I think you are spot-on.
Depends what you call old.
Depends what you call technology.
Probably also depends on what you mean by "not a fuck", "new" and "general rule" too.
Old does vary from person to person. By technology I mean any method, protocol, device, system, material, or combination thereof designed to fulfill any purpose. By "not a fuck" I mean perhaps experiencing passing interest, but no willingness to put it to work for their own purposes, even if there is a clear application for it in their lives. "New" would be anything that they didn't get acquainted during the time of their lives when they did feel a desire to learn about technology, so "new to them" is what it would be really. "general rule" would mean that this applies to the majority, but perhaps not some outliers. For every 500,000 old folks who decry the internet and cell phones, there might well be one who is avidly following and understanding new technology as it is released.
I think most young people don't care about technology too.
Just like old people. They aren't different here.
Young people care about gadgets.
I guess you can consider me old. But I am interested in technology. Computer technology especially. In particular: software. I don't care about cellphones. I got an old Nokia. I can use it to call people. And it tells me the time of day. Perfect. I don't need anything else. (I got satnav in my car). Kids of my friends made fun of me, because of my old phone. I asked them why I would need a smartphone ? They said "so you can listen to music in the train and in the bus". Well, I happen to have a car, and the sound quality in my car is way beyond any headset.
That made them giggle.
You're probably right, but young people will at least try new things to see if they fit into their lives. For instance, they aren't afraid of purchasing their first smartphone just because they know it will have a learning curve. I know many older folks who cling to their dumb phones partially because anything they have thus far learned how to use is better than the new thing they don't know how to use simply by that very fact. They'll say things like "I don't need a phone to do anything but make phone calls", but that statement is belied when they are asking their children and grandchildren to look up information on their own phones constantly. Clearly they see the utility of being able to get information more or less instantly from anywhere, but something else is holding them back from using that capability themselves. New things apparently seem more and more daunting the older you get. Imagining the frustration of navigating a completely alien operating system using an unfamiliar input method on a relatively tiny screen makes smart phones seem not worth the hassle. There's nothing wrong with that. We'll all likely get there. It's just that a younger person would have the interest necessary to enthusiastically tackle all those problems just on the off chance that something in it proved useful to them. That's generally how I get acquainted with new technology. First and foremost I'm so fascinated by it that I simply have to try it out. Putting it to good use in my day to day life afterwards is something that usually happens, but doesn't necessarily weigh in heavily on the initial decision to purchase. It's that "I don't really care if it has a clear application in my life, it's fucking cool man" attitude that is necessary to stay on top of things.
When people talk about "new technology", often they mean "stuff on the Internet". Imnsho if you want to be precise, they mean "stuff on the web". I happen to know pretty well how the Internet works (from what each bit means in an IP header, or atm-cell-header on adsl, to tiny details about linkstate-protocols and bgp, including how to implement that stuff).
That's not what I mean when I say "new technology". I often do learn about new technology on the internet, but I'm definitely more of a "gadget" guy than anything else. Of course the consumer products that eventually find their way into my hands are the net results of advancements made in many fields of technology. They usually consist of things that were once rare and expensive that have been made cheap by the economies of scale and manufacturing progress. The origins of these things is often of great interest to me because I'm old enough to remember when only expensive and impractical iterations of them were available for purchase.
Still, people think "he's over 30, he's over 40, he's over 50, he's old, he can't know anything". Well, the people who build the Internet in the 80s and 90s, are all in their sixties and fifties now. Lots of them (early) retired. They came up with this stuff. They built it. They made if scale from toy networks to billions of devices. (There used to be "professional network technology. IBM SNA, AppleTalk, Novell's IPX, Decnet. I call those "toy protocols"). These old guys know more about technology that 99.999% of young people will ever know. But those old guys don't care about gadgets. They probably won't be impressed when you show them your latest iPhone6. Old people ....
Who's the dumbass here really ?
See this kind of proves my point though. Old people continue to care about whatever it is that they cared about when they were younger. The old guys who were integral in the creation and implementation of the internet as we know it will ALWAYS care about the internet, probably to the exclusion of other things that are just as fascinating going on currently. These people can keep track of the small, evolutionary steps that the internet takes because it really hasn't changed fundamentally in a long time. Everything in it is some variation of what it was originally for the most part, and they have a jumping off point from which to understand everything new that happens in it.
It is half surprising and half unsurprising then that most of this specific group of oldsters don't use smartphones. It's surprising because what is a smartphone but a mobile portal to the internet? It would seem that it would fall under the umbrella of their generalized interest in all things internet. It is probably the single greatest use the internet has ever been put to. I don't mean the ability to listen to the latest Katy Perry album or watch Breaking Bad wherever you are, but the instant access to information of all kinds wherever you are. I believe it's going to make us better as a species before everything is said and done. It's going to foster revolutions in every branch of technology. It's going to bring us closer together as a planet and show us the pointlessness of fighting each other. Making the internet was huge, but getting it into everyone's hands was just as big.
But then I remember that these guys are getting up there in years. To them the internet is something that happens when you're sitting in front of a computer and nowhere else. After all, that's how it was when they were younger and why would anyone need anything more? That's one inescapable fate we all have in store for us. The scorning of new things simply because they are different from the old things. The assumption that if it was good enough for us it should be good enough for everyone for all time. It just ain't true, and never will be hopefully.