The Guardian reports on a recent report from the “centre-right Policy Exchange think tank… [that] recommends £875m should be spent on training the 6.2 million mainly elderly people who are without basic digital skills.” The basic idea is that lots of elderly people suffer from loneliness and restricted mobility, and that learning to use the Web would make elders at least more virtually mobile, and more connected.

Roehampton University professor Ros Coward says, not so fast. “Anyone who has spent time with elderly people,” she argues, “knows the real issues are much more complex:”

Loneliness among the elderly is also to do with poverty and declining health. On the one hand, financial hardship restricts their activities; on the other, it increases frailty – including the loss of mobility, eyesight or memory, all of which undermine confidence when moving around in the wider community.

It is often these other factors that will restrict access to the internet, even for those who might once have been able to use it. To access the internet, you need money, or skilled neighbours and friends, to fix glitches; you need eyesight to read screens and memory to recall passwords.

My father-in-law runs the tech support program at his retirement home, and his description of the work has made me rethink some of my assumptions about technology and the elderly. For one thing, many of these people were at the peaks of their careers when personal computers came into the workplace, so they’re not Unfamiliar With Technology. They also tend to need help with the same kinds of things that tech support in your average office has to deal with— e.g., figuring out how to get an operating system patch so you can get the latest printer driver to run the printer that was installed over the weekend, which doesn’t run the old driver but no one mentioned that. And for many the tech support is more like a maid service than full-time nursing: that is, you call on it not because you’re feeble, but because you calculate that it’s worth it to outsource this task.