Stacey Copeland  00:01

You're listening to the amplify Podcast Network.

Kim Sawchuk  00:12

Older adults were often categorized within certain diffusionist theories of communications as laggards and hesitant users. When you started to talk to them, you started to realize it's not a hesitation, I know what's going on. It's a refusal.

Sally Chivers  00:32

Welcome to Wrinkle Radio, where the stories we tell about aging matter. I'm your host, Dr Sally Chivers, and I am so glad you're here. I'm joined for the next two episodes by Professor Kim Sawchuk. In this episode, we're going to talk about aging and digital technology. If you think we're going to talk about Internet access and chat GPT and cell phones, you're not wrong. But there's more to it.

Kim Sawchuk  01:01

When I decided I need to be more age wise in my approach, I developed a little questionnaire and started asking people in my family and friends about what's a digital technology to you, and realized that people were coming up with really interesting answers. If you were a printer in your previous life, your idea of a digital technology might have been digital camera and a printer and a scanner that for some of the female people I talk to who are older, they'd say, Oh my God, my stove isn't my stove anymore. It's got all these buttons on it. And they would start to talk about appliances. I hadn't even thought of a technology as an appliance. So I realized that by having conversations with older adults about language that we took for granted in our field, that it could be a way of creating a confrontation that would be productive with what I thought I knew that seemed so basic to what the textbooks included as even a technology, that older adults, when you ask them about this, were bringing positions based on their past and their historical experiences and their interests that absolutely confounded a lot of ideas in the field.

Sally Chivers  02:11

That's Kim Sawchuk, a professor at Concordia University in the Department of Communication Studies. She directs the Aging in Data project. She's the ACT lab director, that stands for aging communication and technologies, and she's the director of Concordia Center for Research on aging. As soon as we started talking, Kim Sawchuk taught me that we, and she includes critical media scholars in this so we can feel really smart, even when we make this mistake, we often ask the wrong questions when we're talking about digital technology and older adults, we tend to think about the trouble that older adults have adopting new technologies, or we talk about new technology as a potential solution for the so called problems of growing older. This is how Kim would rephrase the questions,

Kim Sawchuk  03:03

What are the conundrums that living in a digital world pose for us as we age? Aging is a lifelong process, and I'm specifically interested in older people because they have been so often left out of the conversation. I don't want to position either digital media or the older person as the problem, or aging as the problem but that living in the world we live in poses all of us with a set of challenges that we have to negotiate at every single moment in our lives. I also wanted to rethink the idea of digital media affecting older adults. What's been so interesting about working with older adults is seeing how they adapt, how they negotiate, how they practice, how they find workarounds, in facing what we all face, which is that because we live in a society that's driven by innovation and things are changing, from the way that a cable is formatted to constant needs for upgrades, to software developments, to changes in whatever a printer is or was from the fax machine, suddenly to, let's not use paper because it's bad, because everything should be on the cloud, as if that is ecologically friendly. You know, ha, ha. There's a story. So I think about the way that older people and digital people are in a constant negotiation with each other, and that we have to think about it from the point of view of finding the ways that barriers can be put into place, but also questioning the notion of accessibility to digital media is if access is only a good thing,

Sally Chivers  04:51

To say that Kim Sawchuk is at the forefront of research on aging and technology would be to understate the case.  I was curious what brought someone working in a field so associated with youth to devote her career to aging and later life.

Kim Sawchuk  05:08

I think about that relationship between aging and older people and changes in media as being such an interesting place to dwell in intellectually, because it brings forth the cultural assumptions we have about what oldness is, and because they seem incommensurable, that it provides a really interesting space for food for thought. I think I just became so irritated with my discipline that I decided I wanted to focus on age and aging, because I just saw it as such a travesty in terms of the work that was being done on innovation and technology and the digital world, Barbara Crow and I had already been writing feminist critiques of the language of policy around what was then called the information superhighway, and asking, well, who's roadkill on that highway? Who's left out and realizing that older adults were not thought of that at all and that I needed to make a radical turn around. Teaching in a Communication Studies Department, there was one person who taught, actually a course on aging, and then everything else we had or courses that I might be interested in teaching were all about children in media or youth. And so I just realized what a giant absence there was, for many different reasons within Media Studies and also within New Media, that it was a problem on many levels. Epistemologically, it means that new media doesn't pay attention to its own history and it gets lost, and that there were people who had been working in that field for a very long time, many of them women whose lives were undocumented but had contributed to the development of the fields. I started to gradually realize that age isn't just a variable in a marketing data plan or program, that it was connected to what I already knew, life experiences that people had, that it was connected to way we thought about technology, that it was connected to the way we think about time and temporality in terms of history and ourselves, and that it was a critical vantage point to interrogate the language of new media. I just started to embrace it more and more as something that I wanted to focus on as the center of the work that I do,

