Growing Old with Mediatization: Reflexivity and Sense of Agency

‘If I got better at it, I would be able to Skype with my brother on Iceland – or to do all the other things you can do… you know?’ This quote from a 76 year old woman’s account of her thoughts about newer media in her everyday life underlines how the participants in the present study interpret newer media as a horizon of possibility related to things ‘you can do’. Taking this phenomenological sensibility of media as its inspiration, this article presents an analysis of qualitative interviews that were coded to reveal ways in which mediated infrastructures were experienced by older women.

As emphasised by the study participants, stability and predictability played larger roles in the everyday lives of older people in earlier phases of modernity, and they find that they cannot in their old age simply follow the path taken by their parents. Seen from the perspective of the individual, the demand for choice and autonomy in today’s later life amplifies the need for and scope of reflexivity (Archer 2012, Gilleard & Higgs 2015). Societies are ageing and mediatizing at the same time, and this constitutes a significant aspect of the later life experience of the cohorts born during the first half of the twentieth century. Media such as computers, tablets, smartphones and mobile phones are slowly but surely becoming part of older people’s media repertoires. The expansion of infrastructures for communication entailed in digital mediatization (Lievrouw & Livingstone 2006) also substantially expands individuals’ possibilities to act communicatively across contexts. Moreover, media enabling trans-situational agency augment individuality inasmuch as they are less likely to be shared, like the telephone, radio or television of the household (Helles 2016).

Women on average live longer than men, which is why they are also more exposed to experiences of decline in life quality as an effect of ageing; thus, they have more years to independently engage or struggle with new technologies. Concerning media development, the older women who participated in this study – and who all had access to the Internet from home – occupy a unique position vis-à-vis media development. Their historically situated experience of the expanding infrastructures for agency constitutes an asset for understanding the implications of the mediatization for everyday life. By deploying sociologist Margaret Archer’s (2003, 2007) heuristic concept of the internal conversation as the manifestation of reflexivity in everyday life, I engage with the questions as to how media as infrastructures for agency figure in practices of reflexivity among older women, and what that can tell us about the mediated construction of late modern old age.

The research was carried out in the homes of 22 study participants between 74 and 89 years of age. The interviews were patterned by the image of a ‘media world’ where media infrastructures are indispensable for living a socially integrated life. The theme of control was topical to the participants’ experience of possibilities and restraints related to media. Based on their emphasis on media as dis- or empowering tools for agency, I suggest that newer media infrastructures both answer to the need for and extend the scope of everyday reflexivity, and that control of media restrains or amplifies feelings of being an autonomous actor in the cultural field of the third age (Gilleard & Higgs 2011).

The mediated construction of social reality is a process intertwined with other aspects of social change (Couldry & Hepp 2017). Concerning empirical research on how people live with media in late modern later life, this invites sensitising approaches that look into sub-processes related to media development (Jensen 2013, Ekström et al. 2016, Krotz 2014) as, for example, the multiplication of platforms enabling agency across contexts. Later life is characterised by experiences that turn everyday life upside down. Individuals have to reorient themselves in relation to work, finances, culture and social life. Place and routine gradually become challenged by frailty and social loss, dependency on care and perhaps by the move to an institutional setting. Moreover, later life is not what it used to be. On the one hand, a growing number of adults in Western societies live longer with better health and more resources and opportunities after their working lives. On the other hand, increasing economic, social and cultural inequality compromises the lives of a growing number of older adults with fewer personal resources. The late modern ‘deinstitutionalization of the life course’ in terms of increased personal responsibility (Marshall 2014: 211; Beck 1992) and the growing individualisation of life choice enhance and extend the need for individual reflexivity (Gilleard & Higgs 2015: 320).

