Keywords: old age, media generation, new media, new risks, ontological security
The aim of this article is to set up a theoretical framework that will enable us to see, explore, and eventually conduct research on three inter-related phenomena: new media, the way in which they are used by elderly people, and the management of new social risks. To establish the theoretical framework means to check the existing literature and see if it provides enough arguments for connecting the above-mentioned concepts into one logical whole. This treatise interconnects the three concepts in a way which emphasizes new media not only as a potential support in the old age but also as technological space which has individualization (and hence augmentation of late modern fluidity) amongst its affordances. Our course of the study opens with the following question: is there enough theoretical grounds enabling us to assume that managing the new risks by new media entails two coinciding forms of disruption of ontological security and that growing age is an important factor in dropping ability to cope with this process?
Elderly people and the generational aspects in their use of new media – the way they deploy them to deal with new risks – are in the centre of our interest here. The new risks such as health, life-style or economical risks (all closely pertaining to the elderly) are now predominantly dealt with by the means of information society. As far as “we make the world in which we live on the basis of reflection and decisions taken on the basis of the risk assessment […], it follows that nowadays enormous weight will be placed upon theoretical knowledge to inform our reflections” (Webster, 2006, p. 30). As we will show, there are no doubts that new media have the potential to increase the quality of life in the old age. We will also argue that both the use of new media and the treatment of new risks bring about accumulation of individualization and that this kind of parallelism eventually presents a massive threat to “ontological security” (Giddens, 1990). How is the decrease of ontological security experienced by elderly people? Old age is often regarded as a period of “frailty”, general vulnerability in physical and psychological terms. From this perspective, whatever is difficult in life is even more difficult in the old age, when one is enfeebled by dying and unavoidable death nearing. Nicholson perceives frailty as a state of “in-betweeness”, when people lose some connections, try to sustain others and perhaps even create some new ones (Nicholson, 2009 as cited in Nicholson & Hockley, 2011, p.103). This argument allows us to assume that further shattering of ontological security experienced in the old age adds damage to the value already damaged. This article, therefore, prepares ground for empirical enquiry into the experiences of potential threats to ontological security (brought about by the individualized use of new media in dealing with the individualized new risks) in the context of frailty in the old age.
To provide clarification of our elementary concepts, it is necessary to specify what we mean by elderly people, new media, and new risks. As for the generation of elderly people, our research scheme does not allow for simple chronological definition on the basis of biological age. We are concerned about particular demographic traits as a result of biological age rather than about mere automatic belonging to a specific age cohort. “Our” elderly people are in their retirement age and do not share their households with their offsprings any more. They are in age that still allows them to use new media but, simultaneously, predestines them to be “laggards” in the moment of their first adoption of new media (Rogers, 2003)1. In the language of sociologically defined age cohorts, we could roughly identify “our” elderly people by the category of “late adulthood” (age 65–74) (Kendall, 2010, p. 45).
Our delimitation of the new media territory covers net protocols, web services and applications which operate on-line, in common language, “on the Internet”. We do not include technological devices that are used separately as disconnected artifacts, although they function on the basis of „numerical coding” of data and thus meet the definition of new media by Lev Manovich (2001, p.45). Consequently, mobile phones without the Internet connection function, DVD/CD players, PC operating system, play stations, etc. are not taken into account.
The last element of our conceptual triangle – the management of new risks – is borrowed from Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society, one of the most authoritative explanations of the modernization process and its consequences (Beck, 1992). Beck’s new risks, which constitute risk society, are not any random hazards or threats – they are side effects of the process of modernization, especially (but not exclusively) of its industrialization dimension. On the one hand, the new risks are invisible, elusive and deterritorialized. On the other hand, there are constant attempts to objectify them by recognizing them, insuring against them, and minimizing their impacts. The management of new risks thus involves setting broader life strategies to prevent evolvement of the risks into full disasters or, at least, to minimize the damage caused if it cannot be fully prevented. The theory of frailty, again, helps us to underscore that the risks are getting more risky as people grow old and vulnerable. The typical new risks are, e.g. those associated with health, life-style, the impacts of outer environment, and the general condition of physical body and mind. The first step in managing a risk is “risk-spotting” – the readiness to see the risk, recognize it, and adapt the life strategies so that the risk is reduced. Is there a ground to argue that elderly people use new media to deal with the new risks? And can it be connected to the dynamics of trust and feelings of existential safety in the old age?
