Smartphones and Seniors
You are probably wondering what this lead photo has to do with smartphones or seniors. Quite a lot, at least for this senior citizen. A few days ago, in celebration of the latest iPhone 10 or X, the NYTimes ran a short video clip on things lost in the past decade with the advent of smartphones. As I scribbled the picture titles that flashed by — compass, address book, postcard, watch, shame & humility, levels, maps, anonymity, cabs, alarm clocks, cameras, small talk, calendars, work & life balance — I mentally added a few like books, magazines, and newspapers. I am way behind with an aging iPhone 5, but the losses reminded me of books and the M-Bag.
Some twenty years ago, when I first started Snowbird migrations from hot and humid Florida in the summers to Bavaria and returning with the first snowfall, there was the M-Bag. The US Postal Service offered a cheap way to transport printed matter — books, magazines, sheet music, catalogs — between countries. You simply dropped books in a gray canvas, draw-string bag and shipped it via surface mail (truck or freighter) to a foreign country. It was slow but the price was right, about $20 dollars for 20 pounds (or about 40 English language pocketbooks). That lasted me for the summer months in Bavaria. It was too good to last. The Postal Service abandoned the M-Bag service right about the time of the first iPhone. I then resorted to hauling books in my luggage but the extra hassle got tiring for someone who likes to travel with only a carry-on bag.
The solution came in the OverDrive App for the smartphone, which allows the use of a Florida library card to borrow and read internationally. Now I am addicted to reading on iPhone because I always have it in my pocket. It is hard to carry a book in one’s pant pocket. Adding books and magazines to the things lost with smartphones was too hasty. Actually, I found myself reading more because a book was always in my immediate possession while seated in the airport departure lounge or watching corn grow in Bavaria.
Another example that comes to mind is the loss of cameras, especially the exquisite precision of my old Leica, which now decorates a bookcase. But again the smartphone came to the rescue. For the past decade I have collected and organized pictures for an aging group of high school classmates who get together every two years for a nostalgic weekend someplace in Bavaria. These reunions of sixteen girls involve sightseeing outings to town centers, nature walks, restaurants, and bars. They take pictures of themselves in group shots or portraits as well as the local scenery and the elegant meals. Almost all of the pictures are taken with smartphones. It is a crowd-sourced collection of hundreds of photos, which get paired down and edited into a slideshow album for that year.
This project started in the days of Windows 97 and Windows XP. At first I made slideshow videos with an appropriate music background and title slides for the various venues. A DVD was then mailed to the girls. At the next reunion, the first evening get together started with the previous reunion slideshow. The photos and music plus drinks and good food gets the girls to whoop it up with cheerful banter on memories and aging.
After two reunions with DVD slideshows, I switched to Yahoo Flicker as a way to distribute the photos over the Internet as DVD players were on the wane in computers. The albums were shipped instantly via email. It was another technological gain but accompanied by the loss of background music. The infamous Yahoo hacking also made the privacy of the pictures questionable.
The girls were still snapping pictures now almost exclusively with smartphones. I was up to date with processing crowd-sourced pictures from a variety of smartphones gathered at the end of the reunion in flash drives. For the fifth biennial reunion, I took another technology leap and posted the slideshow video with a musical background on a private YouTube channel only available to the girls. This was done to assure everyone of privacy. All the slideshows are now on this private YouTube channel. In addition to the the previous reunions, we also collected pictures from their high school days and made a special 1960s slideshow accompanied by We Are the Champions from Queen.
The fifth reunion was their 50th anniversary since graduating high school. The slideshow video background music included Frank Sinatra’s It Was A Very Good Year with a screenshot of Sinatra leaning against a lamppost with the opening lyric “When I was seventeen, it was a very good year.” This was followed by theme music from a Karl May soundtrack of Winnetou, a cowboy and Indian movie series popular during their high school years. The ending screenshot shows Sinatra singing the line “And if I should survive to a 105” from Young at Heart.
Using modern gadgets, learning new software platforms, appreciating vintage wines, recalling nostalgic melodies and singers, . . . is all part of brain training, especially for this senior citizen.