A later life characterised by changing circumstances and adaptation in a mediatized culture of choice and autonomy challenges the emphasis on routine and habit often taken for granted in everyday life media studies (Neal & Murji 2015: 811, Archer 2012). With a focus on the connection between everyday reflexivity and agency, Archer (2003, 2007) offers input for studying the experience of growing old with mediatization. She considers reflexivity indispensable to late modern societal transformation because the ‘causal efficacy of “objective” factors is held to depend upon their reflexive mediation’ (2007: 89). In this perspective, the intertwinement between social change and media development depends on individuals’ reflexive adjustment in processes in which media are interpreted and then, perhaps, put into practice.

In Archer’s account, reflexivity mediates the impact of ‘structural and cultural emergent properties of the social’ (2007: 64–65) as we pursue our individual ‘life projects’ – that is, the general course of action that we take in order to pursue our ultimate life concerns (ibid: 89). For people born during the first part of the twentieth century, the expansion of the mediated social infrastructures connected with the digital mediatization wave (Couldry & Hepp 2017) constitutes emerging cultural and structural properties related to the construction of social relationships, citizenship, health and care. As hinted at in the quote opening the article, the ‘large “universe” of variously connected digital media through which we actualize social relations’ (Couldry & Hepp 2017: 34) is manifest in the interviews in terms of an anticipation of ‘things that can be done’. According to Archer, it is through such internal conversations that we ‘make up our minds’ by deliberating about our concerns and defining our own projects. The short-term outcomes of our negotiations and deliberations are everyday practices produced or reproduced in the face of changing circumstances (2003: 103).

The individual’s reflexive and flexible organisation of practices as a distinct aspect of late modern everyday life translates into the ability to act with media across contexts (Helles 2016). Seen from the older individual’s point of view, everyday life spans multiple contexts, problems and adaptations, with which it is possible to engage through mediated agency in a multitude of different ways, depending on individual resources. The participants’ sensibility of mediated infrastructures for agency testifies that the newer media have become part of the negotiations they have with themselves about their opportunities and courses of action. Owing to Raymond Williams (1977), a materialist media phenomenology (Jansson 2016, Couldry & Hepp 2017) considers both the expansion of the material infrastructures for individual communicative agency and the sense-making and sensibilities that relate to these infrastructures in order to develop an understanding of the role of media in peoples’ lives and in social change. In drawing on Williams’ (1977) concept of structure of feeling, André Jansson (2016: 15) makes an intervention of particular interest to the question of the older individual’s reflexive mediation of the experience of media development.

In the present analysis, the term ‘structure of feeling’ serves to build a bridge between, on the one hand, the power structures intertwined with media technologies and content, and, on the other, ‘how it feels to live with media and ultimately being dependent on them’ (ibid: 3). An avenue for empirical research into sub-processes of mediatization is to explore, on the one hand, the sense of new opportunities, and, on the other hand, the feelings of frustration, stress and dependence that mediatization gives rise to (ibid: 15). Study participants can reconstruct their internal conversations in verbal accounts, which is why the concept offers itself up for phenomenological analysis of mediatization as a situated experience that gives rise to particular sensibilities and feelings of, for example, abundant opportunity.

The research was carried out through qualitative interviews in the study participants’ homes. The sub-analysis represented in this article was embedded in a field study also focusing on the role of media technology in the material experience of growing old (Givskov 2017a) and on the habitually based diversity of experience surrounding newer media (Givskov 2017b). Visits lasted around one and a half to two hours and were structured around: 1) the media biography, 2) everyday life with media, and 3) media and media development. The analysis in this article is primarily based on the third aspect of data collection in which I aimed to gain insight into ways in which the participants interpreted media and media development.

The twenty-two participants were selected through professional and private networks, excluding people I knew first-hand. In order to ensure a diversity of experiences of the particular aspect of media infrastructures for agency, I selected participants based on differences in education, income and origin, and with both rural and urban backgrounds, from Denmark, Iceland, Pakistan and Palestine. Online media competences varied greatly, so they are likely to represent the ‘online population’ of older women well. With regard to ageing, the study participants were different in terms of how frail they were and the reduced abilities they had to cope with – aspects that do not necessarily correlate with chronological age, but which nevertheless characterise the experience of growing old.

