Digital Ageism: How it Operates and Approaches to Tackling it

This anthology contributes to creating awareness on how digital ageism operates in relation to the widely spread symbolic representations of old and young age around digital technologies, the (lack of) representation of diverse older individuals in the design, development, and marketing of digital technologies and in the actual algorithms and datasets that constitute them. It also shows how individuals and institutions deal with digital ageism in everyday life.

In the past decades, digital technologies permeated most aspects of everyday life. With a focus on how age is represented and experienced in relation to digital technologies leading to digital ageism, digitalisation’s reinforcement of spirals of exclusion and loss of autonomy of some collectives is explored, when it could be natural for a great part of society and represent a sort of improvement.

The book addresses social science students and scholars interested in everyday digital technologies, society and the power struggles about it, providing insights from different parts of the globe. By using different methods and touching upon different aspects of digital ageism and how it plays out in contemporary connected data societies, this volume will raise awareness, challenge power, initiate discussions and spur further research into this field.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Andrea Rosales is an Associate Professor of communication, technology and society at the Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and Coordinator of the Digital Societies Unit of the Communications Networks and Social Change research group at UOC. Her research focuses on the challenges of data societies, particularly in relation to ageism. She analyses the social impact of artificial intelligence to counterbalance the intrinsic power relationships of digital technologies.

Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol is an Associate Professor of Digital Communication at the Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and a senior researcher with the Communication Networks and Social Change research group – IN3 research institute (UOC). She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches in the Social Sciences field and uses mobile communication as an entry point to analyse power relations. At present, her research focuses on analysing the intersection between digital (mobile) communication and the ageing process, and the challenges hyper-digitization and hyper-datafication create in our societies.

Jakob Svensson is a a Full Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Sweden, Department of Computer Science and Media Technology. His research interests include (digital) media and empowerment, technology cultures and political communication. In 2021, he published a book on the people behind data and algorithms, Wizards of the Web.