It’s interesting when a government website like the FBI’s makes a judgment about a whole group of people. It’s more interesting when what the FBI says is, by any sane judgment, totally correct.
“People who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were generally raised to be polite and trusting,” the site reads. “Con artists exploit these traits, knowing that it is difficult or impossible for these individuals to say ‘no’ or just hang up the telephone.”
There you have the FBI as the dispenser of wisdom and common sense: “Seniors are nice and scumbags are not.” What’s next? Will the FBI be telling me that Ivy league undergrads are bedwetting ninnies, or my wife was right to not allow me to teach LSAT prep to kids in Liberia in the middle of the 2014-15 Ebola Outbreak?
What the feds were jawing on about wasn’t naiveté, it’s kindness — seniors born of another era’s classy culture know how to treat human beings like … well, human beings. But as Facebook (and other social media) use by the elderly crosses the fifty percent threshold, I wonder exactly what good it’s doing them.
My guess is that despite the conveniences of the internet, social media is about as healthful for seniors as it is for anybody else. Meaning, I think seniors need to be on Facebook or Instagram like I need to run through a beekeepers’ expo naked and covered in honey.
Here are the two dangers I see: Facebook stores and sells information that data miners can use to scam seniors; and, Facebook’s algorithms will create an artificial shell of impersonal nothingness by which seniors — people from a generation that thrives on real, human interaction — will find themselves increasingly isolated.
The way data miners describe their process is spooky: “For me, I am a Facebook marketer. I am an individual who constantly buys data from Facebook to direct ads to your homepage. […] Now, I can’t target you as ‘Sally’ directly, but I can target you by demographics and traits.”
This means that seniors can be more easily targeted online because scam artists can narrow down their pools of marks ahead of time, like those soulless digital Charles Ponzis have probably already done while targeting seniors on Facebook for both the sweepstakes scam and the lotto grift—Congratulations, you’ve won the rightful respect your damn kids owe you! Just kidding, life is cruel, we don’t care that you were one of the Frozen Chosin, this ‘lotto’ is just an economic vampire sucking your savings out of your damn neck/bank account.
What’s worse, I think, is the isolation seniors already experience that Facebook may make even worse. If you can’t speak to someone face-to-face about your bills, if the socially-damaging artificial communication of the internet does not suffice, if you’re the last one to hear about natural disasters, what’s it all worth to you, the senior?
There are plenty of senior-swindling scams out there that have nothing to do with technology per se, but everything to do with scumbags using technology to bilk kindly old folk. Instead, we should be empowering them. When you make it to ninety years old, I think you shouldn’t have to pay taxes anymore, and when you make it to a hundred, everyone in your age group should be allowed to veto new television shows. That would solve America’s seemingly intractable Lena Dunham problem.
But anyway, maybe it’s just technology itself that’s the swindler. And what is technology stealing from seniors? It’s stealing their humanity—one friend, one interaction, one face, one human connection at a time.
Alex Grass is the religion and law correspondent for The Media Project. His opinions are his own.
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