Growing old with media technology and the material experience of ageing

Introduction

Beyond the content they deliver, media are material – as are the inevitably ageing bodies of the people who live with them. Based on the thematic coding of life-history interviews and action-based observations with 22 single-dwelling women between 74 and 89 years of age, I have analysed how media objects, technologies and sources of sound and light in everyday life co-shape the participants’ experience of growing old.

Media studies has a long tradition of researching the relationship between everyday life and media. The research has primarily focused on how the relationship between private and public is mediated by content. Less attention has been given to the experience of the material dimension of media. With exceptions such as Christina Buse (2010), who has described how computing in old age depends on embodied competences and practical knowledge, the relationship between media technology and the ageing body is practically absent as a subject of research. Materiality carries specific meaning in relation to the experience of growing old. Previously mundane and absent elements of the home – such as staircases, ovens and second floors – stand out from their background presence and attract attention. When the rhythms that constitute the invisible bedrock of everyday life are challenged by the onset of frailty and dysfunction, the body becomes present as an object for evaluation of how far the ageing process has progressed (Alftberg, 2012). The everyday experience of things, body, rhythm and routine which are invested with affect and feeling changes. Our everyday experience of materiality is situated within the wider socio-material world. Evaluation regarding what is accessible and not accessible and what is normal and not normal (Ahmed, 2006: 67) co-shapes individuals’ engagements with their material surroundings. The experience of the materiality of the ageing body is shaped by subjective evaluations in their exchange with culturally circulated constructions (Twigg and Martin, 2015; Woodward, 1991).

Compared to other materialities, media technology is a dynamic and rapidly changing field – in particular following the digital mediatization wave (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). Moreover, as closely connected with the senses of the human body, media technology is different from materiality, tools and technology at large. The argument that mediatization fuels social transformation means that we need to consider media devices as highly integrated in our everyday lives (Deuze, 2012; Jansson, 2014) and also focus on the ‘physical structure’ that conditions mediatization. Women on average live longer than men; they are therefore more exposed to experiences related to a decline in life quality and have more years to live independently and/or struggle with media. Engaging with single-dwelling women’s experiences therefore offers an important perspective on media development in the context of the ageing society. Based on the view that peoples’ everyday life is arranged and rearranged in response to the disappearance of media into a background presence (Jansson, 2014), I have explored the complexities between the ageing body and media technology by asking how the experience of media materiality in everyday life contributes to the study participants’ construction of the self as ‘old’ (p. 273). The fieldwork revealed that different media technology stood out from its background presence as problematic because the media no longer enabled the experiences they used to. The participants’ disconnects with media technology directed their attention towards the body as being in decline. They embodied ‘old age’ by linking the problematic presence of technology and body to two cultural constructions of material ageing: generation and natural ageing. Concerning the question of the interaction between media development and cultural ageing, the analysis suggests that inasmuch as everyday life has become mediatized, the experience of growing old also takes place with and through media technology.

Media technology, body and identity

From the material phenomenological perspective that I have taken in this article, the process of mediatization takes place through the intertwining of technology (in terms of devices and infrastructures for communication) and processes of sense-making (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Jansson, 2016). Similarly, the corporeality of the ageing body is the ‘context’ for the embodiment of narratives and norms related to old age performed by the body or on the body and oriented towards the social world (Gilleard and Higgs, 2015). Underlying this study is the assumption that the inseparability of media technology from everyday life described by Jansson (2014) emerges (also) from the intimacy between the body and technology. Harold Innis (1952) pointed towards the symbiosis of man and technology; Marshall McLuhan (2004 [1964]) elaborated on how the tactile audio and visual qualities of media technologies relate to the human senses. Considered from a phenomenological perspective, the intertwinement of the subject body (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2003) and media technology is the base of everyday human experience (Deuze, 2012: 236). We live ‘with and through, rather than next to or beside’ media (Deuze, 2012: 18), inasmuch as the desire for immediate access to media content underpinning media development in the 20th and 21st centuries renders technologies and operations more or less invisible to us (Bolter and Grusin, 1996). The media’s property as technology becomes obvious to us, for example, when devices do not work as expected (Jansson, 2014: 274).

