How My 98-Year-Old Grandfather Embraced The Internet

And what I’ve learned as a result.

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

Hi, Another mystery for me.

Do I have Twitter ? Should I have this account ? If so what is it for ? How do I set it up ?

Thanks Grandpa

That was the email I received on the afternoon of Sept. 14 from my grandfather. He was forwarding a message he'd gotten from Twitter, where he has an account that he doesn't often use. But he wasn't content to let the email sit there filed away. He demanded to understand and remember why and how he ended up with a Twitter account, and what he might use it for.

My grandfather, who will turn 98 next month, has taken this approach to computers and the internet since we got him a Mac at some not-agreed-upon date in the '90s: one of relentless curiosity and unabashed questioning.

As a result, he's actually really good at the internet.

In addition to Twitter, my grandfather, who now uses a Mac in my father's old bedroom in his house just north of New York City, has also had accounts on Facebook and Blogspot, where for a time he shared his thoughts on global oil prices. Together, we've used Google Maps to identify his grandmother's house in a tiny German village where he spent summers as a kid. On Ancestry.com, we dug up the passenger list of the ship that brought him to New York in April 1937, a flight manifest for a Pan-Am flight he took in the '50s, a copy of the form announcing his naturalization as a U.S. citizen.

When I tell friends that email is the way I most frequently communicate with my grandfather, a man who was born in the middle of World War I, they're often shocked. But his use of the internet is, at its core, not all that different from mine — he may use an extra-large keyboard while I type furiously on an iPhone, but his frustrations are often the same: forgotten passwords, buggy apps, trying to remember what you googled to find a specific article. We both resisted updating the latest Apple operating system for much longer than we should have.

And, like any good troubleshooter, he's glad when a bug is resolved. On Oct. 13, 2011, he wrote:

Hi, Happy to report that my "send" button on the computer is working again Love Dad Grandpa

Most emails aren't so short — they're often lengthy examinations of a topic I know he's genuinely and deeply intrigued by. Most recently, these have included the history of the Crusades, research into genetics, and occasional articles from the the New York Times (with instructions that the story can be found on page A5). A look through my archives has emails with the following subject lines: "Facebook," "Snow Storm," "My Life Story," "Your Email Dated 3/15," "Google," "My Printer," and "My Resume Dated 1982."

The emails are a way of keeping in touch, but not sharing what you had for breakfast or how a certain doctor's appointment went. Like an online native, he knows too much small talk always feels awkward on the internet.

This is all to say that the internet isn't a novelty to my grandfather — he's used it roughly as long as I have, and he doesn't shake his head or throw his hands in the air at the mention of a new app. Instead, he focuses his attention on different concerns: How do online publications make money? What's your website's audience demographic? He may forget exactly what Twitter does, but his questions about the various online publications for which I've worked are, for the most part, more incisive than those from people half or a quarter of his age.

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