The Fearless Factor | Overcome Fear Now

According to Chris O’Brien at the Mercury News of Silicon Valley,Baby Boomers are embracing technology at a higher rate than the Gen Y’s (18-24). We are Twittering, Facebooking, IPoding, Blogging (note!) and playing video games at a much higher level than ever before.

Now, as a Baby Boomer myself, I can definitely attest to this. I’m getting requests from my cohorts to ‘friend’ them on Facebook, Tweet them on Twitter, and even being asked by people who should know better, how to do this stuff. Now, I’m not a techie, and I’m definitely a late bloomer when it comes to all this, but I’ve discovered in the last three years, as I build my business, that there is an extraordinary wealth of programs, information and technology that I can utilize to enhance my knowledge and presence in the world, and I’m doing my best to embrace as much as much as possible of it. I don’t believe in limitations, and do my best to fearlessly open myself up to the opportunities out there.

To think that I started my working life on a manual typewriter, with carbon copies (oh, the memories of that!), and gradually moved on to an IBM Selectric typewriter, which with it’s snazzy golf ball that bounced inside was the coolest thing I’d ever seen! Thank God those days are over. Give me my beloved MAC, my high-speed internet connection, my downloadable MP3’s and my uploadable videos to YouTube. There is a glut of entertainment, information and resources that I will never be able to embrace, and I’ve kind of given up trying to do it all, although I’m an ABC type so that’s hard. I find what I find when I’m researching for my books and programs, and I work diligently on putting it all together. What a wonderful world it is.

My 18 year old and 21 years old daughters might poo-poo their mother’s Twittering, and they definitely don’t want to be seen dead with me on Facebook, but I don’t care. I’m a happy Boomer who loves ALL Of this.

Check out the statistics.

“Baby boomers are embracing popular consumer technology applications nearly 20 times faster than the younger generation.”

Over the past year, the percentage of boomers listening to podcasts or reading blogs jumped 67 percent, to 26 percent. The percentage of Generation Y stayed flat at 45 percent.
During the same period, the percentage of boomers watching or posting videos online climbed 35 percent, to 36 percent. The percentage of Generation Y doing the same dropped almost 2 percent to 67 percent.
Finally, the percentage of boomers playing mobile video games climbed 52 percent to 13 percent. The percentage of Generation Y climbed just under 2 percent to 45 percent.
According to Inside Facebook, a Web site that reports on the social networking king, the fastest-growing segment of users over the past 60 days is people over 35. While the biggest segment of members are still 18-25 (19.5 million), there are now 13.4 million members between 35-54 — a figure that ballooned 276 percent over the past six months.
Perhaps most interesting are the demographics of Twitter. According to Nielsen Online, 65.1 percent of the people who visited the microblogging site in February were over 35.