The inclusion of age as a category refining the way we consider media audiences or users implies generational perspective. There are two basic views on generations in sociology. In terms of chronological definition, generations are seen purely as age cohorts, i.e. people who were born and happen to be alive at about the same time. In terms of cultural definition, generations refer to people who share experience of the same formative events (or processes) and collective memory. The latter approach was first sketched out by Karl Mannheim (1964) in his essay “On the Problem of Generations”2 and then adopted, e.g. by Ron Eyerman and Bryan S. Turner, who define generation as “a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a finite period of time” (Eyerman & Turner, 1998, p. 93).
Some authors emphasize that the events which have the potential to form generations must be of radical, e.g. traumatic, nature (Wyatt, 1993). The scholars who speak of media generations – which is a specific application of cultural approach to generations that takes into account the “potential role of media and technology in construction and self-construction of generations” (Buckingham, 2006, p. 4) – however, emphasize continuous processes more than radical events. Also, June Edmunds’ and Bryan. S. Turner’s (2005) concept of “global generation” takes into account the role of media. According to the authors, it is possible to argue that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period of international generations, which communicated mostly through printed media. This period was followed by transnational generations of the mid-twentieth century, which had access to new broadcast communications. These movements remained nationally focused. From the 1960s onwards, generations have been globalized because television and mainly the Internet allow the shared experience to transcend time and space (Edmunds & Turner, 2005, p. 566).
In media generation scholarship, there is a strong bias towards the focus on media profile of contemporary young generation. Marc Prensky says that contemporary students “are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the internet” (2001, p.1). We can argue that it was mainly the age cohort of people already born into the digital condition that inspired all the ado about media generations. Although some more utopian renditions of digitally-grounded creativity3 of young generation have been rightfully criticized for their technological determinism, it remains clear that people who were fully socialized in the new media environment simply do things online differently than older generations. As Mannheim admits, the older generations experience certain historical processes together with young generations, but make different meanings out of them due to the “different stratification of their lives” (Mannheim, 1964, p. 298). Old people tend to perceive the world as it used to be when they were young and compare the contemporary world to the time past. Mannheim adds that “in estimating the biographical significance of a particular experience, it is important to know whether it is undergone by an individual as a decisive childhood experience, or later in life, superimposed upon other basic and early impressions; early impressions tend to coalesce into a natural view of the world” (Mannheim, 1964, p. 298). We focus on the generational use of new media by the age group of people whose personality had been completely formed when they used computers and the Internet for the very first time and for whom the new media environment is not their “second nature”. Eyerman and Turner use the perspective of political economy and argue that, apart from collective memory, generations also exercise “a strategic access to collective resources” together with exclusion of “other generational cohorts from access to cultural capital and material resources generally” (Eyerman & Turner, 1998, p. 93). Provided that some generations practice exclusion, other generations must be the object of it. Structural exclusion is, of course, not a part of people’s agency, and nobody can be blamed for it. In spite of that, exclusion is a concept that describes the impaired access of the elderly people to new media in comparison with those who are less disadvantaged by age. Age, then, becomes a factor of digital divide. The research which we review next conceptualizes the structural exclusion of the elderly from the cyberspace as “barriers”. We will present two theoretical perspectives; the first one emphasizes new media as a helpful device in maintaining active approach in the old age, the second one highlights new media as a potential source of new anxieties for the elderly (and does so by showing how synergy of individualizations reduces ontological security).