Sally Chivers  07:20

Talking to a group of people not usually associated with new technology helps us expand what we think of as digital technology. We recently bought a new dishwasher. I was so happy with the one we found because it was way quieter than the one it replaced, and it wasn't a smart dishwasher, so I knew that there wouldn't be the work of having to get it online, and that nobody would be monitoring what we did with it. I was so glad we got a new dishwasher so we wouldn't worry about our old one breaking and being without a dishwasher for a few weeks. But wouldn't you know about three months into having it, it started spraying water all over the floor. I discovered this as I'm going to bed, it's probably midnight, so I start Googling, and then I hop on to the Samsung site, and I get involved in an online chat. I still don't know if I was talking to a bot or a person, whoever it was, we'll call them Samsungia. They asked me to go to my dishwasher and show them the inside. So I gave them permission to look through my camera phone. I'm holding it inside my dishwasher, and they type, "Take a step back." It was so eerie. It was so creepy. Even as I describe it, I feel like I'm back in a science fiction movie. So Samsungia, bot or person, couldn't help me over the chat feature. So they arranged to have an actual real life repair person come out. The guy came and the problem was with a digital sensor. He couldn't repair it right away, because he had to get in a part. You know how long it is to get in parts right now, especially when they're digital. So even though I went out of my way not to have a networked device, I was still caught in this trap of digital technology, and I hadn't really thought of it that way until Kim described what she learned from her research with older adults. You don't always have a choice of when you're entering into the realm of digital technology. You don't even always know whether you're talking to a person or a bot. This feels like such a profound transitional moment in digital technology. And Kim reminded me, it's by far, not the first such transition I've lived through.

Kim Sawchuk  09:49

I came into thinking about this at a moment in time as well in the Canadian context, you probably don't remember, but everybody used to have landline phones. Everybody was starting to get into cell phones and realizing my parents didn't have one, lots of older people I knew didn't have one, but so did younger people. And at that point, it wasn't because people were laggards or hesitant. It was because, in the Canadian context, the cost of the damn things, and it wasn't just the device, but of having access to it was really expensive. And if you're living on a fixed income or on a pension, or you're a young person, and you're living on whatever allowances you have, or your shitty wages as a young person, that there were things that those two age cohorts had in common. It had nothing to do with fearfulness on the part of older adults. It was about questions around, can I afford this? Is it worth it, in relationship to what I already have at hand, which is a landline phone and why would I choose to have this? What could it do for me? Barbara Crow and I developed a study, which we called that point, seniors and cells so Canadian older adults and cell phones. We thought we were going to talk to 20 people. We ended up having conversations with well over 300 people, between 2009 and 2013 when we were undergoing this transition. And what we learned is the kind of really interesting workarounds that people would develop to be able to, for example, deal with the fact that they maybe couldn't afford two phones, and they were in a position where they would have to keep their landlines, but they still felt they needed to have a cell phone, because it would do things for them. If you lived in the country like we interviewed quilters in the Kawartha area, well, they're on the road, and they wanted it for safety. People wanted it because in the Canadian winter as well, there's this question of security. But then they would tell us about their practices, oh, I forgot to charge it and things like this. So we were told all these amazing stories of how people were using it, how they would use it as spousal finders in big shopping malls, because they didn't want to walk all those big aisles that they would share a phone. So we knew that communication practices were changing within older adults. We learned from older adults who were still working. Of course, people work well beyond 65 and they were taking busses that even if they couldn't afford to pay for having their phone on all the time that they would perform being on it for safety reasons, we learned about how people were starting to use them because their family members were using them, and there was an expectation that they would be on all the time, and the kind of pressures that would create. What we really learned is that digital technology doesn't just influence older people, it influences social relations, and older people find interesting workarounds and hacks. Don't keep the phone on, but look like you're using it. Don't buy two lines, because at that point it's too expensive. One will do. You always give it to the person who's leaving the house.

