The applause in Suwon, for one woman's first online order

<strong>Hwang Sun-hee</strong>, 79, sat in a senior community centre in <strong>Suwon</strong> with about thirty of her neighbours and pressed the final button on a smartphone order. The room applauded. She had spent her life managing everything by telephone or by turning up in person, until the counters and the phone lines quietly disappeared.

What brought her there was smaller and sharper than any statistic. Hwang loves a dance class. To enrol in it, she now has to ask her children — because the counter where she once signed up has become an app. Bills, tickets, appointments: the places where she used to speak to a person have been replaced by glass screens that do not answer questions.

The kiosks arrived in a rush after the pandemic. By 2022 roughly 450,000 of them were standing in restaurants, stations and public offices across the country. The alternatives thinned out at the same pace. The four largest banks ran 2,824 branches by September 2024, a fifth fewer than four years earlier, and cash machines kept vanishing — fastest of all outside the capital region, where Ulsan lost more than a fifth of its ATMs.

South Korea has one of the widest gaps between young and old in digital skill among wealthy nations. A state survey found 60 percent of Koreans over 60 struggle with public and commercial services for lack of digital skills, against 6 percent of those under 40. Another, in 2023, found nearly one in three older adults felt anxious using digital tools without someone beside them.

The class Hwang attended belongs to a programme the Ministry of Science and ICT began in 2020, run through what it calls Digital Learning Centres. Since 2021 more than 2,000 senior centres have been fitted with tablets and practice devices. In 2025 the programme held over 65,000 sessions for roughly 650,000 people aged 60 and over.

Where people will not come to the training, the training goes to them. Vans loaded with tablets and mock kiosks now turn up at community centres and regional festivals — wherever older residents already gather. The sessions repeat, deliberately. One lesson teaches a button; a dozen rebuild a habit.

The aim is not to teach an app. It is to give back the ordinary independence that smartphones quietly took away.

Pressure has come from elsewhere too. In February 2024 the National Human Rights Commission of Korea formally recommended that the science and ICT minister require non-digital options for older people. Seoul said in June that year it would replace 5,000 city kiosks with machines designed for those who struggle with them. Accessibility rules that took effect at the start of 2023 were extended in January 2026 to kiosks already installed — the ones that had been standing, unhelpfully, for years.

Suwon, a city of 1,234,582 people, is one of many places where the vans stop. Hwang will go back for the next session. She would like to sign up for her dance class herself.