The everyday use of new media – especially of the Internet – is nowadays taken for granted by all young people and by the most people in productive age. For older adults, however, the use of the Internet is not so common. Computers and other information and communication technologies are coded as the domain of younger generations, but especially the Internet with its new communication and information possibilities and still increasing accessibility represents a great opportunity for the elderly to remain an active part of the society. For example, couple of years ago, cell phones have extended communication capabilities and have enriched the daily lives of older adults, who could easily communicate with friends and relatives. Cell phone have helped to overcome the “risk of loneliness” (Haddon, 2000, p. 399), especially for those older adults who live alone in a single household. The Internet can offer them even more and the use of new media could contribute to the quality of life of older adults.
The debates and studies on the subject of the new media use by older adults focus primarily on the motivation of older adults to learn how to use computer and the Internet and to become their regular user, on the barriers which the older adults need to overcome, and finally, on the benefits that come from their regular use.
Motivation is primary. Having spent their entire life without computers, the older adults usually do not see the benefit the new technologies could bring them immediately – “only” at retirement. Some of them feel, that they are too old to learn new things, and the Internet represents something completely new, very complicated, and something that is „not for them“. Concerning this generation, motivation has a specific dimension: it is not just about older adults not needing the Internet and simply not caring, but as Anne-Sophie Melenhorst et al. (2001) stressed, even if they are relatively healthy, older adults realize their place in the life cycle and experience their lifetime as limited and, consequently, as precious. “They tend to be present-oriented and are reluctant to spend their time in an unpleasant way” (Melenhorst et al., 2001, p. 221-222).
Nevertheless, more and more older adults are open to innovations, and they would like to acquire the knowledge how to work with the Internet. To achieve that, they often need to overcome initial barriers. The age-related barriers experienced in learning and using computers and the Internet have been described before (eg. Czaja & Lee, 2007; Richardson et al., 2005; Timmerman, 1998). Based on results of their own research Margaret Richardson et al. (2005) have divided age-related barriers to learning and using computers, into three sections: person-centered barriers; learning environment barriers, and individual circumstance barriers (Richardson et al., 2005, p. 227).
Related to that division, the first group of barriers may include those related to emotional, mental and physical condition in the old age. Older adults deal with fear, anxiety, frustration, feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment and experience of declining mental and physical abilities. Typical problems include deteriorating eyesight, leading to the inability to read a text on the screen, and problems with arthritis, which causes complications when using keyboard and, especially, mouse. For example, the "double click" and moving the cursor around the screen initially is not easy even for the younger users. The original experience can easily discourage older adults and confirm what they have thought before the first contact with a new medium: “It is not for me.” As Sara J. Czaja and Chin Chin Lee add, declines in working memory may make it difficult for older people to learn new concepts or skills, recall complex operational procedures, or navigate complex menu structures (Czaja & Lee, 2007, p. 345). Older adult users often lose self-confidence because they recognize this.
Second group of barriers is related to environment and covers, for instance, the lack of emotional and practical support from others and the age-unfriendly training. For older adults, it is a big advantage to have someone who can teach them to work with a computer and the Internet. Tommi Hoikkala (2004) coined the concept of “reverse socialization” in this context. Most often, it is someone from the family, typically, the grandchildren. Also, if they have someone close with whom they can communicate online, they are much more motivated to try doing so. This is confirmed also by the results of a research on the Internet access in sheltered homes for older people in the UK conducted by Maria Sourbati (2009). All respondents who had used the Internet or wished to do so had family relations and friends who were online. On the other hand, respondents from the research of Richardson et al. described how the fact that they did not have anyone at home, whom they could ask for an advice or with whom they could share experiences and gain encouragement, was initially frustrating. It is obvious that the older adults need to know that they are not alone while dealing with problems related to new media use. It helps if they know that other people also face the same problems as they do. The findings from study of Cecilia I. C. Lin et. al (2012) on social support for Taiwanese middle-aged and elderly women in learning to use ICTs show that learning and sharing ICT experiences with fellow members helped them overcome their frustration and anxieties: They could 'be there' for each other and offer useful experience-based guidance” (Lin et al., 2012, p. 85) Similarly, Tomoko Kanayama (2003), in his research on behavior of