The social connectedness of digital practices in later life: It’s not just about learning, it’s all about relationships

Beneito-Montagut, Roser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5967-4307, Begueria, Arantza and Cassián, Nizaiá 2023. The social connectedness of digital practices in later life: It’s not just about learning, it’s all about relationships. Sociological Review 71 (3) , pp. 581-600. 10.1177/00380261221144154

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Abstract

In the last ten years there has been an increase in access to information and communication technologies among older people, stimulated by widespread adoption of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). At the same time, digital inclusion policies and training programmes continue to develop to increase the access to the digital society for this social group. In this con-text, it is pertinent to revisit a long-standing research question about how older adults use and learn to use these technologies in their everyday lives while paying attention to how their sub-jectivities and their knowledge are situated in the collective shared knowledge of digital practic-es. Using examples taken from a digital team ethnographic study exploring social media use in later life, the paper delves into how learning digital practices and affective relations assembled and what they do to older people’s subjectivities. Their engagements show how these practices are illustrative of the relevance of social connectivity, place, things and affects for learning how to use ICTs. We, then, move to discuss the policy implications of this for the understandings of ageing within a digital society.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	0038-0261
Funders:	Recercaixa, Spain
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 November 2022
Date of Acceptance:	28 October 2022
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2024 07:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/153965

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