Sally Chivers  12:56

Do you remember the first time you went on the internet? I don't, but I do remember the first time I accessed it from home. I was living in an apartment in Montreal, my roommate and I decided to dial in. We heard all those wretched noises that we associate with dial up, and then we couldn't really think of what to look up, so I looked up Anne of Green Gables, and I found on the screen a passage of Anne of Green Gables that was so familiar. I had probably read it 100 times. It's the one where she's looking out on a tree and dreaming of Gilbert Blythe. And then I had this realization that I also had the book in the room with me, and I could read the actual book. in retrospect, that moment was a lesson in turning to digital technology for what I actually wanted to do with my life. Rather than thinking, Okay, I have access to digital technology. I need to do something new or different. I need to change my interests, change who I am in relation to the world. I could be that PhD in English Literature person, and think about how the Internet could enhance that. I remember my grandmother getting a personal computer in the assisted living place where she lived. And when I asked her what she did, she played Solitaire. She loved playing solitaire, so that's what she choose to do on the personal computer, even though, of course, that's what she could have done in her living room. These stories exemplify the questions that Kim says we all need to be asking about digital practices in older adults, and where we need to start when we're thinking about this topic,

Kim Sawchuk  14:38

it's not just that digital practices influence older adults, but that we have a lot to learn about our current digital world and our practices by talking to older adults and listening to what they want, and as a result, coming up with, I think, amazing innovations as a result of working with them. Other than asking, How does digital media affect older adults? How do older adults influence and affect our uses of digital media? Working with community organizations like the Atwater library was incredible because they would propose to us, can you help us? We've done a survey of our older adults who come to the library and asked them what they want to learn around digital and new media, and this is what they told us, they want to learn how to scan photographs. Why do they want to learn how to scan photographs? Because they're worried about family photographs being passed on, and they want to have copies of it so that each member of the family can have a data set, basically, of a life. So I learned from them that it's important to ask. interviewing older adults, demanding that grandchildren, when they come to the table, put their phones aside, talking to me how they're proud of their old brick and about why they don't want to get rid of it, adapting to a digital camera, to practices and rituals they have as community builders, for example, when we did workshops on training older adults how to use a digital camera so they could create their own documentation, of their own histories, of their own organizations. One of the organizations, recaa I've written about, they had a habit and practice every when they would have their meetings of saying, Hi, how are you today? This is how I'm feeling. And then they would ask the other person and Ethel, how are you? Then Ethel would say, oh, today, I'm not feeling so great. Enid, how are you? When we gave them training on using digital cameras or how to use a audio microphone, what we would do is give them the technology, and they would pass the mic or pass the camera, and they would incorporate the learning and the device into their rituals of communication and exchange. It's those negotiations and those conundrums that I think, for me, are important, rather than the question of impact, which is so often in media studies, what people and what's the impact of this device on this community. No, it's how does the community make sense of this? How do older adults make sense of this? What do they want? And how do they negotiate what they're given? And then what do they see as helpful, and what do they reject? And understanding it's all provisional, because new media is changing all the time, and they're not the only ones grappling with this. We all are.

Sally Chivers  17:05

like so many Wrinkle Radio episodes, the sub theme of this episode is challenging our assumptions. When we assume that digital technology makes processes more efficient, that can lead to serious ageism with strong consequences. Kim gave an example of a consultation process gone wrong:

Kim Sawchuk  17:25

when the city here in Montreal, when they were implementing the age friendly city policy consultations, they only had things online, and we in Quebec, the reality is that people over the age of 75 who would benefit from those policies, unfortunately, the majority of them don't necessarily have access to the internet. A lot of those online consultations mean that older adults, who would actually have something to say about the kind of services they want and need and have good ideas as well, not just what they want, but what we should be doing, are excluded. So again, the politics of form that Dorothy Smith talks about in the digital era can create new forms of exclusions, and I've called that the illusion of inclusion. Everybody assumes that putting something online and making it digitally friendly is helpful, but you're perhaps not reading the populations who actually will actually need the service, use the service, or will be irritated and annoyed, by the way, that the service assumes a certain age cohort.

Sally Chivers  18:25

Of course, Kim Sawchuk isn't arguing you shouldn't have an online survey component to consultations about age friendly communities. A lot of older people do know how to use the internet, have internet access and might prefer that for all kinds of reasons, but she's saying it's silly to assume that older adults have that access and will give you the information you're looking for. If you've ever had to fill out a form with a pull down menu and you have something at all unique to say or any kind of unique complaint or feedback or situation, you realize there is no space for you, then you have to pull out the chat box and start talking to Samsungia, for example.

Kim Sawchuk  19:12

Older adults are heterogeneous. Do not lump all old people into this the category of old or elderly. Sometimes we divide it 55 to 60, 60 to 65 I mean within that, there's a whole bunch of ways that our aging identities are extraordinarily complex. And working within that kind of intersection between aging and technology, you witness that sometimes in very clear ways, but it also teaches you that sometimes you can work from those kind of what Kenneth Burke would have called representative anecdotes, unravel them and that figuring out what is the status of that story in relationship to other patterns, and then don't assume the explanations you're going to get are because it's age, because otherwise it's because age, I'm old, therefore because. y

Sally Chivers  20:03

before Kim Sawchuk became a university professor, she worked in marketing research, and a lot of that informs the research she does now in the university sector.