Questions were posed in order to prompt focused talk about how recent media developments were experienced. Opening and semi-structured questions included: ‘Are you thinking about media?’ ‘How are you thinking about media?’ or ‘…this and that aspect of media/media use?’ ‘How does that feel?’ I used a variety of follow-up questions aimed at getting a picture of the scope and nature of reflexivity, such as ‘would you please elaborate’ or ‘do you mean that…?’

With regard to the analysis, I borrowed from Archer’s account describing concrete examples of elements of internal conversations, and coded sentences according to whether they were about media in planning (day, week or long-term), mulling over media (dwelling on a problem), deciding about or with media (debating what to do), and imagining the personal or historical future (Archer 2003: 161). For example: ‘I text just to see if she is there’; ‘I just go online and check the balance and place my investments’; ‘if I learn I’ll follow my granddaughter on Facebook’. Moreover, I coded sentences expressing feelings about media, as in: ‘I can do anything with my media’ and ‘It is hard’, as well as feelings related to social positioning (Moghaddam & Harré 2010) such as: ‘Young people are better at it’. I identified the theme of control running through the set of interviews. I theorised the theme by referring to the concept of a (subjective) sense of control – as a psychological predecessor to a subjective sense of agency (Langer & Rodin 1976, Lachman et al. 2011).

In the following, I discuss three aspects of the relationship between reflexivity and media infrastructures for agency: imagining the circumstance of omnipresent media; anticipating media in – and calibrating media with – individual everyday practice; and the subjective sense of control and agency. Finally, I discuss the participants’ experience from the perspective of the question of the mediated construction of later life.

Statements such as ‘it is a media world we live in’, references to ‘the media society’ and articulations of memories of life before the advent of digital technology – ‘what would we do without all these different things?’ – testify that the recent media development was topical across the participants’ individual experiences. In terms of qualitative change of the role of media communication, the participants emphasised the significance of the possibility of acting across distance: ‘Distance is not the same any more… Sri Lanka… You are never farther apart than you can always reach each other by texting – you know, just ask how he she is doing and the kids’. Critical stances towards the aspect of being involved across contexts were also significant, such as in the statement: ‘What strikes me the most is that everyone is walking around with their phones and all their communication devices, right? You notice it in the train – people are sort of not present where they are’.

Critical stances towards the idea that it is good to be online were addressed, such as in: ‘Everybody talks about how everybody should be “online”’. This linked up in particular with comments about the question as to whether media development was to the benefit or detriment of society: ‘I cannot judge whether it is good or bad – it is probably both’, and: ‘Well, there is no doubt that if you use your media in an intelligent way you can really get a lot out of the system. But if you don’t, then it hurts you enormously. It does.’ Faith in new technology was represented as primarily being in the hands of the young: ‘I hope that they [the younger generations] get something good out of it; that they use it for something sensible’ – as something somewhat out of the hands of the older generation.

Alongside the disappearance of media such as telephones, radios and televisions into a background presence in the reorganisation of everyday life during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Jansson 2014), the presence of media in discourse at large has been highlighted as significant to our time. Mark Deuze (2012) considers the concurrent disappearance and appearance of media in terms of intense discussions about ‘the role of media’ in society and individual lives as symptomatic of mediatization (xiii). Echoing Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) emphasis on the relationship between imagined worlds, techno- and media-scapes, Maren Hartmann (2014) points towards individual imagination of technology as the first and most important milestone in the process of individual media appropriation.

In line with these assertions of the role of media imaginaries in social change, the participants’ meta-reflexivity about media development suggests an overall adjustment in orientation and thinking towards media that is beyond the question of individual consumer choice, as well as being beyond the indispensability of media in routine and habit (Jansson 2014). Considering the participants’ responses in the perspective of structure of feeling, the interviews display an anticipation of media-related change that emerges from everyday feelings of possibility, ambiguity and alienation related to the omnipresence of media. The participants’ sensibilities suggest the presence of a virtual structure in terms of a common sense understanding of mediatization as an emergent meta-process with consequences for culture, society and the future.