Japanese elderly people in virtual communities, finds out that older adults encourage each other in order to learn computer skills. Pages specifically designed for seniors have the advantage that seniors can share their feelings and “[seek] help or opportunities to learn technical skills and knowledge without experiencing fears or discouragement” (Kanayama, 2003, p. 280). Seniors need a teacher they can trust and who understands them. In this respect, Maria Bakardjieva (2005) formulated the concept of the “warm expert”. The warm expert possesses knowledge and skills necessary to use the technology and, at the same time, is immediately accessible in the user’s life world as a fellowman/woman. Authors working on teaching methodology that might work best for older users who are having difficulty grasping the technology (e. g. Mayhorn et al. 2004; Timmermann, 1998) call for some self-paced instruction and patience of the instructors. Indeed, the language of computers is initially difficult for the older adults to comprehend. Respondents from the research of Richardson et al., for example, reported that their ability to learn to use a computer was hampered by technological jargon, which they considered to be a “foreign language”, “designed for engineers”, “confusing”, and “intimidating” (Richardson, 2005, p. 232). Yet again, after initial uncertainty of the new language, older adults are usually able to overcome these problems and learn this “foreign language”. For example, Kanayama (2003, p. 275) describes seniors who commonly used emoticons - which are entirely new, modern elements of virtual culture.
The last group of barriers is the individual circumstance barriers, such as the lack of a perceived need for a computer or the ability to purchase hardware and software. Although the prices of computers and Internet connections keep declining, the income of older adults is generally low and they cannot always afford to buy basic equipment. There are statistical as well as theoretical arguments proving that aging is accompanied by a dropdown in the economic situation (at least for the majority that is dependent on regular income and has no chance to live off accumulated wealth). In Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective, generations are socially constructed in conflict over available resources and he confirms that “old age is also a social decline” (Bourdieu, 1993, p.100).
If older adults overcome initial barriers and learn how to work with the Internet, we can ask what this use actually brings to the oldest generation. Generally, older adults use the Internet to send e-mails, search for information about goods and services, read online news, newspapers, magazines, and to retrieve information on health and culture. The advantages of using the Internet as a communicative medium arise, mainly at the beginning, for those who have friends or relatives with whom they may communicate. Online communication is particularly useful when exchanged with family members who live far away and whom the older adults meet very rarely. Conversely, some of the older adult users have almost no social contacts and thus do not use the Internet communication tools. However, maintaining contact with people they know from the real life, making new contacts, and cultivating virtual friendship is not uncommon among older adults. In these terms, computing technology has brought about the advantages of increased social contact and reduced feelings of isolation (Richardson et al., 2005, p. 234). Older adults use the internet to search for the information needed, as well as to gain new information about their hobbies, interests, or about their original profession. As they are able to find relevant information and communicate through the Internet with other people, they also feel to be more integrated into the society.
An easier access to public and welfare services can be another benefit for seniors. Sourbati deals with this question in a study on Internet access in sheltered homes for older people in the UK. Worldwide, older people, individuals with low income, and disabled people are the most frequent users of public and welfare services. Also, electronic banking, which is commonly used by younger generations, can save time and spare older adults from unnecessary walking, especially in case of health complications. Besides these services, downloading music or movies, watching online TV, etc., also make the life of younger generations more comfortable and easy and can be beneficial even for older adults.
While new media are perceived even today as a prerogative of younger generations, it is clear that computers offer important potential benefits for older users. Prensky calls „digital immigrants“ those who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in their lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or the most aspects of the new technology (Prensky, 2001, p. 2). It is obvious that there will be differences between the new media use by younger generations and the new media use by the oldest, but the Internet can help seniors overcome their specific problems and extend their active life; thanks to its communication capabilities, it can help them to maintain or extend social contacts, etc.
From the above summarized perspective, new media, namely the Internet, are emphasized predominantly as devices with significant potential for further augmentation of life quality in the old age. From this position, growing older seems to be more secure today as a result of longer life expectancy, more sophisticated social and medical care, and broader repertoire of life-style options within an active approach to the old age.
