Abstract
People aged 65+ generally use new media technologies less, in less mobile ways, and for less versatile purposes than younger age groups do. This has raised concerns about older people’s potential exclusion from the digital society. In this paper we present a case study on how older people, who were living in small rural villages in Finnish Lapland, use new media in their everyday lives. According to the participants, how do they use new media in their everyday lives? How do they learn to use new media? Our results point to the diversity in terms of the participants’ self-reported Internet use and related skills. The results also indicate that the participants’ social networks, especially grandchildren, play a more important role in their use of and learning about new media technologies than formal instruction does. Therefore, it is important to recognize that older people who lack social networks are most vulnerable in terms of being excluded from the digital society.
Keywords
1 Introduction
People aged 65+ generally use the Internet and social media less, in less mobile ways, and for less versatile purposes than younger age groups do [1–3]. This has raised concerns about older people’s potential exclusion from the digital society; thus, public authorities and international organizations have launched a number of media literacy initiatives aimed at older people in recent years [4].
The use of the Internet is also related to the area in which older people live such that urban and suburban areas have slightly more Internet users than rural areas do [5]. However, previous research on young and older people’s use of new media technologies has tended to focus more on urban dwellers [6].
The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how older people living in remote rural areas use and learn new media technologies in their everyday lives. The site of this case study is Lapland, the most northern and most sparsely populated area of Finland, with some areas having very few residents. Finland is one of the most “rural” countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with its northern and eastern regions having greater dispersion [7].
Older People’s Use of New Media.
According to previous research, older people most often use the Internet to keep in contact with their family and friends, to manage their banking, to research health-related issues, and to read up on hobbies [8–11].
In the national context of this study, Finland, people aged from 65 to 89 years old use the Internet substantially less than those in younger age groups do [3]. Ninety-seven percent of people in the 45–54 age group were reported to have used the Internet in the last three months of spring 2015, whereas the percentages for the 55–64, 65–74, and 75–89 age groups were 90 %, 69 %, and 31 %, respectively. Furthermore, 25 % of people in the 65–74 age group reported having never used the Internet, and the percentage for the 75–89 age group was even higher at 65 %.
The existing research indicates a need to support older people’s skills and competences related to new media. For example, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) [1] recently investigated media use (TV, radio, mobile phones, games, the Internet), attitudes, and understanding among UK adults aged 16+. The study focused on participants’ media literacy, which was defined as “the ability to use, understand and create media and communications in a variety of contexts” [1, p. 19]. According to the results, narrow users of the Internet were predominantly aged 65+. Narrow users differed from the younger age groups in several respects: (1) their self-reported confidence in using the Internet was lower, (2) their understanding about how search engines operate was more restricted, (3) their competence in critically assessing the accuracy of search engine results was lower, and (4) their awareness and use of security measures was lower.
Older People’s Use of New Media in Remote Rural Areas.
An individual’s use or non-use of the Internet is also related to the area in which he or she lives. In Finland, in 2015 [3], out of people aged 16–89 years old, 93 % of people living in the Finnish Capital (i.e. Helsinki) Region reported having used the Internet within the previous three months. The percentage for people living in other big cities in Finland was 87 %, for people living in urban municipalities, it was 87 %, and for people living in densely populated or rural municipalities, it was 82 %. These statistics are in line with, for example, Internet use in America, where urban and suburban dwellers have nearly a 15 % and 14 % lead over rural residents, respectively [5].
Research has identified the following demographic explanations for rural dwellers’ lower usage of the Internet: older age, lower education level, and lower occupational status [5]. Furthermore, low use and non-use can be explained by social, cultural, and local factors [12, 13]. For example, Hakkarainen [14, 15], studied Finnish people aged 60+ living in eastern and northern Finland’s non-urban environments who deliberately refused to use the Internet. She found that the participants viewed the computer and the Internet as useless and risky “tools and things” that threatened their freedom, nature-oriented lifestyle, health, and security, as well as creating differences between users and non-users. The study concluded that some older people’s distinct identities, interests, history, and culture might shape their motivation and capacity to welcome and use computers.
Internet infrastructure continues to be a limiting factor for Internet use in rural areas [10, 16]. However, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been shown to ease the difficulties involved in everyday living in sparsely populated remote areas. Kilpeläinen and Seppänen [10] studied how people aged 17–98 living in remote villages in Finnish Lapland used ICTs and what that use meant in terms of social communality. Their results are in line with previous research, in that the most popular reasons behind computer use were searching for information and online banking, and that the use of computers was strongly connected to age. Keeping in contact with family, friends, and relatives was important for the participants. Kilpeläinen and Seppänen concluded that the use of ICTs offers an important means through which to create and maintain communality in remote rural areas.
Research on older people’s use of new media has been criticized for neglecting gerontological knowledge about diversity in ageing, and accordingly, treating older people as a homogenous group [17]. However, several researchers have underlined the diversity of older people’s media use and competencies [11, 18], as well as the diversity of older rural dwellers’ everyday lives [19].
