I just had dinner with some people that I used to work with at Zane Benefits.  They are closer to my parents' age than mine, and the topic of technology came up.  There was clearly a gap in knowledge between the younger people and the older people.  The question was asked, "At what age do people stop keeping up with new technology?"

I'm going to skip that question because it seems impossible to come up with an answer.  It got me wondering though, why do younger people generally stay on top of new tech better than older people?

I haven't really thought this through well enough, but there are two things that initially came to mind:

#1 - Keeping your mind flexible - When you're a kid, your life changes dramatically all the time.  Going from elementary school to middle school to high school to college over the span of 6 years keeps you used to change.  I would imagine that a familiarity with change in one area translates to a willingness to change in others.

I guess most people graduate college and then start working and end up doing basically the same thing week after week for the next 40 years.  I can understand why that might make you lose interest in playing around with new things.  If this is true, it must impact learning in general (not just related to technology).

#2 - Lack of exposure - Kids are exposed to technology both through school and social circles.  Most companies are very slow to adopt new systems (they're still using IE6 and Outlook 2003 at many companies).   This seems like a cop-out because I feel like a person should always be responsible for learning new things, but maybe there's something to it.

So what do you think?