With reference to your article in the September issue ‘Are You Well Connected? ’ I am one of the 5 million British over 65s without internet skills because I choose not to have them. I am literate and numerate and I like to think reasonably intelligent, having benefitted from a grammar school education.
You may think it paranoid but I will not be dissected like a laboratory specimen with my every activity leaving an electronic footprint available to government agencies, commercial organisations and sundry other busy-bodies who want to make my business theirs.
I am financially comfortable but object to the ridiculous prices asked for electronic gee-gaws and the packages associated with them. Its, not that I am unable to afford them. The much vaunted savings that apparently are available to me if I use the internet are irrelevant. My basic needs are simple!
Any information I need comes from my own small library or public ones. Slow it may be but much more pleasurable and socially more rewarding. I am not important and so my life would be of no interest to ‘tweeters’ in the way that their banal existence is of absolutely no interest to me. Only my family matters or interests me, and the rest of the world, considering the mess it’s in, does not impact me. I enjoy the privacy and the calm of my parallel world and the contentment it brings me.
Finally, it occurred to me that you may wonder what age I am. I am 77 and thus very easy for me to take the stance outlined above … a privilege of being retired.
Mr R Morris, Stoney Stanton
