Here’s a new term that I came across in a Wall Street Journal essay published in the June 14-15, 2008 edition: elderbloggers. In her essay, “Put It in Writing,” Ronni Bennett writes about the growing population of elderbloggers, the thousands of bloggers who are older than 50. At the time that Ms. Bennet started blogging in 2003, when she was about 62, an internet search for older bloggers might have netted only a dozen or so. Now, like the US elder population in general, their numbers have dramatically increased. According to Ms. Bennett, “Isolation and loneliness are well known to impair health and mental fitness. Blogging is a powerful antidote.” She discusses the general differences between elderbloggers and our young counterparts (no surprise that we tend, initially anyway, to be shyer about writing about ourselves), and she offers brief intros to some of the friends that she’s made through blogging, people whose paths she would never have crossed, had she not been blogging. You can read the full text of her essay by clicking here.
For more on elderblogging or for blogs by elderbloggers, try these links:
Time Goes By — What it’s really like to get older (this is Ms. Bennett’s blog)
Our Bodies Our Blogs: Elderbloggers Shift the Universe
Octogenarian (blog by Mort Reichek)
Marie at 1 Write Way 