Session Chair: Aleesha Joy Rodriguez
Presentation 1
NAVIGATING THE DIGITAL WAVE: THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES OF ORDINARY ELDERLY SHORT VIDEO CREATORS IN CHINA
Yingwen Wang
London College of Communication, United Kingdom
Concerns about the aging of the Chinese population (Y. Wang & Su, 2024), and with the Chinese government's acknowledgment of the silver-haired economy's significant development, there is an urgent need for research into the social media engagement of the elderly. Short videos, representing a novel form of information dissemination and social engagement, offer the elderly a means to connect across time and space (Zhang & Xiang, 2023). Short form video is dynamic and intuitive, making audio-visual information and public communication particularly accessible to older audiences. Notably, On 15th January 2024, the General Office of the State Council of China published the "Opinions on Developing the Silver Economy and Enhancing the Well-Being of the Elderly." This document marks the inaugural national policy directive specifically addressing the “Silver Economy” by the Chinese Government (Huang, 2024). The issuance of the Opinions policy underscores the critical role of the elderly demographic within the ambit of China's contemporary digital and cultural milieu, highlighting the government's commitment to integrating this segment of the population into the broader socio-economic framework.
However, existing research, both domestically and internationally, has predominantly examined the participation of older adults in short video platforms from the user perspective, often overlooking the significant number of older individuals actively contributing as content creators within the short video culture. Consequently, this research addresses this gap and is dedicated to examining the involvement of Chinese elderly individuals in the realm of short-form video culture, specifically as content creators.
Presentation 2
Older Adults’ Responses to Misinformation on Social Media
Annalise Baines(1), Eszter Hargittai(2)
1: University of Zurich, Switzerland; 2: University of Zurich, Switzerland
Social media offer the opportunity for much public discourse, which also has the potential to spread misinformation far and wide. This study investigates how older adults respond to misinformation on social media and how older adults’ responses to encountering false information on social media vary by sociodemographic factors and digital skills. Based on survey data collected in 2023 from 2,000 adults ages 60+, we find that many users take a multifaceted approach to assessing false or misleading information on social media. Their most common strategies are checking the source and reading the comments for validation. These responses to misinformation highlight older adults’ active participation in information verification on social media.
Presentation 3
Automating Eldercare? Visions, problems, and expertise in the “Age Tech” Industry
Elizabeth Nixon Fetterolf
Stanford University, United States of America
The US, like many nations, faces what scholars and commentators have called a “crisis of care;” due to aging cohorts, a frayed social safety net, high costs of in-home care, and an underpaid, undervalued homecare workforce, care for the old is increasingly inaccessible (e.g., Abelson & Rios, 2023; Glenn, 2000). The eldercare technology, or “Age Tech,” industry has introduced myriad new technologies – positioning these developments as urgent solutions to the “care crisis.” Existing scholarship has examined how care workers and families navigate surveillant systems that mediate eldercare in the US (e.g., Glaser, 2021; Berridge et al., 2019) and how how technologists in Japan envision caring technologies as vehicles for family and state futures (Robertson, 2017; Wright, 2023), but there has been limited research on how professionals within the American “Age Tech” sector envision This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork with doctors, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs in the industry and analysis of extant materials to answer the following questions: How are organizational boundaries, particularly between healthcare and technology experts, established and maintained within this highly interdisciplinary sector? How do professionals define the problems that they are attempting to solve? When do these definitions come into conflict with one another? I argue that competing visions are often at play, even within the same organizations and within individual narratives – members of the “Age Tech” industry alternate between presenting themselves as savvy entrepreneurs tapping into the “longevity economy” and do-gooders providing a necessary service for a social ill.
Presentation 4
Latet anguis in herba: unveiling ageism of generative AI
Juan Linares-Lanzman, Andrea Rosales
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) burst into media industries (Baradaran, 2024) as a cheaper, easier, and faster alternative to produce contents, images and videos. Social scientists are already starting to show how GenAI reinforces stereotypes and discrimination, largely due to gender, race and origin biases in the data used for machine learning. However, less has been said about ageism in GenAI. Probably because ageist depictions tend to be the norm and ageism is widely disregarded and deprioritised in research, industry, and society. Despite ageist depictions of the media industry reinforce stereotypes and have a negative impact on self-perception.
In this paper, we analyse: 1) if GenAI produces significant ageist outputs (or not), if yes, 2) in what extent GenAI is reinforcing age stereotypes, through the analysis of 1.800 image and text outputs of popular AI tools. We compared the outputs of prompts related to older people with those related to the adult population and employed image recognition and text analysis to assess if Gen AI falls into associating ageist prejudices to older people, and if they are reinforcing those stereotypes.
Preliminary results show that, despite their neutrality disclaimer, generative contents, not only fall into age stereotyping discourses but also exploit tropes that have been widely questioned. Thus, while the media industry has been moving towards an inclusive discourse , the easiness of GenAI burst as a threat to the inclusion of diverse perspectives.