‘To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins’, writes Sarah Ahmed (2006: 134). Seen from the perspective of André Jansson’s (2014) assertion that everyday practice and place become ‘materially adapted to media technologies’, Ahmed’s definition of being comfortable is useful in highlighting how media have become part of the ease that we tend to develop with our everyday practices and environments. Inasmuch as the things and technologies that individuals are oriented towards also orient them in specific ways according to culturally shared expectations and norms (Ahmed, 2006), the experience of materiality entwines with identity. Across the interviews and observations, media as objects and technologies revealed themselves as prominent topics, and the participants’ readiness to talk about their media in terms of problematic technology supports the observation that in old age, we tend to talk more about how things and routines change than about the ageing body (Alftberg, 2012: 35). Concerning the embodiment of old age quotes such as ‘young people are better at figuring out what to do’ or ‘I’m sure younger people don’t press the wrong buttons as much as I do’ are examples of how the participants connected their experience of problematic technology with a common-sense notion of a link between newer technology and youth as identified by Maren Hartmann (2005). The articulations of which segments of society they felt the newer media are mainly accessible to suggest that the participants experienced a dislocation from media development that is in line with the notion of different media generations with different competences. Moreover, with quotes such as ‘it’s to be expected at my age’ and ‘it’s not easy to get the devices I probably need. I’m too tired – this is old age’, participants connected their experience of what was possible (or not) regarding media technology to the realm of the natural. Deeply embedded in Western culture with regard to ageing, the natural is manifest in the discourse of the inevitable processes of material decline, which constituted the main construction of normal ageing in the 20th century (Jones and Higgs, 2010). In this way, the participants interpreted the relationship between the technology of media and the materiality of the body as a ‘normal’ material process of the succession of generations and progress of individual biological ageing.

The bond with media and ‘body time’

In affluent Denmark, where institutions and everyday life have become thoroughly mediatized, the homes of old people are filled with old and new media technology. During my fieldwork, I saw homes encompassing different ensembles of books, magazines, newspapers, radios, telephones, televisions, smart and mobile phones, record players, CD players, televisions, PCs and so on. Interviews and observations showed different ways in which the participants’ days had been and still were constituted by more or less uninterrupted media companionship. During the interviews, when they became aware of the ubiquity of media in their everyday lives, they expressed surprise, as illustrated by the following quotes: ‘this is media non-stop for one reason or another, isn’t it?’ and ‘it’s really interesting – I get to see myself from the outside somehow’. Clearly, media were connected with the participants’ feelings of ease as described by Ahmed.

In media studies on everyday life, the intimate relationship between technology and the body has been assumed rather than addressed directly. In Roger Silverstone’s connecting of the media’s ‘formalities of delivery’ to feelings of ontological security, media materiality was found to be constitutive of the experience of the comfortable continuity linked to the reproduction of the household (Giddens, 1991; Silverstone, 1994). Jo Tacchi has explored the role of radio materiality in creating the textures of everyday life by engaging the capacity of sound to further affective rhythm as the combination of mood and routine. In Tacchi’s account of media texture, affective rhythm maintains elements of the everyday in which people’s well-being is invested (Tacchi, 1998, 2009). In a similar vein, Sarah Pink and Kerstin Leder Mackley (2013) have considered the swithching on and off of media as co-creative of the home environment. While not focusing directly on the relationship between body and technology, the points made about how media link with basic rhythm, affect and feeling align with the suggestion of the involvement of corporeality in the bonding force (Jansson, 2014) between subjects and technology.

In the interviews, sounds from the record player, the CD player and, in particular, the radio came across as a quality with several different meanings for the comfort and ease of everyday experience. The radio was left ‘on all day’ as an element of being ‘at home’; different channels had accompanied different timeslots of the day or certain activities; or different kinds of ‘music’ would be used as part of creating atmospheres and managing ‘feelings’: ‘I think I used the radio to create or change a mood … when I was sad, perhaps, if I started thinking about my son … then, “no you shouldn’t – now you’ll put something on and listen, all right”?’ The element of sound just being ‘on’ was or had been part of sensory and affectively invested scenes, as well as sound having been part of the management of feelings and mood (Pink, 2004, 2012; Tacchi, 1998). These points have been discussed by Pink and Leder Mackley (2013) in their study of how we experience place with media technologies by ‘engaging their capacities to be on/off and as such helping create an environment that “feels right”’ (p. 689). In a similar way, qualities of light and weight were significant. A participant explained how looking at the green standby light from the computer was part of her feeling comfortable while falling asleep – ‘it’s cosy because I use that machine so much during the day’, she explained. The participants stroked or squeezed their personal devices while saying ‘I love my smartphone’ or that a particular device was ‘needed’, ‘missed’ or ‘close’. The weight of the mobile phone hanging from a strap around the neck was part of a participant’s feeling of being ‘dressed and ready to start the day’; to another, the weight and sound of the portable radio hanging from a strap around her neck gave her a feeling of being ‘home’. The bond between body, affect or feeling and technology was a significant aspect of experiences as basic as getting out of bed, dressing, eating, relaxing and sleeping. Beyond the involvement of corporal responses in media experience, the referenced studies, as well as the present one, underline how the bond with invisible technology is felt (Jansson, 2014: 273, 276) at a basic level as being comfortably at ease with our material surroundings. It highlights how the experience is corporeal in alignment with the assertion that media are grounded in the body’s immediate being-in-the-world (Dourish, 2001). In continuation of the points made about the role of media materiality in ontological security, everyday textures and well-being, media technologies can be seen as being intertwined with what Julia Twigg (2004) captures in the concept of body time – that is, the way biorhythms and bodily impulses and needs form the invisible bedrock of rhythm in everyday life.

