What it’s like to go on the Internet for the very first time -- at age 82

Kerstin Wolgers made it through almost 82 years on this Earth without ever once checking an e-mail, watching a YouTube clip or sending a tweet. But as part of a crash course that introduced her to the Internet for the first time, the former Swedish actress did all three -- plus Googled, Instagrammed, Wikipedia-ed, shopped, video-gamed … even online-dated, eventually. “Lots going on here,” she says of Tinder. “It’s really exciting, if you asked me.” Exciting -- but also confusing, “difficult” and “mad.” Over a period of only five days -- during which she wore a heart monitor to track her anxiety (!) and a camera to beam her adventures online -- Wolger learned a lifetime’s worth of Internet skills, from how to conduct a Google search and pay a bill online to where to watch cat videos and “Gangnam Style.”

Wolgers, as you may have guessed by this point, didn’t dive into the Internet for the lolz alone. Her grand experiment was part of a Swedish advocacy campaign, organized by the public relations firm MyNewsDesk, that aimed to draw attention to the “digital divide” -- the often invisible gulf between people who use the Internet and those who still do not, particularly among seniors. In Sweden, campaigners claim, as many as one in 10 people don’t have access to the Web. That’s actually slightly better than the situation in the United States, where 13 percent of adults say they don’t use the Internet. If you drill it down to just seniors, that number jumps dramatically -- to 41 percent, or about 16 million people.