Another perspective, the one of critical gerontology, focuses on the old age as a comparative disadvantage in the capitalist society that is getting even more disadvantageous as capitalism has developed into its “disorganized” phase4 typical by the privatization of security systems and the individualization of decision-making. Critical gerontology points to the dark side of the second modernity and shows that the fluid transitions of identity, multiplicity of choices, decision-based relationships, and privatization of responsibility may be a marketplace of options for some groups but insecurity and anxiety for many others, including the people of age.
“Debates in gerontology have implicated globalization processes in the move from defining ageing as a collective to an individual responsibility. […] the pressures associated with the achievement of security are themselves generating fresh anxieties across all generations. Risks once carried by social institutions are now displaced onto the shoulders of individuals and/or their families.”
(Phillipson, 2009, p. 620)
In this light, new media and the Internet convey and add a new form of individualization to the already existing volatilities (e.g. dealing with indeterminate risks) which the old people experience as stress and anxiety more than any other generation. Older adults have doubts, e.g. about Internet safety – such as the fear of misuse of credit cards when entering data online. Clearly, in relation to giving out personal and credit card information over email and the Internet, and in relation to gaining advice about information security and virus protection, not knowing what and whom to trust is a significant ‘downside’ of computer use for some of the older users (Richardson, 2005, p. 239).
In search of the field where these two analytical perspectives could be applied to explore the ways in which the old people use new media for dealing with the new risks, it makes sense to consider mainly the risks related to age. The area combining the age-related risks and active digital engagement of old people is the healthcare. One of the most important benefits for older adults mentioned below, are connected to use of welfare services and e-health. For example, ordering a prescription or booking an appointment with their doctor by e-mail or by filling out a form on the hospital website could make their life easier, particularly for those less mobile. Similarly Czaja and Lee add that “technology may allow older people to take a more active role in their own healthcare and enable those with some type of chronic condition to remain at home.” (Czaja & Lee, 2007, p. 342) Though the positives predominate, the problems of internet overuse has been described as well, typically older adults seek for health information too much. In the Czech Republic, searching for information about health is the fourth most frequent on-line activity (out of 21 monitored activities) among the people aged 65 and older (ČSÚ, 2010). In the U.S., “eighty-two percent of Americans aged 50 to 64 and 66 percent of those aged 65 and older reported using the Internet to gather information about their health conditions” (Seckin, 2010, p. 39).
Our enquiry into the management of new risks via new media in the old age is inspired by a homology between the new risks and new media. Principle of how one navigates him/herself through cyberspace is based on individualization, as well as management of risks and use of new media in late modernity. If the new risks are treated via new media, the principle of addition is put to work, and the individualization of the management of new risks is synchronized with the individualization embedded in new media use. Their relationship is one of the logic of equivalence. We will show that this kind of “double individualization” has consequences that may be especially challenging when the users are in the old age. Reflection on the intricacies of growing old in the globalized society is of particular relevance to our study of the old people, new media, and the new risks. It provides an abstract, macro-sociological context for the use of new media in the management of new risks – including the accumulation of the individualization of responsibility within this process – by the elderly and others that may be too vulnerable to withstand the side-effects of this transformation.
There are numerous works confirming that the new media use is a highly individualized practice. The areas of user-generated content, or “produsage” (Bruns, 2007), can be mentioned as prime examples of individualization, because in these cases decisions to produce and provide media content are generated outside of collective professional organizations and stem from individuals. Vincent Miller (2010) disentangles a paradoxical double-bind of the individualization of blogging. Traditional solidarity-based relationships were, in his opinion, destroyed by individualization. Blogosphere today functions as a substitute for the traditional relationships and, simultaneously, it is constituted by the individualization that killed them. Miller claims that blogging and related virtual communities represent purely voluntaristic relationships based on nothing more but decisions, tastes, and private inclinations (2010, p. 536).