Media technology stands out

The study participants sought out ways to maintain their lives with media, to stick to their usual media-related rhythm and to use media to maintain their habits in a process of intense learning and adaptation faced with different degrees and forms of decline, frailty, social loss and media development. The media adopted during earlier life phases were felt indispensable in the present everyday life – as well as in the readjustments related to growing old. In the wake of the digital mediatization wave, participants experienced, on one hand, that they were able to pull some newer media into the everyday – on the other, an unwelcome push from technology for different reasons. That is, while the participants easily managed to replace or integrate some devices, the replacement of other devices was felt more in terms of constraints. One strategy was to bypass difficulties related to, for example, operating the radio. A participant explained about her everyday life, from waking up to dozing off, with her radio(s): ‘I have four radios. I switch one off when I switch the other on. Then I don’t have to tune … it starts in the morning and so on …’. In this way, media also become part of pursuing continuity (see Swane, 2018). At the same time, different technologies had come to stand out from their background presence because they for one reason or another had begun to restrain rhythms and routines that were previously enjoyed and taken for granted.

Some media had been abandoned – left on shelves and in corners, incompatible with other newer technology; reminiscent of the past, they were put away as problematic or redundant. This evolving of the media home in later life was to some extent just the evidence of media history (some participants didn’t get rid of useless things), but in some instances it had a particular significance in that it evidenced a disruption. Telephoning is a case where the intimate relationship between the body and technology was felt as restraining due to a particular media development related to the Danish population’s migration to mobile telephoning technology.

Some landlines were packed away, some were operational but not used much and some occupied a central spot in the room – for instance, on a little telephone table next to a chair, as the ultimate example of the centrality of this technology to everyday life. To the participants dedicated to phone conversations, articulations such as ‘I love my telephone. It’s meant so much to me … this is my real phone – it’s my contact’ show that the landline technology had been linked to social relationships to such an extent that the phone was identified with the ‘contact’ it enabled. The participants’ use of past tense (‘has meant’, ‘used to be’ and ‘before’) is evidence of a development that they felt had destroyed a long-cherished routine – something which was also addressed directly: ‘I’m so sad that everybody’s cancelling their landlines. I’ve had a friend in Jutland for 30–35 years now … we used to spend hours a week talking, but she also quit hers’.

The problem of landline technology growing redundant directed attention to the shortcomings of the newer technology of the mobile or smartphone in terms of operation and interface. The participants’ attempts to use their mobile phones or smartphones for phone conversations coincided with experiences of sensory dysfunction: ‘it’s up here, right, then you accidentally push something, and then it goes away’; ‘sometimes, it just doesn’t work right’; ‘I don’t know what happened, it just …’; and ‘it’s a stupid phone I have’. Moreover, the experience of poor sound quality was described in expressions such as ‘woollen sound’; ‘crack, crack, crack’; ‘well, you just hold it close so you can hear, right?’; ‘even though you switch on the speakerphone you can’t hear’; and ‘the sound isn’t clear’. Issues of size, ergonomic compatibility, battery and sound quality were experienced as disrupting the participants’ immediate access to the social connection the technology used to co-constitute: ‘sometimes I don’t bother continuing, get tired in the head and just stick to briefly catching up, you know’; ‘well, you don’t get the same flow in the conversation. We don’t get to be as close …’

In the wake of the digital rollout, radios, PCs, and record and DVD players were perceived as problematic in a similar way to the disconnect caused by the migration from landlines to mobile phones. Technology stood out – from the body and from rhythm – and directed attention towards restraints related to connecting with friends and family. A corollary to this was that the participants stated that it had become confusing for them to assess what was needed to connect devices in the right way and upgrade media to the level where it enabled the continuation of rhythms. Quotes such as ‘then the cable didn’t fit anyway’, ‘I don’t know where to get that’ and ‘I used to ask a shop assistant who knew my internet and computer, but now he’s gone and I don’t know where to ask’ highlight the fact that current technology accelerates such processes as ‘figuring out’, selecting and purchasing media, and that this was felt to be chaotic in contrast to the uncomplicated process of, for example, acquiring and connecting a television back in the day (as one participant highlighted).

