Policy discourses, research suggestions and lived experiences of older people: discrepancies of “the digital good”.
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Both international and national policy discourses see digitalisation as the key phenomenon of today´s and future societies. The older adults are seen/presented as falling behind in the adoption of this positive development, lacking the education, skills and tools to increase their digital literacy, resulting in a digital gap and both social and digital exclusion. We use multisource inquiry to challenge this notion through the prism of older people´s own perception of quality of life and lifestyle-based satisfaction despite of being “offline” and “dis-connected”. We compare the results of the policy discourses analysis from both international and national sources and academic literature findings with results from in-depth interviews with 30 older adults in Czech and Slovenia on their experiences with technologies and digitalisation, with special attention to the time dynamic, comparing the pre- and post-COVID19 era. We analyse in-depth interviews in the context of an uncritical understanding of increased digitisation as a positive value and the lag in the use of digital technologies as a threat to the quality of life of older (non-)users. We argue that terms such as digital gap and digital divide are primarily policy concepts and don’t bring much clarity into understanding the lived experiences, and their blindfolded adoption into critical socio-gerontological approaches does not advance our understanding of the impact of digitalisation on older adults. The persistent effort to assess, measure, and compare the digital knowledge (usage, skills, literacy, online safety) of different population groups, by the very nature of rapid technological development, produces unintended consequences of oppressive notions of individual failures, hiding the structural ageism. In this paper, we argue for the need to move beyond the binding and barren framework of condition monitoring to a critical examination of uniformly presented goals for the older people´s (non-)digitalised lives. The study was funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), project No. 22-05059L and by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS), project No. J5-4580 „Effect of digitalisation in (post)COVID-19 era on quality of life, and social inclusion of older adults“ (DIGOLD). |
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