“A Little Silly and Empty-Headed” – Older Adults’ Understandings of Social Networking Sites

Abstract

This study suggests reasons for the absence of a growing proportion of the population, the so-called baby boomers, from the otherwise highly popular social networking sites. We explore how people of this age group understand social networking sites and how these understandings fit certain aspects of their life. Designing social networking sites that match older adults' life would increase their possibilities of coping with the changes related to their age and of contributing to the information society. In a qualitative study involving use of an existing social networking site, and group and personal interviews, we found that understanding the internet as a dangerous place, and social networking sites as places of socially unacceptable behavior, hinders the use of these technologies. To include older adults, we propose arrangement of social events for getting familiarized with these services and offering of clear and simple privacy management on the sites. These actions have implications for users of all ages.

Being old in an always-on culture: Older people's perceptions and experiences of online communication

“…None of them use other SNSs than Facebook. Our findings confirm previous research (Braun 2013;Chung et al 2010;Gibson et al 2010;Xie et al 2012;Lehtinen et al 2009;Nef et al 2013) that shows how the participants who have now started to use Facebook experience it as an enriching and complementary way of keeping in touch with friends and family, and to re-connect with old friends. Non-users explain they are not interested in Facebook; are not able to learn to use it; or basically find it a superficial and trivial form of communication.…”

“…Given the widespread adoption of SNSs, many studies have been conducted on older people's use and lack of use of these services, typically finding that older people have privacy concerns and problems with grasping the purpose, usefullness, and value of such services (Braun 2013;Chung et al 2010;Gibson et al 2010;Xie et al 2012;Lehtinen et al 2009;Lüders and Brandtzaeg 2017;Nef et al 2013).…”

The Embodiment of Relationships of Adult Facebookers

“…From friendship to a sense of friendship?". In line with this, we have previously mentioned a similar concern located in many adults over 58 [10] [14]. However, in Subrahmanyam et al's study [19], participants didn't think using SNSs affected their relationships.…”

“…It was also cited among the benefits of social media use [4,5] [12,13]. One of the barriers (for adults over 58) to joining and/or fully exploiting social media was found to be technical problems [14,15], while some were hesitant to join because they viewed social media as cold and narcissistic and not fulfilling their idea of friendship [10] [14], and preferred face-to-face or email [14] [16].…”

“…Whether a digital service like Facebook belongs to the category of "material technologies" we will leave out from the discussion here and rather focus our interest on understanding how, by using Facebook, our relationship with it can become an embodied relationship that leads to more intimate relationships between people. The reason we chose to study Facebookers over 58 is because this age group is less likely to use social media, even though they form a significant and growing proportion of Western population [10]. We therefore believe that it is interesting to study questions of technology and human relationships (intimacy) from the point of view of these people, who are often reluctant users.…”