A silver surfer is an older person who uses the internet, and usually one who does so keenly rather than under duress. In British usage, where the term is most at home, it tends to mean anyone from about fifty upwards who emails, shops, banks and browses online. The tone is generally affectionate, though it can shade into the patronising, and it turns up most often in journalism and marketing aimed at the over-fifties. The ‘silver’ is the hair; the ‘surfer’ is what they are doing with the web.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘silver surfer’?
The phrase is a neat double pun with a comic-book garnish. ‘Silver’ alludes to grey hair, the standard shorthand for the older generation that also gives us ‘the silver pound’ and ‘silver foxes’. ‘Surfer’ comes from ‘surfing the internet’, the dominant 1990s metaphor for browsing the web. That expression was popularised by the American librarian Jean Armour Polly, whose article ‘Surfing the INTERNET’ appeared in the Wilson Library Bulletin in June 1992, although the phrase had been used by others before her. Once ‘surfing’ was the everyday word for going online, a punning label for grey-haired surfers was more or less inevitable.
The inevitability was helped along by Marvel Comics. The Silver Surfer, a chrome-skinned alien who rides a surfboard through space, was created by the artist Jack Kirby and first appeared in Fantastic Four #48 in 1966. By the 1990s the character’s name was familiar enough that the slang term could borrow its ring, even though the connection is purely a matter of sound: nobody was suggesting that pensioners resembled a gleaming herald of Galactus.
The slang sense arrived in print in the late 1990s. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence is from 1997, in the trade magazine Progressive Grocer, which is a suitably unglamorous birthplace for a term now thought of as characteristically British. In Britain it was taken up by the digital-inclusion campaigns of the early 2000s. By 2004 there was an annual Silver Surfers’ Day, intended, in the words of its organisers, to combat digital exclusion, complete with a Silver Surfer of the Year award; the 2004 title went to 69-year-old Dennis Rogers, who had taken up computing to help manage his dyslexia. The term carries a faint air of surprise that the old have mastered something new, a cousin of ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. As the generation that built the web goes grey itself, that surprise, and perhaps the label with it, is quietly dating.