Online networking: the new party line

Seniors learn how to use Facebook, blogs and more in classes at OASIS

By Janie Nafsinger

Boom!, Jan 7, 2010, Updated Jan 7, 2010 (1 Reader comment)

Janie Nafsinger

Bill Long, an OASIS volunteer instructor, guides Dori Spencer in online social networking during a class called “Joining the Online Community.”

Facebook, Google, Twitter, instant-messaging, blogging — it’s a mad social whirl in cyberspace, especially for people who grew up with telephone party lines way back in the 20th century.

Fortunately, Bill Long is there to guide seniors who want to jump into the Internet social scene but don’t know where to start, or where they’ll land.

Long teaches computer classes as a volunteer instructor at Portland OASIS, a non-profit education program for adults 50 and older. One of those classes, a two-hour session called “Joining the Online Community,” shows students how to sign up for Facebook — that worldwide network of 300 million active users — and how to use Google Talk to instant-message and call their friends via computer.

“The old way to socialize was the party line, then e-mail came along in about 1990,” says Long, a 65-year-old Beaverton resident and semi-retired Oracle database administrator.

In recent years, Long says, online social networking has mushroomed into a seemingly endless stream of Web sites ranging from Facebook to cyber matchmaker eHarmony to countless online journals known as blogs (Web logs). “Your church or school probably has a social network on its Web site, too,” he says.

Students in “Joining the Online Community” often are overloaded with information, Long says. “It’s probably one of the hardest classes we have because it requires a lot of prior knowledge. You have to know how to e-mail, you have to know what Googling around is, and you kind of have to know what Facebook is because online networking is a combination of all those things.”

LeNoi Steckley of Portland already uses e-mail and surfs the Internet, but she recently took the class to learn how to access blogs. She’d also like to explore Web sites that she reads about in magazine articles. “I’m really interested in meeting friends through the computer and doing chatting on health, politics and other issues,” Steckley says.

Dori Spencer, also of Portland, took the class for one reason: “To know what my grandson is talking about,” she says. “He’s 14 and he knows more than anybody.”

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