As the following sections demonstrate, the virtual structure constitutes a backdrop for the way media has become an individual concern, and a signpost to the acquiring of devices, skills and behaviours that tie in with reflexivity and identity on the level of everyday practice.

While media competences, and resources in general, varied greatly among the participants, the aspiration to gain personal control over and capitalise on newer media in everyday life was significant across the interviews. This was carried out in both imaginaries of undetermined possibility for agency and in actual practice of mediated agency. The concern about not losing touch with new developments was prominent. Statements such as: ‘I really do not want to fall behind’; ‘Well, I am part of the overall media development and am keeping up’; ‘I want to be on the bandwagon… it gives me a life quality’, and ‘I feel part of the development process this way’ highlight media as a changing circumstance in later life to which the participants felt inclined to adapt. The participants’ orientation was directed towards the possibility of doing things across distance – also in terms of the practical issues, as illustrated by a statement such as: ‘I mean, I wouldn’t have to stand in a line and could take care of things when it suited me’.

The concern to follow suit was also reflected in expressions of a lack of ability to control particular media: ‘I have sometimes looked at online news and [my grandchildren] have written I don’t know how many notes: ‘Then you have to do this – then you have to do that’. Moreover, a sense of pressure and dependence was significant in responses to the rollout of borger.dk

borger.dk is Denmark’s version of e-government.

In a similar vein, the ability to send and receive verbal messages – in order to clarify aspects of television news – highlight that mediated social infrastructures are associated with a sense of appealing convenience in the context of the everyday life of the older participants. The mobility of media was represented as a particularly significant asset: ‘I remember my first mobile phone – it was a complete revolution – from one day to the next I could walk around and connect with whom I wanted, whenever I wanted’. Underlining the emotional side of the sense of flexibility, the aspect of being ‘on’ in a state of immediate ‘connection’ was highlighted in terms of a quality: ‘It gave me a sense of a more lively communication with people – back in the day you had to wait for an answer. Now other customs have developed and most people respond to messages quickly.’

Media appeared as integrated with multiple aspects of the ongoing internal conversational aspects of everyday life beyond media, such as, for example, the mulling over of a difficult relationship with a daughter – ‘then I just text to kind of, well… check that she is alive and just to feel that she is there’ – or the enactment of empathy and care: ‘I have a friend who is very active with texting. Sometimes she just has to tell me that she has vacuumed. And then I know – I really do know why: In that moment, she misses someone to communicate with. Then I just write back: “that is wonderful”.’ Also bigger events with emotional impact, such as a change in health, were objects for the reflexive adjustment to change with media. Getting a diagnosis involved going back and forth between searching online, asking questions in patient groups and communicating with the doctor, as explained in the following comment: ‘then, in the meantime, I have figured out some more on the Arthritis Community’s homepage; perhaps I write and ask them, or I write back to my doctor – and then I perhaps make a decision to try taking some specific oil.’

As suggested by Helles (2016), media that enable agency across contexts significantly broaden the range of options individuals have at their disposal to navigate everyday life. Irrespective of whether the participants perceived it as unfeasible or were already engaging with mediated possibilities for agency as part of their individual practice, their shared concern to adapt to media underlines the practical and emotional consequences of the virtual media society in terms of perceived possibilities and constraints. The participants’ reflexive adaptation in terms of an alignment of individual projects with and through media is suggestive of mediatization progressing through the experience of the media society as an institutional fact (Searle 1995), i.e. an anticipated structure exercising some kind of control to which the participants responded through their numerous actions with regard to the opportunities and demands that were ‘offered’. The virtual presence of media as an institutional fact across the interviews testifies to mediatization as a double sided process. Media infrastructures on the one hand take the shape of an independent institution – an ever emergent fact – that has a place in reflexivity inasmuch as it controls communication as a resource in society; on the other hand, the infrastructures for agency become intrinsic to everyday practices (Hjarvard 2013) – old as well as new.

