Older adults experiencing and balancing the ambivalences of digitalisation in everyday life: Media repertoires as resources in domesticating emerging technologies

Abstract

Older adults have been found to conceive digital technologies as both helpful and problematic in their everyday lives. Based on a qualitative analysis of diaries and interviews with 40 older Finnish adults, this study identifies efforts they engage in to balance this ambivalence. I approach such balancing practices through the theoretical lens of domestication: the process of integrating technologies into everyday life. By combining the concept of media repertoire with the domestication approach, the findings illustrate how ageing individuals take advantage of their media repertoires in the process of making digitalised societies liveable. In order to include ageing individuals in societies that increasingly demand engagement with emerging technologies, then, means that services should be designed in ways that allow them to be integrated into older adults’ media repertoires that have been being formed for decades.

Keywords

• older adults
• digitalisation
• domestication
• media repertoires
• digital technologies