Making up for lost time

Hollywood may see the web as a place for 15-year-old hackers, writes Peter Preston, but it's really the perfect tool for those old enough to be their grandparents

Come with me along the sharpest of cutting edges: to the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kids in jeans are showing off their handy work. Ideas come tumbling out of every cupboard. And what's this, at the heart of the lab? A new computer format for an even newer net newspaper: one that 'senior citizens' can use to publish for themselves every week. Writing, reporting, buzzing with life; keeping in touch. The guy who wrote the programme may be a twenty-something, but the people who use it are seventy-plus.

Which is one more truth among the myriad wonders of the web. Advertising agencies (bless their curiously out-dated cotton socks) may still think of the net as a territory where only the infinitely desirable, conspicuously affluent young roam - but No, this is a world for everyone. Why else is my personal queue stuffed with spam for Viagra each morning? There are, of course, no rules here. Only frail generalisations. Hollywood likes to make its top hackers into Pentagon computers around the age of 15 (a cliche predictably echoed in the BBC's Spooks). But the most fantastic sight I ever saw on a Guardian main frame, long ago, was Harry Jackson - even then way past 60 - playing his computer control board like a Wurlitzer organ and gradually bringing a system back from the dead. And the second most fantastic sight was Michael McNay, going on 60, laying out a front page on screen against the deadline clock. Who first thought of the one subject front page? Mike... the artist from start to finish.

So why should we lot, picking up or pondering our pension slips, be left out of the fun? We have our marbles. We have all the dexterity and agility we need. Better yet, if we're lucky, we have the time to learn - and think. For the point of the net is communication, education, information. It brings people together so that, some mornings, after I've written a column about George Bush, there'll be a hundred or so emails from California and points east lying in my queue. It means that I can flit and research and follow up on leads and tips. It means I've a chance to get inside subjects.

That's a huge boon for journalists, to be sure: but there's nothing special about our case. A couple of friends in their sixties go to work in Angola for a year, doctoring in the outback. But they've got the Guardian on the net. They're always in touch. Big Bruce from San Francisco calls about his trip to Korea. The editors I met in Penang in February - sixty of them from over thirty countries - keep up a constant debate every time the screen flickers. You may not be quite as spry as you were, eager to pile on a plane. But this way the world comes to you. You may be a bit lonely, out of the main stream. But this way the stream flows your way.

I spent the first quarter century of my working life doing things which didn't come naturally: transcribing, correcting, rubbing out, fiddling with a cranky typewriter, trying to raise the office on the phone, cutting articles on the stone set in slabs of lead type. What was life enhancing about any of that? The net, and all that goes with it, is freedom. Why are those of us who came late to such freedom somehow afterthoughts? We're not. We're deep in the game. We're making up for lost time.