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

• Published in: Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Technology and Society Vol. 12209; pp. 29 - 41
• Main Authors: Carlo, Simone, Bonifacio, Francesco
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2020; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Aging and social media; Aging and technology acceptance; Generational differences in IT use; Training the elderly in the use of IT
• ISBN: 3030502317; 9783030502317
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-50232-4_3

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.