New Media Learning Strategies for Older People.
Previous research indicates that older people’s personal interests and needs are the most important factors explaining their motivation to learn and use ICTs [11, 20, 21]. Accordingly, Vroman and colleagues [11] suggest a person-focused approach when designing instruction and learning for older people, meaning that the design should always be based on their individual, subjective interests and needs.
Older people’s self-efficacy as technology users is positively related to the development of their ability to use, understand, and create new media content [22]. Pedagogical interventions that rely on peer support and collaborative problem solving are therefore promising. A case study performed in rural northern Finland [23] showed that through a person-focused, collaborative, and problem-solving oriented pedagogical approach resorting to peer support, it was possible to support older people in learning to use a tablet computer for their individual needs.
Social support networks are crucial for older people to learn about new media, which is also the case for younger age groups. Older people often learn to use the Internet under the guidance of their friends and family members [4, 22]. Within the field of intergenerational studies, encouraging results have been attained from technology-oriented intergenerational learning programs. In these programs, young technology-savvy people have acted as technology tutors for older people [24].
2 Method
In this paper, we will answer the following research questions: According to the participants, how do they use new media in their everyday lives? How do they learn to use new media? To answer the research questions, we collaboratively conducted three focus groups with 16 older people, aged from 62–86, who were living in three small rural villages in Finnish Lapland (see Table 1) during the spring of 2015. The names of the villages are not provided for privacy reasons. The focus groups were audio recorded with the participants’ informed consent and were later transcribed verbatim by a trainee in the second author’s faculty.
In our previous analysis of these data [25, 26], we read, analyzed, and coded the transcripts to identify and mark focus group passages in which the participants talked about their Internet use and digital competences in terms of modalities of agency, as defined by Jyrkämä [27]. Jyrkämä argues that human behavior is the result of the dynamic interaction of the modalities of agency: knowing how to, being able to, having to, having the opportunity to, and wanting to and feeling. In this paper, we take a closer analytical look at the coding categories of “Internet use” and “knowing how to,” which we have only briefly touched upon in our previous publications.
3 Results
Diversity in New Media Use.
Our participants constituted a diverse group in terms of their self-reported Internet use and related skills. The group included five Internet non-users and eleven users whose usage varied in terms of breadth and frequency. The Internet non-users justified their non-use with reasons that were familiar from previous research: lack of need and interest, as well as a lack of confidence in their ability to learn due to weakened memory [14]. As one of the participants in focus group 3 explains: “Well, I would like to learn, but this head of mine starts to be pretty thin and all information falls out of it.”
In our data analysis, we identified the following purposes that the participants used the Internet for: searching for information (e.g. health, hobbies, travelling); managing their banking and taxation; providing customer feedback; updating their blogs; signing up for courses; storing and sharing digital photographs; keeping in contact with friends and family (e-mail, Facebook, Skype); playing digital games; making doctors’ appointments; buying train tickets; reading newspapers; watching TV; and shopping.
For example, one of the active Internet users (aged 67) reported that she considered the Internet as “a necessity” and that she used her laptop for banking, making doctors’ appointments, signing up for courses, purchasing tickets, searching for information, and for updating a blog about her dog. Another respondent (aged 64) told us he was planning to buy a smart phone for the local moose-hunting activities. With the phone, he would then be able follow the real-time movements of the hunting dogs equipped with GPS collars and the moose that they were running after in the woods.
The rural and remote living areas of the participants and the associated long distances to public and private service providers affected some participants’ choice in terms of using new media to handle their business. One of the participants in focus group 3 told us that she had recently filled in her tax refunds online because she “would have to drive all the way to [name of the place deleted], almost a hundred kilometers, to get the printed form that you would then fill out.”
Another respondent in the same focus group told us that she had purchased clothes for her grandchildren online, because “it is convenient here, since we don’t have shops nearby.” For one respondent in focus group 1, reading the local newspaper with a tablet had resolved an old problem of getting one’s newspaper in the early afternoon instead of in the morning. In some of the remote rural villages of Finland, newspapers are not delivered in the morning as they are in the cities, but later on in the day.
In our previous paper on this research data [25], we also argued that digital competences (i.e. a complex set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that is required to participate in digital societies [28]) are very much distributed competences of older dyads (couples living together), families consisting of three generations, and informal networks of villagers. This was evident in the research data: The participants reported that their spouses, children, grandchildren, or fellow villagers did Internet tasks (e.g. searching for recipes and paying bills) for them, and helped and supported them in their Internet use. In this way, the village community was an important social asset for some participants, which is evident in the following excerpt from the second focus group (R = researcher, P = participant):
- R::
-
How about you [name omitted] then?
- P1::
-
Well, I often have to call [name of the other participant] for help.
- R::
-
Will he then come to help?
- P1::
-
Yeah, he always comes.
