Møller, Kristian, Klausen, Maja, Fast, Karin, Jansson, André, Lindell, Johan, Bengtsson, Linda Ryan, and Tesfahuney, Mekonnen
The mediatization of culture and society has a profound impact on later life. As societies are ageing (Wilson, 2001) older people now constitute the fastest growing group in the population of developed societies. In combination herewith, older people are the fastest growing segment of Internet users as well as users of social media and smartphones (Eurostat, 2015). The proliferation of digital media technologies thus affects how the elderly person experiences, structures and gives meaning to everyday life. Older people structure and live postretirement life with and in media in a variety of ways and face different types of age-related economic, social and/or cultural exclusion while doing so (Givskov and Deuze, 2016: 2). Within research on ageing and information and communications technologies (ICTs) there has been a call to ‘gray the cyborgs’ (Joyce and Mamo, 2006) and concepts such as ‘silver surfers’ (Choudrie, Grey, and Tsitsianis, 2010) and ‘technogenarians’ (Joyce and Loe, 2010) point to a field of research that combines gerontological questions, that is questions regarding ageing and old age, with investigations of how media and technologies influence and potentially transform both life in the third and fourth age and hegemonic representations and discourses about the process of ageing and old age. Therefore, as technologies play an increasing role in the everyday life experience of the senior person, there is a growing need for research that examines how elderly people amplify, reappropriate or resist cultural assumptions about old age in their everyday life with media.