As anticipated by the comment pointing towards ‘the young’, and the reference to the aspiration not to fall ‘behind’, the everyday experience of media as an institutional fact appeared as consequential for the participants’ way of positioning themselves in the wider context of social reality (Moghaddam & Harré 2010). Some particular utterances referred to experiencing difficulties in keeping up with peers: ‘I feel that I am lagging behind compared to my friends. One friend… she cannot stand not knowing how to use new technologies. She must have it and must master it. She is very skilled’; and: ‘I feel dependent on other people’s time and willingness to help’. Other comments referred to the comparison of individual competences and to an abstract notion of being ‘out’. ‘You feel at a loss, that you don’t have the required knowledge. In a way you are left out’; and: ‘Many people are happy with all of this, think of it as much easier than, for example, going to the municipality, but people like me, we are lost in all of this’. Especially poignant was situating the self by comparison to the media competences of the younger ‘generation’, who were perceived as being ‘better at it’, ‘agile’, ‘competent’, along the lines of the established discursive link between young people and new technologies (Hartmann 2005).

The instances of mulling over the position of the self as excluded from media development indicate that the participants’ experiences of the institutional fact of mediatization are linked to feelings of being in control in today’s social environment. Research concerned with the phenomenological experience of media in everyday life has highlighted the fact that breaks from using media are potentially linked to feelings of ‘dissonance’. Jansson and Magnus Andersson (2012) argue that dissonance is largely tied to mediatization in terms of the individual’s feeling of ‘not being comfortable without being able to connect, the feeling that you miss too much and cannot manage the practical matters of everyday life’ (p. 190). Underlining that the social infrastructures were felt as indispensable, where being ‘off’ was associated with feelings of discomfort, participants expressed a dependency on media, as exemplified in the following comment: ‘Then I couldn’t manage all the little things I do during the day – I would feel that I was outside the world if I lost it [the phone] or couldn’t get “on”.’ Moreover, comments explicitly addressed the significance of particular media to positive feelings of being in control:

My whole world is there [the smartphone]… I almost miss it… it is lying over there [pointing at a table]. Well, I don’t mean it that way… but you know, I cannot do without that phone because nobody can get in touch with me and I cannot keep up with Wordfeud and my mailbox then. It would be a disaster if I forgot it somewhere.

The distinctions between being in or out – on or off – underline that the omnipresent social infrastructures were felt to enable social integration on a very general level and by a wide range of cross-contextual practices. With emphasis on the aspect of mediatization as a property of late modernity, it has been argued that media pose specific challenges to ontological security, inasmuch as the modern world system is more intensely experienced with and through ICT (Silverstone 1994, Hartmann 2009, Hartmann 2014). Recently, with reference to newer media, Hartmann (2009: 223) suggests that ontological security in terms of ‘home’ is no longer only related to how the media technologies and content structure the routines and values of the household, but to the feeling of individual safety derived from being ‘connected with’ media.

Whether the opportunities presented by media to enable agency were imagined or taken up in practice, the participants’ expression of an ‘I-media-society’ project, in Archer’s terms, suggests that mediatization has a bearing on the issue of sense of control that ties in with the feeling that certain media are felt to be indispensable for living a socially integrated life (Jansson 2014). Concerning the expanded social infrastructures, these clearly tie in with the participants’ senses of ontological security, underlining the centrality of omnipresent media for the sense of societal belonging as well as for homeliness. It is well established within the psychological field of gerontology that the perception of having control (also) in later life constitutes a prerequisite for feeling that one has agency within society at large (Langer & Rodin 1976, Lachman et al. 2011).

The ‘I-media-society’ project, and associated feelings of dis- and empowerment, I will argue, is key in mapping the contemporary social space in which people grow old, inasmuch as it ties in closely with the demand for responsibility, the imperative for autonomy and the desire for individuality, which constitute essential aspects inherent in the individualisation of the life course. In the remaining part of this article, I discuss how media devices and infrastructures augment the sense of individual agency and the implications of this for the cultural field of ageing.

