How do you explain the internet to your grandmother?

My grandmother was a school secretary until she was in her sixties. She typed at dictation speed. Yet Grammy is constantly impressed by my ability to use a computer. On a recent Saturday, over terrible Starbucks coffee in her “senior living” studio apartment, she marvelled that I was able to take down everything she said. “What are you typing? All of this? That must be 120 words a minute.”

It’s not, but she didn’t type so much slower than that at my age – even considering the fact that she was slamming down stubborn typewriter keys. But the grand mystery of computerkind makes the act of typing somehow more remarkable to her. My grandmother is well aware that my laptop’s keyboard is identical to a typewriter’s keyboard, but when I ask if she wants to use it, she always demurs, insisting that she’s “slow”.

“My IQ is very high,” she says, “but my hand-Q is very low.”

Tech that’s only been around for a fraction of your life – like personal computers and the internet to Grammy, who is 90, kein ayin hara – can feel dramatically opaque, with a halo of newness so dazzling that it obscures even the elements which should be familiar. Technology you’ve grown up with your whole life, by contrast, tends to feel transparent – you see right through it. Nobody thinks about how to operate a pen or a cup, even though they qualify as technology – just technology that we take for granted. Similarly, most people born after 1990 don’t give cellphones a second thought ... but my grandma, whose family didn’t have a phone at all until she was 18, is astonished that the touchscreen on my iPhone can tell which button I’m trying to push.

My grandma’s lack of computer or internet skills doesn’t bother her, for the most part, because she doesn’t see the need – even when she feels a little isolated, she’d rather just have us call. But her daughter and many of her grandchildren are writers, so it pains her that so much of what we do is only accessible online. If she knows we’ve done something big, she has my mother print it out – but when she asks me how she can find out immediately when I publish a piece, I’m at a loss on how to advise her. My dad, for instance, gets an email every time my byline goes up because he has a Google alert on my name (and presumably sifts patiently through notifications about the 30-odd other Jess Zimmermans in the US).

Grammy, however, needs a version that’s equally automatic but fully analog: “If I can get a newspaper every day, why can’t I get what they put online, if I say ‘I want to see what Jess has online or Mom has online’?”

Opportunities abound for people on the internet to find out what other people on the internet are doing any hour of the day, but opportunities for getting that same information away from the internet are far more limited.

This problem isn’t limited to the grandmas of internet writers. When so many of our professional, romantic and social interactions happen online, it becomes increasingly difficult to let our unwired loved ones into our lives. When I showed Grammy a picture on my phone that I took with my boyfriend, she demanded a copy, and I genuinely couldn’t think of how to get her one – it’s a low-light shot, too grainy to come out well if I printed it. Meanwhile, if my best friend asked for a copy, she could have one as fast as I could hit “choose existing” and “send”. It’s easy to move things around the internet. It’s harder to move them out into the world.

My friend Catriona once compared the people of the internet to the people of a city: digital natives like me live in Internet Town, know the whole place well and, while we have our preferred haunts, if you’re looking for something different, we can probably tell you the best place to find it and how to get there from here (or at least make a decent guess). Other people just go to work there: they know the part of the city around their office, but go home to somewhere else at the end of the day. There’s a smaller group of people who just come into the digital space when they need something specific that can’t be found anywhere else – so they tend to be a little more nervous, are inclined to stick to well-trafficked areas, and can be more susceptible to crime.

And, of course, there are those lucky few, like my grandma, who don’t visit Internet Town at all, because it just seems too impossibly far away and weird: they find even the way into the city maddeningly opaque. Those people live perfectly satisfactory lives without ever venturing inside the city limits – until the inevitable moment that the city lovers refuse to leave its borders. When you’re a full time city dweller, it’s easy not to notice this happening – everything has been built with your convenience in mind, and the trains all run to pretty much anywhere you need to go. But when the path into the city – or the internet – feels closed off to you, it’s really jarring when the people in it don’t feel like they need to leave to visit you at all.

Or, as my grandma put it, “We Luddites have needs too.”

Maybe for Hanukah, I’ll print out a bunch of the things I’ve written and put them in a binder for her. When our relatives can’t visit us in this great internet city where we live, the least we can do is bring them a gift from home.