Old people aren't tech savvy

I have a small bugbear: the trope that old people aren't tech savvy. A guy at work brought it up this week — a joke about how if you want to do some exploratory testing, just give the app to his mum and she'll find a way to break it. She's rubbish with computers, apparently. And honestly, as a sweeping statement (I don't know his mum!), that's kind of disingenuous. It's tricky to define "old". My parents are in their 70s, which still isn't old old. Some of the grads I hear talking about "old people" bandy around ages like 50. Come on! — you're talking about "dumbing things down" for the generation that hacked the Pentagon on their lunch break because they were bored 🙃 I think people default to "the generation above my own" without considering the history of technology. My mum was born in the British Isles in the 1950s. Sure, she didn't have the internet, but it's not like she was born into a 17th-century Amish community! She had to learn how to use a car, a typewriter, a telephone, a…