‘There’s So Many Different Things!’: How Technology Baffled an Elderly Congress in 2018

In hearings with Mark Zuckerberg and others, the House and Senate revealed a lack of familiarity with our digital ways

The 115th Congress, Republican members of which are pictured here, was one of the oldest in history. Photo: Melina Mara /The Washington Post

By Avi Selk

If you’re trying to recall what your members of Congress accomplished in 2018, the answer is: They grew older.

The 115th Congress was already one of the oldest in history when it convened at the dawn of the Trump administration — average age 58 in the House, 62 in the Senate, 90 billion or so in the relativistic time scale of the online generation, in front of which Congress spent much of the year embarrassing itself. By the time the 115th hobbled into extinction at the end of 2018, artifacts from its attempts to engage the younger folk and their digital ways lay strewn across the Internet like the fossil record of an obsolete species.

There were the agonizing video clips from April’s Facebook hearing, in which 68-year-old Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) attempted to ask Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg a question about data privacy, and revealed a conception of social media resembling a wad of tangled Christmas lights: “Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device…