The loss of ‘closeness’ and ease connected with the immediacy of conversation to the ‘stupid’ technology of the phone or in other instances are examples of the appearance of technology, previously transparent, in an experience that involves the disentanglements of the body or body rhythm and technology. Yet, as described, such experiences of problematic technology tend to render the ageing body invisible by the shifting of orientation – in this case towards media technology and the notion of media development and media generations, as exemplified in quotes such as ‘they were born with all of this’. In this way, the participants anchored their experience with media materiality in the interpretation that they were dislocated from development due to their chronological age.

The body stands out

Media devices constitute a dynamic subfield of materiality, and it can be argued that for people accustomed to old media, newer media amplify shifts in orientation towards the surrounding materiality, which in part explains the participants’ engagement in the experience of problematic media. However, the fieldwork also suggests that the particularity of the close relationship between the human body and senses and media technology can invite a shift of attention towards the corporeality of the ageing body. While looking in a disenchanted way at a dusty setup of a TV and a couple of VCR and DVD players, one study participant explained,

Yes, that mess … I had a B&O before. Well, it was really my mom’s. It doesn’t work with … well, what do I know … and then I have the old video player, but it doesn’t work with this one. I can play movies on that one, but the remote doesn’t work with it. And then I have that one, which can go backwards and forwards … it’s a shame, I have so many films that I’d like to watch.

What used to be a coherent set of devices for the participant’s film viewing was experienced as a relatively dysfunctional pile of objects that had accumulated with the shifting technologies over the past 40 years. In connection with such experiences, taking action to acquire things that were needed to make specific media work as they ‘used to’ was no longer experienced as a self-evident or even possible task due to an emerging frailty, as the following quote illustrates: ‘and, you know, I’ve got really bad … before, when I had an idea, I used to do it pretty quickly. Well, now it takes time’. The body presented itself as being in decline vis-à-vis the dysfunctional technology, and this experience was part of the participant’s self-evaluation as being frail:

The reason why I don’t get it [a new computer] has to do with strength – it is a phenomenon related to ageing … you get tired too fast and often think about how much you were able to do earlier in your life. The bodywork is falling apart, maybe not the motor, but the skeleton and bones …

In a similar way to the technology of media, the body was perceived as being a source of problems – compared with, for example, an old car.

Concerning the shift of attention towards the senses, the quality of sound constituted a significant issue across interviews: ‘Some sounds I can’t have in my head or in my ears, so some things I’ve had to give up …’. Participants explained how their hearing (despite hearing aids) was undergoing change so that the sensory experience of sound had become one of disturbance; it deteriorated not just in terms of the perception of volume but also in terms of quality:

That radio, right, it looks posh and so on, and I used to use it a lot, especially in the morning, but I don’t anymore, and that makes me sad, really, because I like music, you know. You don’t hear the same way anymore. Sounds get kind of metallic, I think.

References to ‘giving up’ and ‘sadness’ show how these experiences of restraint or disablement were invested with feelings. The fact that descriptions like these were connected with statements such as ‘this is what getting old is about’ and ‘it’s a phenomenon related to my age’ underlines that the experience of restraint caused by the disentanglement of media technology and body co-shapes the experience of the body growing old in a material (natural) process.

We might only notice comfort as an affect when we lose it (Ahmed, 2006: 134), and when the intertwinement of media and body become restrained, the ease that media used to enable are lost to the attention towards technology or the ageing body. In this way, the bond that individuals have built with the media during the life course gradually gives way to momentary feelings of estrangement.

