Connections, negotiations, and tensions: Talking tech with older adults

Mobile media, and the larger digital technological systems of which they are a part, both shape and are shaped by contemporary experiences of aging. With the aim of exploring older adults' understandings, uses of, and experiences with digital technologies in their everyday lives, we conducted four exploratory focus groups in two Canadian cities, with a total of 29 participants representing a diverse range of ages, living situations, and socio-economic statuses. Challenging stereotypes of technophobic or health-obsessed elders, our participants reported using a wide variety of devices and apps for a multiplicity of purposes. Focus groups were characterized by open-ended discussion, eliciting complexity, creativity, and agency in our participants' understandings and experiences of their digital worlds. Two main themes emerged from the analysis. First, a number of tensions - self-talk vs practice, design vs adaptation, "scripts" vs recreation - were articulated. Second, participants recounted the complex negotiations between technologies and people, bodies, environments, and resources that conjoined to shape their navigations of digital worlds. We suggest that open-ended dialogue with older adults is a promising method for understanding their ongoing, complex, and socially and materially situated engagements with technology. As a generative methodological tool, the focus group not only captures these dynamics but also produces the frictions, negotiations, and shared reflections that reveal them.