For that matter, individualization seen as a series of individual options without any external driver is the constitutive logics of hypertext, i.e. the underlying syntax of the entire Internet. Hypertext is a non-sequential, non-linear text composed of particular blocks of text that are mutually interconnected by links or hyperlinks. Hence, hypertext is more precisely defined as a method for generating texts rather than as a textual entity. It is a nomadic text, which is always “under construction” and has no fixed form, as the users constantly “re-write” it by developing new and new routes through the links. George P. Landow stresses that “this reconfiguration of text introduces three entirely new elements: associative indexing (or links), trails of such links and sets or webs composed of such trails. These new elements in turn produce the conception of a flexible, customizable text, one that is open – and perhaps vulnerable – to each reader” (2006, p.13).
Setting a trajectory that takes one through the syntactic level of the new media language (hypertext) is not dissimilar to the management of new risks in the risk society. Both sets of practices evolve around the privatized responsibility and individualized decision-making lacking any external assurance. Questions arise regarding the consequences of this synergy between the two individualizations. How do people experience parallelism of social and technological individualization? How do they put up with double individualization of the responsibility for: a) their decisions to grant existence to the risks which cannot be taken for granted, and b) the decisions to follow the trails through the hypertext which were invented solely by them? Dealing with the new risks via the Internet is like dealing with the invisible via the intangible. The reversed side of the expanding individualization is a decline of available recourses to collective systems of trust and the ensuing decrease of certainty and feelings of security. The pre-Internet media had the potential to impose some structures and regularity on people’s everyday life through spatial and temporal characteristics of their distribution. This potential was famously theorized by Roger Silverstone, who referred to it using Anthony Giddens’s concept of ontological security (Giddens, 1990). Silverstone argued that the media, especially television, “provide in their narratives and in the formalities of their delivery within ritual or on neo-ritualised occasions, a framework for the creation and sustenance of ontological security” (2004, p.167). The online environment empowers the audiences so that the media narratives or formalities of media delivery no longer set the frameworks steadfastly. The users were given considerably broader access to “the steering wheel” of the entire communication engine. They gained significant autonomy, but its dark side is the individual responsibility followed by the absence of any external assurance. Reflection on the combination of individualized practices (such as the delimitation of new risks by navigation through the new media environment) eventually raises a simple question: What happened to the ontological security in the times of new media and double (and perhaps multiple) individualization?
The new risks mostly do not have a clear material existence. We cannot taste any genetic manipulation in the corn while eating our morning cereals, nor do we feel anything when free radicals supposedly attack our cells. Otherwise intangible new risks exist only to the extent to which we register, acknowledge, and confirm them by our decisions to take precautions. The underlying dynamics of the risk society is the ongoing transformation of indeterminacy and fuzziness into provisional determinateness, a process that is fueled by delimitation of the risks. According to Beck, the risk society cherishes the illusion of having control over something that cannot be controlled at all (Beck, 2004, p. 400). Some discourses – e.g. science and the media – specialize more than the others in isolating the new risks from a cloud of indeterminacy. They function as lenses that enable us to see what is otherwise unobservable – and we will never find out if they only magnify what is already out there or give rise to an entirely new, manufactured reality. The discourses of science and the media delimit the new risks from above. The new risks, however, can be delimited also by practices coming from below – by people’s agency, which involves the interpretation of the media and science production, and the final resolution to act on the basis of an assumption that the risk really exists (or not).
The determination of the new risks from below, by people’s decisions to take them for real and act accordingly, has a sore spot in the ultimate individualization of the process of decision-making. In Beck’s opinion, the process of individualization is one of the most typical parameters of the risk society (1992, p. 90). The path from the first to the second modernity is literally “paved” with growing individualization5. Beck’s concept of individualization does not refer to individualism in the sense of egoism or self-centeredness. It is much more closely related to isolation of individual in modern society from larger, super-individual collectivities. The process of individualization encompasses weakening of the systems of previous collective guarantees, solidarities, and determinations. Religion has lost its power on the way from tradition to the first modernity. The shift from the first to the second modernity witnessed dissolution of class identity. All these processes of erosion of belonging to various collective systems resulted in the inevitable individualization of responsibility that frustrates contemporary citizens in the risk societies. Life steps and acts which were kept outside of decision-making or planning – being understood as a given destiny or class-based determinations – have been turned into a series of personal options. Fate has been replaced by a fabricated life-style.
