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ARS14
Age, Memory and Long-TermAudiencing
PP 534
Senior Citizens’ ICT Access, Use and Literacy: How Material Resources Matterduring the Senior Citizens’ ICT Access, Use and Literacy:
How Material Resources Matter
T. Olsson
1
, U. Samuelsson
2
, D. Viscovi
3
1
Lund University, Department of Communication and Media, Lund, Sweden
2
Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden
3
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
According to international statistics, Sweden is one of the world’s most internet connected nations. The most recent data reveal that approximately 90
per cent of all Swedes have online access through various devices, such as computers and/or mobile phones. The fact that online access is widespread has
been interpreted as a useful opportunity. Among governmental agencies it has been referred to as an opportunity to make public services more available
and effective. Also healthcare has become a part of this. With the advent of online portals for health information and communication, Swedish healthcare
agencies hope to be able to provide better services, but also to make their contacts with care seekers and patients more efficient. The ambition to make all
kinds of societal services more accessible and effective via online applications presupposes a number of important prerequisites. It presupposes widespread
access to devices and ICT-applications. It further presupposes that all citizens, who are the inscribed users, have competence and skills enough to also make
use of them. For research, senior citizens make up a specifically interesting category of citizens in this context. They have lived through the transformations
from analogue to digital services and are also expected to start to adapt to them. According to general, national statistics, however, their levels of access to
and use of ICT-applications are clearly lower than for younger people. Meanwhile, senior citizens are by no means a coherent group of ICT-users. Hence, it is
vital to attend to differences between and similarities within the overall category“senior citizens”in order to gain insights into what these transformations
mean in terms of“inclusion in”or potential“exclusion from”for varying groups of citizens. In this paper we depart from and aim to further develop the con‑
cept material resources (Murdoch et al., 1992; Warschauer, 2003; Olsson, 2007) – here measured by an index including household income and home own‑
ership – when analysing different groups of senior citizens as ICT users. To what extent do senior citizens’varying access to material resources influence…
• …their access to various ICT-devices (computers, smart phones, iPads, etc.)? • …the ways in which these devices are put to use? • …their perceived
levels of ICT-literacy? The paper presents and analyses data from a recent Swedish survey (November 2015-January 2016). Data are derived from a national
SRS of 2000 senior citizens (+65 years), with a response rate of 64 percent. Out initial analyses reveal that access to material resources are influencing all
of the above mentioned aspects (access to devices, use of devices, perceived literacy, and more). The correlation is, as expected, positive: with increasing
resources, follows increasing access, use and sense of literacy. In the light of these data the paper problematizes emerging patterns of digital inclusion and
exclusion among senior citizens and their potential societal consequences.
PP 535
Discontinuities in Long Term Media Habits: The Role of Changing Life-Circumstances for Transformations of Everyday Music Listening
Practices
A.K. Hoklas
1
, S. Lepa
2
1
Dresden University of Technology, Department of Sociology, Dresden, Germany
2
Technische Universität Berlin, Audio Communication Group, Berlin, Germany
Within media and communication studies, long-term media habits form a still undertheorized aspect of everyday media use: Common media selection
models tend to either neglect them totally or to treat them as a given, without being able to explain the psycho-social mechanisms of their development,
dynamics and societal diffusion. Against the background of digital media change and the introduction of ever new media contents, technologies and
devices, this neglect becomes increasingly problematic. How can we explain and understand the different forms of integration and non-integration of new
material media technologies into everyday life? Until now, existing research approaches concerning technology diffusion and media generations typical‑
ly only differentiate between users and non-users of single technologies. Furthermore, by not taking into account the robustness of collectively shared,
trans-media habits that have been developing over decades, they tend to overlook the functional reciprocal interaction of new and existing media, as well
as the differing forms and types of integrating new media technologies into everyday life. From our perspective, this desideratum may be approached by
drawing on the media repertoire approach (Hasebrink & Popp, 2006) which has been developed to find shared trans-media patterns within larger popula‑
tion samples and which may be combined with regression analysis and qualitative follow-up studies in order to examine the social mechanisms of media
usage pattern genesis. Within our research group, we have been trying to adopt this notion to the problem of everyday music listening, an area where a lot
of new technologies have been diffused in the past decades. In the line of this thinking, we conducted a population representative telephone survey in late
2012 that was able to identify six different audio repertoire patterns within the German population. As results from additional regression analyses demon‑
strated, type adherence was strongly influenced by birth cohorts and to a minor degree by social milieux. Through a qualitative follow-up interview study
we could further demonstrate that informants’ habitual music media orientations acquired in childhood and youth were able to explain most nowadays’
audio media usage patterns (Lepa, Hoklas & Weinzierl, 2014). Within our presentation we aim to expand on these results by further qualitative analyses
with informants of the same study that tried to examine under which circumstances the general‘inertia of habitus’that we found was effectively challenged
and eventually overcome by some of the informants. Respective examples include the birth of a child, longer illnesses or moving in with a new partner. As it
turns out, such major changes in life circumstances often enable grounds for fresh‘initiation phases’with new audio technologies and services that were not
considered before, obviously due to the relative inertia of generationally founded habitual music media orientations. Since neither generational habitus, nor
the importance of different life phases and changing life-circumstances are yet being accommodated for in popular media diffusion theories our discussion
ends with a suggestion to consider ideas from material-praxeological Mediatization research as a complementing approach in future studies in this area.