I dare say that GPS has made a tremendous difference in cruising through remote areas.....But even more important is that 40 year old couple that just looked at trawlers for the first time at the Seattle Boat Show. They're coming from a much different way of interacting than we are and all of these social networking features are something that they'll expect.....
GPS is simply a high tech version of the sextant in terms of what it does. Capt. Cook would have loved to have had GPS, although then I guess it would have had all the charts already so there would have been no need to send him out on his voyages of discovery.
There is a difference between technology that makes boating (or flying or....) safer and technology that is simply social in nature. Not hitting a reef is important to the survival of the vessel and its occupants. Letting little Johny back home know that the sunset was pretty and the crabs you caught were delicious is not.
And while you have far more exposure to a wide variety of boaters and want-to-be boaters than I do, the 40-year olds who are new to boating and are joining our club, for example, do not seem any different than all the rest of us. In fact, their dreams of getting away from it all are even stronger than ours because they are still dreaming and haven't been exposed yet to the realities of "getting away from it all."
I don't hear these folks talking about Facebook and Twitter and connectivity. I hear them talking about how great it will be to get away from the hassles and annoyances that connectivity brings them in their everyday life. Much like the older generation talked about how nice it would be to be able to get away from the phones, newspapers, and TV.
These younger boaters are for sure interested in the technologies that make navigation easier, that make it easier to get information about destinations and what to watch out for enroute (which is exactly what Active Captain does, of course), and that make communications easier or faster in the case of emergencies. This they're very interested in acquiring or learning about.
The social networking aspect of boating not so much. At least not in my observation of the very small sample I'm exposed to.
Also, I think your assumption or implication that the "older generation" can't relate to today's social media networking is incorrect. So far as I can tell, all of the 150 or so people in my organization in my building at work-- and these folks range in age from the mid-twenties to the late sixties, with the majority being in the 40-60 range--- have Facebook and Twitter accounts. Many of them also have LinkedIn accounts. And from what I gather in talking with these folks on a day-to-day basis, they actively use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The difference is in how they use it, and this gets back to my earlier comments on the author's book about the differences between people who have life experience without the internet and people who have never known anything but the internet. The people I work with use these social media technologies to enable them to communicate in ways they couldn't before, but their use is layered over a sense of reality. In other words, they use the technologies when it helps them do what they want to do, but when they don't need the technologies, they don't use them. They are not slaves to it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. are tools, not lifestyles.
And--- I found this very unexpected--- the people I hear at work denigrating the "evils" of social media and the "group-stupidity" it fosters (their term, not mine) are actually the younger ones-- the folks in their mid-20s-mid 30s. Not the older ones. The older ones use it when it makes life easier and ignore it when it doesn't. It's the younger ones who are so vocal about how social media is becoming increasingly a gigantic headache to them and is "dumbing down their friends" and stuff like that. The problem is that they don't seem to realize they can turn it off whenever they want to.
But I think the media-inspired image of the technology-ignorant 60-plus year olds is way off the mark of reality. It's just that the older folks know enough about the realities of life not to get all hung up on something that's just a tool. And from what I see, it's a lesson that the younger folks might seem to be learning, too. Which is encouraging if it's actually happening.
Bottom line is that we're not interested in connectivity from a soclal networking aspect when we're on our boat. A big reason we enjoy boating so much--- be it cruising or going out fishing in the smaller boat--- is that it give us an excuse to turn everything off. "Sorry, we didn't get your message, we were out on the boat." And from what we've observed, the 30 and 40 somethings seem to feel exactly the same way.
Again, small sample, big generality. But that's what we've observed.