“In the welfare states of the West reflexive modernization dissolves traditional parameters: class culture and consciousness, gender and family roles. It dissolves these forms of the conscience collective, on which depend and to which refer the social and political organizations and institutions in industrial society. These detraditionalizations happen in the social surge of individualization.”
(Beck, 1992, p. 87)
Decision-making is a fundamental form of agency in the risk society, and it fully applies to the management of new risks as well. People’s willingness to accept certain risks as objects of their decision-making process confirms and solidifies position of these risks, their social existence, and emergence from the field of indeterminacy. The new risks are crossroads that cannot be bypassed. They are the types of options that are open when the only thing that is out of option is to not take any option. The new risks maneuver person into situations whereby making a decision is inevitable. People have to decide, and they have to do it under informational conditions of the “chaotic paradigm” (McNair, 2006), grounded in an unstable, context-based verification of truth-claims, and rhizomatic and contingent nature of information gathering6. This condition makes a decision between “incommensurable varieties” (Lyotard, 1993, p. 99) almost impossible. Zinn adds: „People have notoriously to decide without having the time and knowledge for carefully weighing their decisions […]“ (Zinn, 2008, p. 34). People disentangling information rhizomes weaved around the new risks are left alone with nothing more than their own individual responsibility for approving or denying the existence of a risk.
The individualized responsibility related to the new risks management assumes even more relevance when we perceive it as an effort to be taken up in the old age. Scholars have looked at how the deficit of ontological security and expansion of uncertainty combines with other social disadvantages, and the point has been raised that the old age radicalizes the experience of fluidity, uncertainty, and insecurity. Ontological security, according to Giddens, „sustains trust in continuity of past, present, and future, and connects such trust to routinised social practices“ (Giddens, 1990, p. 105). In the concept of ontological security, there is an inbuilt assumption that it is an essentially good thing. It provides stability to everyday life by means of the repetition of routines and rituals, which have their origins beyond a present individual creation. Not the least, it protects people from a direct confrontation with the contingent and fluid nature of social contracts. Practices symptomatic of postmodern and globalized society, however, tend to expose fluidity and contingency rather than to deflect them, which is also the case of individualization of the new risks management and the new media use. The unmasked threats to ontological security may become a source of social or cultural anxieties, which affect trust and the feelings of certainty.
The stress generated by individualization impacts all generations, nevertheless, there are two arguments for emphasizing that the old people are more disadvantaged in individualized conditions: their (already mentioned) frailty and their memory. Elderly people developed their memory of what it means to be old when they were still young – and these memories are very different from what it means to be old today, in the era of individualized responsibility and privatized security management. The gerontological literature confirms that experience of security and predictability is an extremely relevant value in the old age and that the elderly people painfully sense any damage in these domains. It is mainly critical gerontology that takes up this point and voices discontent over transformations of aging in the second modernity, i.e. exactly the same phenomena which we tackle in this article. Chris Phillipson urges critical gerontology to theorize such issues as how will the old people maintain sense of security and identity in what Beck (2000) describes as a “runaway world“, or how they can avoid experiencing the fluid identity as psychological disintegration (2009, p. 623).
The field where new media, new risks and old age empirically intersect is health care. The Internet has become an indispensible source of information about health and its maintenance for elderly people as well. The scholars working in the field of technology and aging confirm that “health is one of the key Internet search areas for today’s older adults” (Morgan, 2005, p. 706). The health-oriented sector of cyberspace, including the practices by which the data are entered into and taken from it, represents what is called “e-health”. The standard definitions usually limit e-health to computerized medical services delivered by health care providers; nonetheless, the engagement in information seeking from below by patients, cannot be omitted. E-health is often presented as a chance for “active patienthood”. “Health communication … is no longer a matter of ´push´ through one-way media; it is increasingly becoming a matter of ´pull´ as consumers go on-line in search of their own research and services” (Hesse, 2009, p. 120). The main question here is how old people experience the opportunity to be active patients, which includes relative absence of external authority in providing health advice.