Growing old with and through media technology

Technology is not neutral, nor is the experience of the ageing body universal. Understanding aspects of what it feels like to grow old with media as documented in the sections above, can build an analytical bridge between media in everyday life and the power structures that are intertwined with media development (Jansson, 2016). Assumptions that newer media are constraining and/or enabling for cohorts of older people socially, personally and even physically are prevalent in both social policies and research (Givskov and Deuze, 2018; Quinn, 2014; Richardson et al., 2011). Beyond the focus in this article, the interviews and field notes revealed patterns in which new technology was shown to enhance old routines and practices as well as enable new ones, suggesting that media are resources for the ageing individual’s deliberate, creative and sometimes necessary adjustments in the face of change. One participant, a refugee of Palestinian origin who had never learned how to read and spoke no Danish (I used an interpreter for the interview) transferred her habit of asking her sons face-to-face to clarify aspects of international and Danish TV news to the exchange of voice messages on the phone during the day or evening. This example of cross-media use highlights the fact that the individualization of media following the advent of multiple platforms for personal use means that people experience opportunities of media and integrate media differently according to delicate interplays between media, social background and identity (Buse, 2010). In the same vein, a participant who had experienced a reduction of her mobility and frequency of social company described text messaging and following family members and friends on Facebook as a positive way to mend her feeling of loss, thus creating a new comfortable connection with her environment. In this way, the research underlines that the involvement of ‘messy’ media in the somewhat similar messiness of everyday life contributes to the social diversity that characterizes people in later life(e.g. Dannefer, 2003; Higgs and Gilleard, 2006).

Focusing on the aspect of growing old with and through media materiality highlights the point that media are at the core of experiential life and that media development is produced and felt in the mundane activities that constitute the baseline of everyday life. As media disappear into the lifeworld, they can become visible quite forcefully when they break down or otherwise fail to produce an otherwise routinized or comfortable experience. The participants’ experience of a loss of mediated transparency to the problematic presence of media technology is an aspect of how media development is felt in old age. When telephones, radios, televisions and computers for one reason or another do not enable the experience that they used to do – when their material properties stand out – they signal a material aspect of ageing in terms of corporeal decline. In this way, the particular bond between media technology, senses and body (compared to other technologies) highlights the particular role of ubiquitous media in the experience of corporeal ageing. The material experience of ageing in the mediatized society is co-conditioned by the accelerating disappearance of technology, during the 20th century, into a background presence in numerous rhythms, routines and social interactions fuelled by the intertwinement of technology and body. Living in media (Deuze, 2012) entails ageing in media.

The frequent references to a felt lack of ‘fit’ with technology suggest that the participants’ experience with media has become intrinsic to their perception of their later life history – as well as to their ways of describing it (Gubrium and Holstein, 2000). Here, the worlds of media and life collapse in the ways the study participants make sense of their technological environment. The progress of mediatization runs parallel to the transformation of ageing into a distinct cultural field. This field can be defined by the emergence of the third age as a diverse field for individuals’ continued autonomy and agency set against the imagery of the dark fourth age of dependency and decline (Gilleard and Higgs, 2010). As we have seen, technology fed information back to the participants, becoming part and parcel of their experience of growing old naturally. The participants’ embodiment of ‘old age’ in an ‘age order’ in relation to media technology aligns with the presumed order and relative homogeneity connected with the idea of a natural ageing (Jones and Higgs, 2010) as a process terminating in decline and constrained agency – in today’s society, the fourth age.

Conclusion

Societies are ageing and mediatizing at the same time. Assumptions that media technology is widening the gaps between age cohorts co-exist with imaginaries about the key role of such technology for well-being in later life and in active ageing. The field of media studies has not been very engaged in exploring the particular experience of older people – regarding how it actually feels to grow old in a mediatizing society. The motivation behind this article emerged from the assumption that the ubiquity of media technology in the everyday life of Scandinavians entails that media technology is also involved in the experience of ageing materially. Based on fieldwork among 22 older women between 74 and 89 years of age, I have described how different kinds of media technology stood out from everyday rhythm and routine as problematic because the media no longer worked as they used to do, demanding a process of permanent adaptation. Moreover, I have described how the participants experienced their own corporeal decline with and through media technology. The pressure to purchase and adapt to new media technology in order to maintain ‘the usual’ was one significant aspect of this – the experience of a decline of strength to take action and deterioration of the senses (with hearing loss as the most significant example) was another. Considering these experiences of the older single dwelling women in my study suggests that the experience of ageing in today’s society is conditioned by the accelerating disappearance of media into a background presence in numerous rhythms, routines and social interactions structured and framed around them (as artefacts and interfaces). Finally, I discussed how the participants linked their experience with media technology and the ageing body to old age as a natural individual process of biological ageing in the context of the succession of generations. The embodiment of ‘old age’ in relation to media technology aligns with the presumed social age order connected with the idea of a natural ageing process terminating in decline and constrained agency – in today’s society, imagined as the fourth age. Growing old in the mediatizing society means that the individual experience of ageing materially also takes place with and through media technology.