Across the interviews, the topic of control that related to media development derived from the sensibility that social integration in today’s society depends on media infrastructures for a broad range of purposes. The emphasis that the participants put on this cross-practice media dependence serves to underline the connection between media and (imagined or practised) styles of conduct that seems to emerge in later life today, inasmuch as reading news online, connecting to friends and family via mobile phone when out walking, and video phoning with peers long distance are new media activities.

Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (2011) link the emergence of the third age as a cultural field to the particular experience of sub-groups of the baby boom cohorts’ in terms of consumption, individuality, self-expression and the concurrent decline of traditional anchors of identity related to family and work. Conceived as a social space (ibid: 36) in which people grow old at this particular time in history, the field is patterned with new logics that drive participation and new possibilities to be realised in which media are key. With particular relevance to the question of the progress of mediatization in the digital age, the expanding infrastructure for communicative agency can be considered as intrinsic to the process of the diminishing role of context and extended scope for reflexivity in later life.

Based on the broad media life hypothesis, Mark Deuze (2012) puts forward the argument that the individual’s experience of omnipresent media at hand nurtures feelings that we have control over and are co-producers of our own lives (p. 39, 263). Contrary to the dissonance implied in the comments on being excluded from media development and disconnected, utterances such as ‘I can do anything with my media’ or ‘I can do anything from my phone if I am not home and if that is what I want’ are clear expressions of feelings of empowerment connected with using media. In addition, comments such as ‘Why I chose Apple… it corresponds. It is really easy to use. The fact that I read emails on my phone is perhaps also manageable with other brands, but the direct correspondence is wonderful, right?’ underlines that being in control of distinctly selected technology is linked to social positioning and identity. These sensibilities suggest that having access to social infrastructures through computers, tablets, smartphones and mobile phones emotionally orchestrates later everyday life and resonates with the sense of having agency. In line with this, Helles (2016: 39) argues that the presence of the mediated infrastructures not only stimulates the recognition of possibility and freedom but can ‘accentuate the centrality of our reflexive agency’. In accord with Archer’s (2012) concept of the reflexive imperative, the participants’ cross-context and cross-practice appropriation of media, as well as their expressions of a sense of agency and empowerment, can be seen as intrinsic to the reflexive ageing associated with the culture of the third age. From an institutional mediatization perspective, the participants’ testimonies suggest that dependence on media infrastructures co-emerges through the augmentation of the imperative to adjust and organise everyday life in the face of changing circumstances through the life course.

This article has taken a modest step in piecing together some of the complexities emerging between mediated social infrastructures and the expansion of the scope of reflexivity among older Danish women. Looking qualitatively into the experience of the single-dwelling ‘online’ older population has enabled an engagement with subtler differences related to the experience of media development, notably disparities related to the sense of control and agency in the context of the media society. The overall sense of urgency on the one hand and, on the other, the particular expressions of dis-or empowerment invite us to consider the contribution of these cultural contradictions and ambiguities of mediatization to the patterning of the cultural field of ageing with sociocultural inequality (Givskov & Deuze 2016, Jansson 2016). In contrast to the older individual’s withdrawal from society – a notion that constituted the leitmotif in previous cultural (functionalist) perceptions of the ideal way of growing old – old age is today envisaged as the deep and dark fourth age of decline and dependency that waits beyond the continued activity and participation of the third (Gilleard & Higgs 2011, 2015). As the many comments describing the experience of feeling at a loss with and through media development illustrate, the imperative to adapt to media change interweaves with the embodiment of the imperative to remain in control, autonomous and active, as part of the cultural mainstream.

In the light of the participants’ common expressions of a sense of urgency related to adapting to media, the diversity of practical experience among the participants is striking. It remains an empirical question for future research if and how the proportion of the older Danish population that, for one reason or another, do not access the Internet at all perceive the media society – if they share the sense of urgency and position themselves as inevitably excluded and dependent, and how this ties in with frailties such as, for example, isolation and loneliness, or if they embody a resistance.