The proactive approach to the management of health risks (which takes places on new media platform) has a significant consequence in transforming the old power balance in doctor-patient relationship. The access to vitalist science used to be treated as a privilege of medical experts, a kind of “secret knowledge” grounding the absolute exclusivity of the medical profession. Digital democratization of this domain – the public availability of preventive, diagnostic, and curative information – is a serious dislocation of the dominance of doctors over patients. Tania Lewis even claims that cyberchondria is an attempt to pathologize certain type of patients’ agency that unsettles hegemonic position of medicine (Lewis, 2006, p. 527). The engagement in active patienthood via new media is penetrated by societal logic of individualized responsibility and autonomous decision-making, but it also involves conflicts with the institutions of the first modernity (the health care system). Hence, another question is how old people experience not only the relative absence of external medical authority but also a potential conflict with the medical authority.
Our conclusion is that the new risks (as one element of our triangulated question about how old people use new media to manage new risks) can be operationalized as the health risks in the sense of prevention of diseases, limitation of their consequence, and practicing a healthy lifestyle. One of the meaningful approaches to research would be to ground it in the knowledge of the two analytical positions concerning aging in the second modernity (with its excessive plentitude that has to be navigated through individually) we have identified: the “individualization as a chance” and “individualization as an anxiety” positions. Such research must be based on thorough qualitative questioning of “cyberseniors” that would pursue their feelings about and experiences with individualized decision-making, which they have to apply while acknowledging the risks and fixing their trails through hypertext. This kind of research brings insight into the dynamics of ontological security under the threats of new individual responsibilities stemming from the management of new risks, and use of new media. It focuses on how old people, i.e. those who are extremely sensitive to fluidity, variability and instability, experience the proliferation of the individualized responsibilities. Since these are the typical attributes of the language of new media and the Internet, it also contributes to the debate on whether old people are just an age cohort or perhaps a specific cultural media generation.
1. According to Everett M. Rogers, statistically significant relation between pace of adoption of technological innovations and users’ age cannot be proved. In other words, the data do not allow us to claim that people who adopt new technologies first are significantly younger than those who adopt them with some delay. The data are controversial on this issue (Rogers, 2003, p.28). Quoted data, however, does not focus explicitly on the old people but on those who are older than the early adopters. In our theoretical framework, we employ the assumption that people who are old in demographic sense (not just older than the young ones) are more likely to be late adopters or “laggards”. The late adoption of technological competencies of seniors described in his sample is also confirmed by Leslie Haddon: “A few had used PCs towards the end of their working career, and continued to do so now, as a hobby or while pursuing new educational options such as courses offered by the University of the Third Age” (Haddon, 2000, p. 398).
2. The essay was published for the first time in 1928 as “Das Problem der Generationen”.
3. The best example here is Donald Tapscott and his concept of the “net generation” (Tapscott, 1998).
4. The concept of disorganized capitalism was coined by Scott Lash and John Urry (1987). It primarily involves a large-scale disconnecting of the capital from the nation-state borders, the empowerment of global corporations, resignation of the state from regulatory activities, and privatization of welfare and security systems.
5. The second modernity is a specific stage in the development of modern society. In the second modernity, the societies’ backbone rests in solving problems generated by boom and progress in the period of the first modernity (Beck, 2004, p.15). The second modernity functions as a kind of convex mirror which reflects the first modernity – in other words, the triumphs of the first modernity are projected into the second modernity as the latter’s new risks. Therefore, Beck also speaks of a “reflexive modernization” (2004, p. 5-6).
6. Scientific knowledge (often communicated by media) is typical of an opaque code which is not easily accessible. Another problematic spot is in often contradictory results of the scientific research which lead to conflicting recommendations about the same dangers or hazards. An example can be he debate about the global warming (Boyce & Lewis, 2009).
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Correspondence to:
Irena Carpentier Reifova
Department of Media Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University Prague
Smetanovo nabr 6
110 01 Prague
Czech Republic
Email: reifova(at)seznam.cz