When technology non-use troubles good ageing

In ageing research, policy, and practice, older adults’ non-use of digital technologies is often discussed as an involuntary state that risks marginalising older adults. In recent years, critical appraisals of technology non-use in gerontological literature have opened up dominant definitions of non-use as a problem, re-constructing older adults’ engagement with technology as diverse and deliberate practices. To understand the multifaceted nature of what is considered non-use, however, these studies have often focused on older adults who self-identify as non-users, or on criteria of non-use that these researchers themselves established.

In this paper, we suggest a more processual and dialogical approach. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation with providers and participants of a digital social care service for the prevention of social isolation and loneliness in old age, we show that ascriptions of ‘non-users’ to older adults may come from different actors, and that they may be in conflict with how the older adults define their engagement with technologies. Taking those frictions between different ascriptions of use and non-use into consideration, as well as the socio-material negotiations through which such frictions are responded to, our analysis reveals how non-use is intertwined with notions of ‘good ageing’. In the context of digital health and social care services for older people, whose mission is to facilitate ‘good ageing’, negotiations about use and non-use are in fact negotiations about different ways of understanding and enacting good ageing in practice.

Reflecting on insights from our study, we propose ways to improve the ability of human and non-human actors to respond to each other’s diverse forms of understanding and enacting good ageing. Cultivating such ‘response-ability’ may open alternatives to a gradual disengagement for older persons participating in digital health and social care services by allowing more diverse forms of good ageing to co-exist. As a result, non-use can shift from being a problem or concern to being an indication of ways of improving ‘good ageing’ together.