Ageing with digital technologies: From theory to agency and practice

Abstract

The title of this special issue, “Ageing with digital technologies” points to two of the growing challenges facing the twenty-first century, namely the changing demographic structure of societies connected to ageing populations on the one hand and the technological development and digitalization of societies on the other hand. These challenges are continuously addressed by researchers and scholars across the globe in a variety of aca-demic disciplines, including medicine, demography, biotechnology, neu-roscience to name just a few. At the same time, questions of ageing and technology do not go unnoticed in other disciplines, including humanities and social sciences. The focus of this special issue is on the latter, namely exploring and better understanding the social and material factors, in terms of theory, agency, and practice, that play a role when older people are co-creators, users, and recipients of technological innovations. The notion that older adults are one of the groups for whom digitalization of society is the most problematic has been widely discussed by ageing researchers (Russel, 2011, Quaan-Haase et al., 2018). Most research on older people and digital technology has previously been discussed in two ways: first, in the context of digital and social inequalities, digital divide, and social exclusion. This research has also informed the popular