The old person who can't figure out how to use a computer is a commonly repeated stereotype in our culture as there are whole generations of very old people who have found themselves in a world dominated by computers but without the know-how to use them.
Just a few minutes ago I was thinking about how strange it is that the people who can't figure out how to use modern technology were in their own day using technology that would blow the minds of people a few generations before them, such as airplanes, radios, etc.
Has there has historically been any other stereotypes of old people in the popular culture of the time as being unable to operate "modern" technology? For instance a whole slew of jokes in books and cartoons during the 20's about how old people can't figure out how to operate cars? If so, what are some examples?
I am reminded of author and humorist James Thurber's recollections of his mother and grandmother from his childhood in Columbus, Ohio, around the turn of the 20th century. Keep in mind that Thurber is a humorist, and so some exaggeration is in order, but you did ask about stereotypes in popular culture.
My mother, for instance, thought -- or, rather, knew -- that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. "Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!" she would say to us when we started off. Gasoline, oil, and water were much the same to her, a fact that made her life both confusing and perilous. Her greatest dread, however, was the Victrola -- we had a very early one, back in the "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" days. She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison's dangerous experiments. The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it hang. She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.
In Great Britain in the 1970's, they switched from shillings (£1= 20 shillings) and pence (12 pence = 1 shilling) to "decimalised" currency (1 pound = 100 pence). In the years after the switch, it was common to display prices in both calculations, and they actually had at one point, a "decimal converter," a small mechanical device that would tell you the price in "new money."
Thus, it became an oft-repeated way to refer to someone as antiquated by the phrase "What is that in new money?"
The Luddites were anti-technology. This was in England during the industrial revolution.