Kim Sawchuk  20:15

This keeps going back to my trauma story of having worked in a marketing research agency where I first became aware of the amount of what I would call surveillance of consumer bodies was going on, and this was before digital technology. I started to notice that marketing research was predicated on the idea of age segregation and that there is very fine parsings out of people and their habits and attention to what we buy, consume, do practice, from the moment that we tend to be around 15 to 45/50, if you were over 50, you entered into what I identified as the gray zone, where, if you were 50 plus, you were suddenly undifferentiated and all the same. So I started to think about age segregation and the way that teenagers were targeted. And then also noted that in terms of culture, there was a whole discourse and language of La Belle Age en francais, th. Golden years, marketers were starting to pay attention to the fact that potentially people who were either just pre retiring or post retiring may have money that they might want to tap into. Having had that long view, you see those transformations through time of the capacity of systems and what Castells would call living in networkedsocieties where it's about the speed of the information that can be transferred, it's about the scope and range of the information that can be transferred. It's about the amount of information that can be transferred in a single moment. It's about the complexity of information that can be calculated. This is what it means to live, not just in a digital world, but a digitally networked world. So again, when we talk about a digital technology, people might see on their fridge a temperature guage that tells them whether or not their ice machine is working, but you have those sensors connected to the company for repair work, supposedly, it means they can also calculate how many times you open your fridge. So there's information and data being collected in ways now that are unimaginable. Again, working in a marketing research office, you realize that you can collect tons of data. What you do with it is a whole other question.

Sally Chivers  22:26

Before this conversation with Kim, I had set aside my thoughts about the dishwasher because it works, and I'm really glad about that, because it's quieter than the other one. The noise of the other one was driving me bananas. But come to think of it, I don't know what happened to the video that I took live with either the person or the bot. Are they studying what was inside my dishwasher? It's kind of like those eerie moments, you know, the ones when an ad pops up for something you were maybe thinking of buying, but you're sure you didn't look it up anywhere. Did you mention it to your spouse over dinner? Was your TV listening in? How did they even know you wanted it? Do you want it? Who even is they? And we start to think we're really smart and savvy about this. People now post questions on Facebook, like, where to find smoked paprika in Peterborough, and they add a picture of their dog for the algorithm. They know that a cute picture of a dog will get more views on Facebook, but do they really know why they're seeing the ads they're seeing on Facebook? Turns out there's a little I you can click that gives you information on why you are fed that ad. Check it out. It will scare you, so do it at a time when you're feeling very comfortable and confident.

Sally Chivers  23:48

We know algorithms are out there, but we don't really know the extent to which they're guiding our lives. We're being monitored, and what that has to do with aging. That will be the focus of the next episode. Here is a teaser.

Kim Sawchuk  24:02

Something Kate Crawford reminds us of is that we live in this world where there are predictive systems. They've been around for a long time, but the level and capacity to be able to make use of those predictive systems is more or less iffy. There's still probabilities not complete. I used to come home from the marketing research office crying, going, we're really screwed. We're being monitored and tracked. And this was way before all of this stuff was in play. So all of this stuff now I'm doing on data and data gathering, I see as kind of an extension of my early traumas, of having witnessed from the inside what was going on under the hood in terms of the monitoring of consumer bodies. It's not just dangers and risks. It's really, in some instances, sometimes harm. So let's go back to the question of, what's an algorithm? It's simply a kind of a calculus. I use algorithms when I use my Excel sheet and I click on and I'm calculating my sums. When you check on, you know, Wikipedia or through chat GPT, and say, what's an algorithm? It's so benign, they'll say things like, it's a set of defined steps or rules to be followed in problem solving operations. Algorithms are always positioned as problem solving calculations. What it doesn't take into account and what it leaves out is automated decision making machines, ADMS, that are in fact, connected to algorithms that are providing calculations based on the history of your movements through digital space, that are influencing a whole whack and variety of things, some of which we consent to, much of which we do not. So algorithms simply are calculations, but if you think about it in relationship to digitally networked societies, and who has the capacity, power, and, frankly, money, to make sense of that information. That's where it gets scary.

Sally Chivers  25:55

Before you panic, tune into the next episode of Wrinkle Radio with Kim Sawchuk, where we'll talk about algorithmic aging, including some tips on what you can do to try to stay safe. This has been Wrinkle Radio. I'm your host, Dr Sally Chivers, thank you for listening. Please tune in next time, and until then, please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your neighbors, tell your local friendly chat bot, and remember, don't panic. It's just aging.