What do three generations of this family have in common? Gadgets. Even if not everyone is an early adopter. They tell Dani Valent what works for them.
THE BOYS
The three Whiffin boys - Jack, 16, Tom, 13, and Noah, 12 - have an iPod each. "Mine's broken but I don't care," says Jack. "At school, I just listen with someone else's headphones." Jack and Tom have mobile phones. "At night I turn the phone off so I can go to sleep and not get distracted because someone sends a text," says Jack. "I get up in the morning and I usually have messages waiting from friends. I don't know how I managed in primary school without a phone." Jack is the only one with his own laptop.
Noah Whiffin, 12. Photo: Mike Baker
"I put my schoolwork on a 'cloud' so I can work on it at home," he says. "I use the computer for projects and to get references, mostly Wikipedia, even though teachers don't really like it." YouTube is another favoured resource. "I did a history project on World War I, and there was a battle I didn't understand. I found a documentary that Discovery channel had done on it and that was really good."
Both Jack and Tom use Facebook. "I use it a lot," says Jack. "I might talk to four or five friends at once." The boys also "meet" with friends to play Gran Turismo on the PlayStation network.
Jack Whiffin, 16. Photo: Mike Baker
"Even in my lifetime it's changed so much," says Jack. "When I was younger we just had a crappy old computer that we played the most simple games on. Now you can have multiple people playing online." The PS3 has highlighted a generation gap for Noah, who notes his parents' reluctance to learn how to record TV.
"Kids have confidence with technology but parents can be afraid to try new things," he says. "If you just jump into it, it usually works." Noah only uses the computer to download songs on iTunes, but he's completely plugged in twice a week when he goes fencing, dressing in an electrically conductive suit, which registers every touch.
Tom Whiffin, 13. Photo: Mike Baker
"There's a body wire that connects to my foil and that goes in a wire to a little box that lights up," he says. "Fencing is like a part of me. I love it so much."
Wishlist
Jack wants a better phone ("I've got a slidey phone that always snaps in half"), Tom wants a laptop ("Then I could sit on my bed to do my homework instead of sitting in the study"), and Noah wants his first phone. "My friends are all starting to get phones and I'm looking forward to getting one, too." He used to have an app on his iPod called TextMe that enabled free texting via Wi-Fi. "I got rid of it because I was consumed by it," he says. "I used it so much to text all my friends, start a conversation stupidly, just say hi." So isn't he worried he'll be the same with a phone? "No, because it's not free," he says. "With a phone I'll just use it when I need to, not have a conversation about nothing."
JO, 43
Primary school PE teacher
Jo Whiffin, 43. Photo: Mike Baker
Last year, Jo Whiffin was on a train in Switzerland and saw a couple playing a board game on their iPad. "I thought, 'How good would that be?' " she says.
"I decided we should have one for our next trip, to play games, do email, download our photos and to store books so we wouldn't have to carry the chunky books around." After many unmissable hints, husband Scott bought the 3G-enabled iPad for her birthday.

Jo thought she was getting a tool for family fun but the boys have barely had a look-in. "I'm surprised by how much I've come to love it," she says. "I check my email every day but the real surprise has been Facebook. I didn't think I'd be into it at all but every night I take it to bed and look at it, check the comments." Jo has 35 friends, including her two elder sons. "That's the deal - I have to be their friend. They're very tame on Facebook but some of their friends aren't. It's shockingly obvious how a lot of young people have no idea of the consequences of what they say."
Jo uses the home PC for banking, work planning, report writing and to catch up on Australian Story on the ABC's iView service. She watches her other favourite show, Offspring, on PlayTV through the PS3. She listens to her iPod in the car and takes it and a portable dock to school to play music for her dance classes.
Wishlist
Jo would love an inbuilt GPS for the car. "My navigation skills are really poor," she says. "If I have to drive somewhere unfamiliar, I feel a lot more comfortable having someone there to navigate or a gadget to direct."
