have to talk about Israel or abusive priests. Sounds sensible to me.