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‘Behind the Digi-God's back’: social representations of older people's digital competences and internet use in regional Finnish newspapers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2020

Päivi Rasi Open the ORCID record for Päivi Rasi [Opens in a new window]
Päivi Rasi*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education, Media Education Hub, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi
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Abstract

This article discusses how three Finnish regional newspapers represented older people's digital competences and internet use in their daily coverage. The study explored media representations from the perspective of social representations and sought to answer the following questions: In what kind of internet user roles do the articles portray older people? How and with what kind of images do the articles portray older people's digital competences in various internet user roles? How are older people positioned at a societal level in the articles? The analysis revealed that older people were portrayed as incompetent outcasts of a digitalised society. However, there was a clear difference according to whether older people were portrayed as recipients of public services or as consumers of private services. As targets of public services, older people were predominantly portrayed as happy targets, who welcomed the services provided for them. This result can be interpreted as part of the promotion of government digitalisation policies.

Keywords

digitial competencesinternet usesocial representationsmedia representations
Type
Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , April 2022 , pp. 829 - 848
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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