Ellen Degeneres may seem much younger than her 50 years, but there’s one modern practice she refuses to adopt. Ellen admitted to Star Magazine in an interview that she doesn’t have a computer or use e-mail. It sounds like she’s used one occasionally, but doesn’t have one at home or use e-mail for communicating at all:
What’s something about yourself that people don’t know?
I don’t have a computer, and I don’t use e-mail! I don’t own a Blackbetter either. I don’t think it’s healthy to always be texting and online all the time. I hate it when you’re having lunch with someone and they’re looking down at their BlackBerry, punching away.
[From Star Magazine, print edition, May 19, 2008]
I had a 70-something teacher in college who would give us handwritten hand outs and I thought the guy was a great teacher, but behind the times. He said he didn’t know how to type and didn’t want to ever use a computer and I just chalked it up to his age. Both of my retired parents are adept computer and Internet users, and I find it surprising when someone says they’re proud not to get online or use e-mail. It’s such a useful tool and one I can’t imagine living without for an extended period of time.
Ellen is right though that it can be an unhealthy addiction, and one that I’ve been accurately accused of. I always use the excuse that it’s my job, but I also have this need to try and keep up with everything and that can be consuming. Still, it’s like everything else and you can use it in moderation. It just seems like too much of a useful tool to completely abstain from using it. Maybe it’s easier not to use e-mail or a computer when you have a whole staff of people working for you like Ellen.
Ellen Degeneres is shown on 4/26/08 at the GLAAD Media Awards, thanks to PRPhotos.
It’s not the internets fault if someone is rude enough to be using their blackberry while eating lunch with you.
I also think it can be unhealthy but its also the best thing EVER. You just have to know how to moderate yourself thats all!!
It’s ever so much more healthy to be addicted to daytime telly.
I keep in touch with so many people through the internet, I can’t imagine being without it. I’ve kept up with distant family members, old co-workers, and friends around the world. I have a great friend in France, we drop each other a note daily. I would not keep up nearly the level of communication that I do without the internet, because I simply would not sit down and write all those snail mail letters. But an e-mail is quick to dash off.
People claiming to be too old to learn new ways just floors me. I was well into my 50s when I got my first PC. And a now-deceased aunt of mine, at 85, was given her son’s old computer and she enrolled in a computer class at the local high school to learn to use it, and from then on loved using it every day.
Good for you Ellen not to give in to the trends…as for me they’ll have to pry the internet out of my cold dead hands.
Ellen has a staff of over 100 people to take care of things like this for her. And she doesn’t need the internet to hook up with other hot lezzies, they seem come to her with no help from the internets 😉
Ron, it’s called money- the great American leg spreader. Ellen is a great comedian, but her head looks like a blond unmade bed. It takes millions in the bank for her to get a hottie like Portia de Rossi in the sack.
Sasha–I live in LA…I see it everyday. It works! It reaaaaally works!
🙂
In that top picture she looks older than 50.
No email – that’s called having other people do it for you.
There’s nothing wrong with not having a computer. Email’s great for business things, but I hardly ever use email just to visit somebody. Phones are nice for conversations, and there’s nothing like getting an actual letter from somebody who took the time to think about what they wanted to say and then wrote it out and mailed it. It’s touching and very personal. We don’t need half the crap we think we do in order to have meaningful lives.
I don’t have a computer, I never go on the Net, and I don’t know what e-mail is anyway. Hell I don’t even have an electricity connection yet.
Hey, what’s this machine in front of me? Who put that there?
You use the phrase “useful tool” too many times to believe that it’s anything less than a full-on addiction for you CB.
I check my email a lot, too, but if I haven’t go access, I can go a week or more without it.
I agree wtih Sasha 100%. Portia would not be with Ellen if Ellen didn’t have the $$$$. Also she doesn’t need email as she has the staff and $$$ for other people to do things for her. She doesn’t need to know how to write good comedy either by the looks of things.
Look at that photo of her, she looks like a muppet and aged. There is no way on gods green earth that Portia would be with her if she wasn’t the most popular and recognised lesbian. Portia is a trophy for Ellen, she really got the brass ring scoring Portia.