- R::
-
That’s great.
Learning About New Media.
Participants’ children, and especially their grandchildren, had a role to play, first, in the development of the participants’ understanding regarding the opportunities afforded by the Internet technologies [25]. For example, one respondent (aged 85) told us in the second focus group, somewhat amazed, about how her grandson had found information about a nearby car accident from the Internet:
Yesterday my grandson [name omitted] came, opened his laptop, and started to look for where the car accident had happened. He was saying, “Oh, it was right there.”
Even if the participants’ family supported their Internet use by, for example, paying bills for them online, the issue of family members teaching them computer skills was sometimes complicated. In the following excerpt, a respondent (aged 78) from the third focus group talks about her daughter being fast and busy:
But my daughter [name omitted] is so fast that […] she just gets in and out fast and when I think about something and try to tell that to her, she’s gone already. She has already closed the windbox door behind her and no longer hears anything.
Furthermore, in the second focus group, some of the participants expressed how they were not comfortable with asking for help too often from their family:
- P1::
-
And then it annoys me, that how can I do this. My husband [name omitted] can do things [with the computer] better than me, but I don’t want to bother him too much.
- P2::
-
Yes, it would be so good to always be able to manage by oneself.
Grandchildren seemed to be more available as technical tutors in the case of several participants. One respondent (aged 68) from the second focus group had learned that grandchildren’s technical support is best realized via phone calls, instead of through face-to-face encounters:
That’s why getting advice on the phone is easy, because if they [grandchildren] stand by you, they will show things so fast. […] But if they give advice on the phone, they can’t show things so fast, because they have terribly fast fingers [demonstrates how grandchildren type extremely fast with their fingers].
The participants reported various other ways in which they had learned to use new media. In the second focus group, participants told us that they had recently managed to set up a computer club at their village school where they received instruction, and in which five aged villagers took part. One respondent (aged 78) from the first focus group told us about how she had started a computer class with her husband and how she had experienced difficulties [25]:
My husband [name omitted] and I, we went to that computer class together, and I thought that, for sure, I will learn these things. […] But that didn’t work out, because my husband [name omitted], who, at that time, already had pretty poor hearing, and the instructor teaching the course, he was talking behind our backs, and for a man, he had such a quiet voice that even I couldn’t hear. So, I didn’t want to bother. I dropped out of the course.
Our research data indicate that at times, the villagers are left with no options: they just have to manage by themselves and try to learn to, for example, fix things. One respondent from the third focus group talked about an incident with her printer:
- P1::
-
But I think this is so characteristic of modern times, that when we had problems with our printer, it didn’t intake paper from the trail …
- P2::
-
Umm …
- P3::
-
Exactly!
- P1::
-
… I found out who fixes these [printers] and sent an e-mail to them asking where’s the service, where could I take this. And they sent me back instructions on how to fix the machine. Do this and do that!
- P3::
-
Did you start fixing it?
- P1::
-
Well, I had to. There was no other option. […] I was cursing to my husband that … if my car breaks down, then I don’t call somewhere and get a list of instructions on how to fix it, like “grab your tools and …”
- P3::
-
… start fixing.
- R::
-
Did you manage to fix it?
- P1::
-
No, it still doesn’t intake paper.
4 Conclusion and Discussion
Our results clearly confirm previous findings about the diversity in terms of the self-reported Internet use and related skills of older people [22] living in remote rural areas. The results also indicate that the participants’ social networks play a more important role in their use of and learning about new media technologies than formal instruction does, which can be difficult to realize in a remote area with very few older residents. However, as we tried to describe in the results section, support and instruction from children and grandchildren can sometimes be a complicated issue.
Some of our participants clearly expressed an interest in and a need to learn about and use new media technologies for their personal interests [15, 24, 25], such as moose hunting or needs related to overcoming the long distances to public and private service providers. Some of the participants talked in a very positive manner about their relationships with their grandchildren, who also acted as their technology tutors. Therefore, we see promise in technology-oriented intergenerational learning programs [24].
However, it is important to recognize that older people who lack social networks are most vulnerable in terms of being excluded from the digital society. Designing support and instruction for older rural dwellers with non-existing or limited social networks requires creative thinking and good existing professional networks. These services should be designed and implemented for those individuals who are keen to learn. For example, in Finland, at the site of this case study, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) presently provide older people with personalized support and tutoring in the use of new media technologies. In all of the service provider sectors (private, public, NGO) there is a growing need to think of new, creative ways through which to integrate personalized new media support and tutoring services into already existing social, health, cultural, and educational services. In remote rural areas, the special challenge is how to bring the support services as close to the people as possible and even directly into their homes.
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Rasi, P., Kilpeläinen, A. (2016). Older People’s Use and Learning of New Media: A Case Study on Remote Rural Villages in Finnish Lapland. In: Zhou, J., Salvendy, G. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Healthy and Active Aging. ITAP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9755. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39949-2_23
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