Older People, the Internet, and Virtual Communities

Abstract

Around the world the proportion of older people is growing, and this group is accessing the World Wide Web more and more for a variety of purposes including e-mail, finance, health information and genealogy. There are several different definitions of what constitutes an “older person,” but for the purposes of this article we will define older people as those over sixty-five years of age and no longer in the full-time workforce. The proportion of older people in Australia will increase dramatically over the next twenty-five years and Foskey (1998) notes that since the nineteenth century there has been a “longevity revolution” in the Western world. In Australia during the past decade the over sixty-five age group living in non-metropolitan areas has seen the greatest rate of growth (Foskey 1998).