On a sunny summer afternoon, Susan Goldstein navigates a web browser as her teenage tutor cheerfully offers an occasional tip or encouragement.
Goldstein has been reluctant to buy a computer but took the plunge earlier this month after finding herself “up against a wall more and more often.”
While the Toronto senior has used her smartphone to test out banking services and look up information, with her “older eyes” and interest in trying Zoom calls, it was time for a bigger screen.
“You can’t communicate with anybody unless you go online. It’s very frustrating,” Goldstein said. “I’m being left behind.”
It’s a world that Adriel Lumampao, a teen volunteer with the Toronto Public Library’s Seniors E-Connect program, is excited to help Goldstein and others navigate. His efforts are helping them build their digital skills and dive into the “limitless possibilities” of searching the web.
“I personally believe that the Internet is an amazing place where you can just search up anything,” said the 15-year-old, who calls himself the default tech support for his grandparents.
He is also a fervent fan of online research and wants those he’s helping to learn to navigate with care. Dubious health claims and deceptive ads on social media worry him.
“I just want to teach them just to make sure [to] always check your sources, check where you get this information from, because you never know. The internet is like a wild place.”
Canadian seniors haven’t been the focus of many digital media literacy initiatives, despite being a rising population demographic — more than 7.5 million Canadians are aged 65 and over — and an increasing presence online.
According to Statistics Canada, five in 10 Canadians over 65 are regularly on social media, while more than eight in 10 are on the web generally.
But with more everyday tasks requiring digital fluency and misinformation swirling online — and given the influence this cohort wields — experts say older adults want and need more digital literacy education and support.
‘Benevolent ageism’ widens digital divide
Common generalizations that adults 65 and older are hopeless with new technology or particularly gullible against online misinformation serve only to increase the digital divide between seniors and other demographics, according to education researchers Claire Ahn and Natalia Balyasnikova.
Too many people have a mentality of “benevolent ageism” — a notion that seniors aren’t knowledgeable, require hand-holding or need things done for them, explained Balyasnikova, an assistant professor at Toronto’s York University.
“Older adults are, in fact, eager to embrace digital tools when they’re provided with the right training and support,” she said, adding that seniors are often ignored in adult education programming.
Immigrant seniors, a group that Balyasnikova and Ahn have worked with, in particular, are “completely invisible,” she said.
Some educational programming for this segment can be “quite infantilizing” as well, Balyasnikova noted.
However, if initiatives are designed to let seniors take charge, adapt to their needs or circumstances and involve community networks, it can be empowering and foster a feeling of agency.
Participants in the duo’s study, for instance, were eager to share newly learned skills.
The seniors were very worried about fake news and how to “best prepare themselves and share the information with their peers, their friends and communities who aren’t always aware,” recalled Ahn, an associate professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
Trusting and sharing content
Researchers at Stanford University found that during the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, older Americans were more likely to visit untrustworthy websites than adults aged 18-29. The finding echoed similar conclusions from the previous election four years prior.
Earlier research into the 2016 election found Americans over age 65 shared twice as many false or misleading online articles on Facebook — still the reigning social media platform for seniors — as the 45-to-64-year-old demographic did, and nearly seven times as many as the youngest cohort examined.
“That’s concerning because older adults turn out to vote at a higher rate than any other age group,” noted cognitive scientist Nadia Brashier.
While cognitive decline is often mentioned as why seniors engage with questionable content, the assistant professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego doesn’t think it’s that simple.
On one hand, she said, older adults have more experience and general knowledge of the world, which helps them better determine what’s true and what’s false online.
Yet on the flip side, they tend to have fewer so-called “weak-tie” connections — think of that social media buddy you’ve never met in real life — than younger generations do. As a result, when they’re scrolling their feeds, they “expect to see credible content because they assume ‘my close friends and my family wouldn’t share false stuff,'” Brashier said.
“There seems to be this gap between older adults’ truth judgments — which they’re pretty good at — and their sharing behaviours, which is where there’s some room for improvement.”
Seniors can also struggle with a reduced ability to remember discrete, contextual or peripheral details — like warning labels, fact checks or “false” flags on online content — and so might simply recall the questionable information alone, she noted.
Brashier also sees promise in educational interventions expressly for older adults, such as the self-directed, fact-checking course co-developed in 2020 by Stanford researchers and the U.S. digital literacy body MediaWise.
She also wants tech companies to stop focusing on younger populations and start including the over-65 set when testing their latest creations.
Back in Toronto, Goldstein has been racking up hours of practice — typing, scrolling, navigating web browsers and more — at the North York branch, where she met Lumampao, and at two other library locations. TPL recently resumed Seniors E-Connect after a pandemic pause: six branches have run classes, with five more currently planning to.
“While you might think that everybody has a phone, everybody has a tablet, everybody knows how to use them to do all the things that they need to do … that’s not necessarily the case,” said Vanessa Sparks, a TPL senior services specialist.
The goal is to foster intergenerational connection, digital skills-building and digital inclusion — all in a community space anyone can visit for free, she said. “It’s a really important location for becoming a fully engaged digital citizen.”
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