Another factor can be that the previous generation doesn't see what's such a big deal about a groundbreaking technology. A lot of the folks 10 years older than me had trouble seeing what was so revolutionary about HTML and a browser (you're requesting a file and displaying it through a markup language? OK... and how is this different?) Personally, it took me a long time to grasp why blogging offered so much more than just maintaining a personal website (that said, RSS did seem very cool from the get-go). Facebook was hard to distinguish from earlier (may I call them 1.0?) applications that were "basically a bunch of web pages linked together" (a bunch of these went down with the first dot-com bubble).

So another risk is too much awareness - rather than being technically clueless, the older crowd goes too far in the other direction.

A handful of genes separates a human fom a sea cumcumber (ok, maybe a little more than a handful)... uhh, how is this different from using DNA to make more DNA? ;)