SCOTT, 46
Bicycle Victoria program manager
Scott Whiffin, 46. Photo: Mike Baker
Scott Whiffin considers himself the Luddite of the family, but every morning he takes his cup of coffee into the study and reads online news­papers. "I get The Age delivered but I also look at The Age website for breaking news," he says. "I also surf international news sites like The Guardian, The New York Times and sometimes Le Monde." He's intrigued by the way Twitter operates in major news events. "It was fantastic to watch the Brisbane floods unfold on Twitter," he says. But he's more of a Twitter "lurker" than a participant. "I occasionally dive in but I mostly like reading things," he says. He's also on Facebook but considers himself a slow embracer of social media. "I like the old-school idea of talking to friends."
Scott had a BlackBerry in his previous job and was constantly on call. "It crashed into holidays and special family moments," he says. "I have lots of memories of watching the boys play sport and being on the phone." Now he's enjoying the liberation of leaving his phone on the bench for hours at a time but he's also passionate about the benefits of parenting via text message. "We're keen on our three boys being quite free-range and independent, but I do like a quick text from them," he says. "Out of all the technologies, the ability to send a quick text - 'Are you okay? Do you need me to pick you up?' - is a wafer-thin umbilical cord that I'd rather not be without."
He has an iPod, which he listens to on Yarra riverside bike rides home from work. "I download podcasts of TED talks," he says, recalling a recent lecture by designer Philippe Starck. "It was hilarious and insightful; I cacked myself while I was riding." The cycle buff has experimented with Garmin cycling computers, which log ride statistics. "You can see how many calories you've burnt, how many kilowatts you've generated, how many metres you've climbed, your pulse rate," he says. "But I decided it was too much information for me. Riding was becoming more of a data-generating exercise and I didn't like that."
The three boys saved up for the PS3 themselves, but Scott finds he's getting some value out of it. "When we discovered that you can digitally record TV with it, Jo and I were rapt," he says. "We rely on Tom to act as the NASA commander to do it for us but I love the way television becomes precision viewing rather than watching the ads or missing the shows you want to watch."
Wishlist
When Scott saw a friend using a photo of a pixellated square (an image-based code) on a bus shelter to connect to a particular website, it ate away some of his suspicions about smartphones. "I do like the idea that one device can do so many things and you don't have lots of PINs to remember," he says.
RUTH, 71
Retired educationalist
Ruth Bunyan, 71. Photo: Mike Baker
Ruth Bunyan, Jo's mother, is an early adopter, having made midnight visits in the 1950s to Australia's first computer, the seven-tonne CSIRAC machine at Melbourne University. "My husband was doing his PhD in physics," she says. "He could only book time on it in the middle of the night. We'd watch it for an hour, punching cards, all its coils going around." In the 1980s, Ruth taught the computer language BASIC to her high-school maths students, and every few years a new personal computer was purchased for home use.
Now she has a digital camera, a phone and a laptop for email ("I had a message today from a friend who's 82"), banking, games ("It has been terrific to hone my skills at bridge") and storing her digital photographs. The computer is invaluable for her volunteer work with international students. "At our last meeting, we used Google Docs - we can sit around a table and everyone has access to the document."
Ruth takes her HP laptop to Apollo Bay on weekends and plugs in her USB modem so she can research authors for her next book group, book flights and accommodation for holidays, and download science podcasts from the BBC, which she listens to later on her iPod, a hand-me-down from grandson Tom. She loves her mobile phone but couldn't wrangle it without assistance from another savvy grandson. "The writing on the screen was so small. I'd looked through all the instructions and I didn't think you could make it bigger," she says. "But Jack looked at it and went click, click, click and there it was, much better."
Internet shopping is a new adventure - she's browsing clothes from US online retailers and she just bought a GPS for the golf buggy. "You download the golf courses you want and then enter whatever hole you're on," she says. "It tells you the distance to the front of the green or the back of the green. It's going to take a lot more than that to improve my golf, but it helps in choosing the club," she says.
Wishlist
Ruth wants an iQ box for her Foxtel set-up. "I like the idea of being able to watch TV whenever it suits me and fast-forwarding through the ads," she says.
This article first appeared in Good Weekend.