Abstract

The number of older people is growing rapidly in all the industrialized countries. This paper seeks understanding of how older people who are inexperienced Internet users really make use of the Internet. This is tackled through a survey and observations on 42 Internet courses with 328 participants. Quite surprisingly, the most common use was found to be e-banking transactions rather than Web browsing or e-mailing. In general, elderly users focused on the benefit to be reaped from the Internet. Those 65 years or over had more trouble with the font sizes on Web sites than those aged 55-64 years, and the latter found the Internet even more valuable for carrying out transactions. Interestingly, no other statistically significant differences were found over the two groups.

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