Covid-19 Pandemic Has Shown It’s High Time For Older Generations To Become Digitally Savvy

I wake up every morning to the sound of loud videos playing on my father’s phone, where someone is claiming Covid-19 is an act put up by China to favour its trade. At the dining table, my mother serves a glass of garlic water with breakfast. While all these myths around the novel coronavirus have been busted by fact-checking mechanisms, as each day passes, it becomes more vivid how hard it is for my parents to gauge the information that is coming from their mobile screens about the virus.

This is something that most of us have observed in the past few years and chosen to ignore. However, in the times of a pandemic, the generation X and boomer smartphone users are being blatantly exploited in the name of Corona, and there is a dire need for them to become digitally savvy.

For a generation that did not grow up around the technology it is currently surrounded by, it becomes extremely difficult to navigate through truth and post-truth, genuine news and fake news, especially during a pandemic. In a time, when everything has shifted to a screen, they need to start taking baby steps towards changing their content consumption behaviour.

The millennials complain that their attempts to educate the generation X have become futile because they tend to always look at them as a younger generation who knows less than they do. What becomes more difficult is that at this point of time, there is so much information being circulated about Covid-19 that it is difficult to keep a check constantly. Furthermore, fake news has also leveraged the pandemic in its favour to catalyse the communal hatred; I have come across messages on my parents’ phones, warning them to not visit barbers and butchers who are Muslims as they allegedly have an agenda to spread the virus.

While I hold the rationality to immediately identify these messages as propaganda, my parents find it very hard to do so. Despite being told it's false, the hatred that the fake news created lingers somewhere in their minds. This is also because other members of their age group continue to believe it, and they trust their generation more than ours at any time.

What becomes more problematic is that the pandemic has caused them to believe everything that's written on the internet, be it a WhatsApp forward or a Facebook post. They have a tendency to read every text like a news article and see it as a legitimate message from an authority. A very recent example which took a toll on me was when my parents believed a false report which claimed scientists to have discovered a vaccine for the virus. The format of the report looked so genuine that it became very hard for me to explain it to them how I know that it is fake. This sad reality is something that made me ponder over the serious threats of digital illiteracy in urban spaces.

The digital gap between generations

A wide range of information in the form of videos and messages has exploited their vulnerability to the digital world after Covid-19, ranging from scientific healing through lighting candles to 18 nations choosing Indian PM Narendra Modi as a leader for an international taskforce on Covid-19.

According to a study conducted by Nominet UK, digital competency decreased with age, highlighting a generational digital skills gap; in countries like the UK, only 23% of boomers(born between 1946-1964) were tech-savvy, which would suggest worse figures in a developing country like India. This also leaves the millennials as a generation responsible to fill in this gap and educate them digitally.

The problem originates from the point where boomers and generation X do not hold the curiosity to find out about the context of a piece of information, unlike millennials.

In the lockdown, their exposure to the social media to which they are still quite alien has increased multiple folds. Moreover, the increased screen time, complemented by even more unverified information about the virus increases the problem.

Having lost touch from the outside world and relying completely on smartphones for news, entertainment, discussion, or making transactions for that matter, have created an urgency to educate them so that they can protect themselves from misinformation and exploitation in the name of Covid-19.

What can be done to bridge the gap?

As easy it is to dismiss the news that our parents report by terming it as fake, we usually tend to ignore the need to help them understand how propaganda and IT cells function. Highlighting how much harm can be caused through misinformation can also be narrated through various past incidents, and how one small piece of incorrect information landing at the wrong place can lead to a lot of damage.

Much of our parents’ actions in this crisis are suggestive of the panic or unnecessary paranoia amongst this generation that the fake news about coronavirus is thriving on. If you know someone from their age group who is digitally savvy, ask them to make your parents understand; they usually tend to seriously consider what people from their age group suggest.

As of now, there are a lot of organisations that are working in this direction as a fact-checking mechanism on Covid 19, however, indulging in a discussion with other millennials, they unanimously agreed that more than learning, boomers need to go through an ‘unlearning’ process and this lockdown is the best time where we finally have got the opportunity from our daily hustle to catch up with them and start listening to them. This can be initiated by using a language and concepts familiar to them and helping them navigate gradually instead of talking solely from our experience.

Make them understand that you cannot always be there to guide them and they will eventually have to start detecting fake remedies, precautions, or news against the virus and refrain from forwarding it further. Most importantly remind them to think twice before clicking the forward button, and ask themselves, “Am I sure about this?”

Helping them access fact-checking websites and holding on to their rationality even in times of fear have to be taught to them. It is very significant for us as a generation to help them and Covid-19 is a warning sign that it's high time we help the older generations delve into the digital world objectively without imposing our digital superiority.

(Ankhiyan Ranjan is a post-graduate student of Development Communication at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. Views expressed are personal.)