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“You Don’t Need Instagram, It’s for Young People”: Intergenerational Relationships and ICTs Learning Among Older Adults

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Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Technology and Society (HCII 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12209))

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Abstract

The present research focuses on the problems connected to digital literacy for the elderly and on moments of intergenerational learning. The paper presents the main results of an ethnographic research carried out for a course on the risks related to the unintentional use of ICTs. The course took place in March 2019, involving 60 seniors as attendees and 25 students from a secondary school in a small town in the north of Italy as lecturers. The research seems to remark the importance of the context where the encounters between younger and older people take place. Overall, our observations do not indicate that intergenerational learning is useless per se, nor they suggest that it is not successful at all. The joining of different generations always raises symbolic challenges in terms of social recognition. What appears clear from our observations is that placing an intergenerational training in a classroom is not sufficient in itself to transform young students in teachers. It neither puts older people in the correct disposition to feel like students again.

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Acknowledgments

This research is a pilot project within the wider international project HARVEST - eHealth and Aging in Rural Areas: Transforming Everyday Life, Digital Competences, and Technology. Harvest is funded by Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) “More Years, Better Lives” (Third Call). The third Joint Transnational Call, launched in December 2016, is entitled “Ageing and Place in a digitising world”, Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives” (JPI MYBL) is supported by J-Age II. J-Age II is funded by Horizon2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, under Grant Agreement nr 643850. International Coordinator: Simon Lindgren - Umeå University (Sweden). Italian coordinator: Fausto Colombo – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Simone Carlo & Francesco Bonifacio

Authors
  1. Simone Carlo
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  2. Francesco Bonifacio
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Correspondence to Simone Carlo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Qin Gao

  2. Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

    Jia Zhou

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Carlo, S., Bonifacio, F. (2020). “You Don’t Need Instagram, It’s for Young People”: Intergenerational Relationships and ICTs Learning Among Older Adults. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J. (eds) Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Technology and Society. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12209. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50232-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50232-4_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50231-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50232-4

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