Johannesburg - Sixty-seven-year-old Shamela Chetty has lived a long and eventful life and has created a family legacy of many children, grandchildren and even a great grandchild.
But the past 15 months or so has been a challenging ordeal for the Johannesburg pensioner, who has spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic away from her loved ones.
“I’m a diabetic and I have high blood pressure so I’m a Covid risk and I’m too scared to go to many places,” she said this week.
But despite the fear of contracting the novel coronavirus and the subsequent months in isolation, Chetty has used the lockdown to learn new skills to communicate in the digital era.
“I’ve never really been a technology person but when I first went into lockdown, my son gave me his iPhone and it’s really been keeping me busy.”
Previously, the senior citizen owned an older phone which she mainly used for phone calls and basic WhatsApp texting.
But since the countrywide shutdown began in March last year, she has been mastering WhatsApp video calls and recently learnt how to send voice notes.
“It's been really nice being able to see my grandchildren’s faces, even though I can’t actually see them in person,” she said.
Asked if she would consider other social media networks like Facebook or Instagram, she giggled and said, “that might be a step too far right now”.
But Chetty is one of many South African “silver surfers” who have joined the digital revolution during the global health crisis.
According to research conducted by local internet fibre company Vuma, 86% of pensioners signed up for fibre during lockdown.
Their 2020 End-User Customer Satisfaction Research Study assessed the fibre internet use of more than 27 000 respondents country-wide.
“The internet was a family lifeline for 86% of pensioners, or ’silver surfers’, who braved the new world of personal voice and video calling to keep in touch with loved ones they were prohibited from meeting in person,” Vuma head of marketing Lianne Williams said.
“A further 82% used it to stream videos on platforms like YouTube. However, just 40% were ready to do their shopping online, despite being encouraged to stay at home.”
Williams added that “silver surfers” were also the least likely to listen to streamed music online – just 38% of them did so, while this type of service enjoyed more than double the popularity among all other age groups.
Other notable findings from the research was that work accounted for 96% of households’ frequent fibre internet usage, pointing towards the scores of people who have had to work from home during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, 96% of those who used fibre did so to connect on their favourite social media platforms.
“Streaming TV services (91%) were also popular in homes, with teens, pre-teens and younger kids being the highest consumers of content on these platforms,” Williams said.
“Our survey revealed that working from home and streaming TV services were the primary reasons for households upgrading to fibre, while online gaming and listening to podcasts were less common.”
In addition, 93% of teenagers used the internet for studying and learning, although 98% of the same age group said they were using it to watch videos. Just short of two-thirds of teens and pre-teens used the internet for online gaming.
Vuma's survey also showed the correlation between internet activities and connection speed, with just less than 80% of households with 1Gbps lines frequently engaged in online gaming, while only 38% of households with lines under 10 Mbps did the same.
"The survey shows that fibre internet is an essential tool in South African homes during the pandemic, connecting families throughout the country to an abundance of information and knowledge from the safety of their homes,” Williams said.