People writing about these kinds of trends tend to miss the point: these are, in fact, not still photos of a moment in time, but rather a continuum over time.

When looking at a very old group several years ago it might have been easy to simply say: not on line. But looking at that same cohort today finds them very much online. The difference: it's what they have been doing for the past bunch of years: WORKING!. And in contemporary America, at least since the early 1990's, a desk top computer has been part of the work life of virtually every kind of worker imaginable.

Having learned to use these infernal machines at work, and having leared the value of online shopping, email, instant messaging and general web surfing (not to mention all that free porn), this audience has no interest in turning back.

A better way to understand this is to eliminate wording like "when old people go online" and recognize that they have been online for a long time. One will almost never find an 80 year old who, for the first time, gets online. The more likely model is that increasingly, as people have been acustomed to working online AND they get old, they will continue to do both.