Digital Impasse.

Oldsters think low-tech, youngsters think high-tech, and both sides insist their ways are best. They're both wrong.

THE technology revolution somehow bypassed my 88-year-old mother. Looking around her two-bedroom apartment in one of those beachfront high rises in Bal Harbour, Fla., the time could just as easily be 1975 - 1965, if you ignore the cable hook-up. The antiquity includes a rotary phone, which during a recent visit I foolishly used to find out when a movie was starting. "Stay on the line for an operator," that dreaded last menu choice when touch-tones are unavailable, soon led me into phone bank purgatory. If you had any doubt, let it be said that the world is just not suited for rotary phones anymore.

Apt. 930 lacks other standard operating equipment for the modern age: answering machine, VCR, microwave, DVD player, cell phone. My mom insists on keeping a 30-year-old radio, even though she just gets a couple of stations. Everything else is static.

Of course, there is no computer. She only vaguely understands what it can do but hasn't the vaguest idea how (sound familiar?). As for the Internet, she is understandably curious but also frustrated at being out of the loop of what's become a requisite part of the culture.

Having said all this, I should also point out that there is nothing hermetic about my mother. She is not a joke -- she drives almost every day, reads the paper, goes to the movies, watches "Wall Street Week" and can often discuss politics and sports with greater clarity than folks half her age.

No more surling

That she is so far removed from killer apps and even e-mail says a lot about technology's long-standing pattern of not crossing generational lines. Once in a while there's a patronizing feature in the papers about elderly people learning how to use a computer. Here's how an Associated Press story back in 1999 began: "Computer companies are catching on -- grandma and grandpa want to surf the web."

But once you've reached my mother's age, surfing is the least of your needs. She is more in tune with the early 20th century's mechanical logic, where the typical answer to gadgets that didn't work was brute force. "You have to jam it in," she or my father would sometimes say, a solution that won't mean much when trying to figure out an Excel program. (It also helps explain why there's so much broken in her house.)

Her reaction to high-tech thingamajigs is really no different than my grandmother's reaction 70 years ago to an electric refrigerator (what the oldsters still reflexively call the ice box") or that crazy contraption called a television set (pronounced "teleVISION.") "What's wrong with radio?" she would ask, even as her children and grandchildren rolled their eyes.

Modem advances are not for everybody, no matter how much Madison Avenue assures us otherwise. The older you get, the less likely you are to be enamored with the latest whatever, particularly when the current whatever suits your needs just fine. Much of that has to do with the simple realities of old age, when making a bank deposit or going to the market can be a daylong project. Never underestimate the rigors a body goes through in its 80th year, when slow motion becomes the norm.

Slow motion user

Like many her age, my mother has come to rationalize her low-tech lifestyle. A VCR to watch old movies is out because she doesn't like seeing all those dead movie stars. An answering machine is pointless because if it's really important they'll call back. E-mail is of limited value because, sadly, when you're 88 there's a dwindling supply of friends and family members. A cell phone? "You got to be kidding," she grunts.

I realize such steadfastness could be the result of fear -- slow motion hasn't a chance against perpetual motion. But there's something else at play here. Let's call it necessity. More than 40 years her junior, I find myself similarly reluctant to buy into techno-promises just because the hipsters insist it's for my own good.

That includes my still jotting down someone's name and phone number in a little black address book I've had for over 30 years. No electronic organizer could possibly handle that chore any easier. I still rely on paper for researching and backing up my stories, even though I've used a PC nearly every day of my working life for over 20 years. I can't afford to be as stubborn as my mother when it comes to everyday computing. Still, I am suspicious -- and let's face it, paper is cheap.

Having the best of both worlds (low-tech simplicity and high-tech efficiency) is what most of us middle-agers are searching for. There clearly is a digital divide, but rather than income or ethnicity it's based more on whatever conformities make up a particular generation. It's too bad my mother can't appreciate the benefits of going online -- just as it's too bad a 17-year-old can't appreciate the joys of taking a walk without having to take out his cell phone.

They're both missing a lot.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal.