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Marie Poux-Berthe
Last Name
Poux-Berthe
First name
Marie
Email
marie.poux-berthe@unisg.ch
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PublicationAgeist technologies, ageist societies? Understanding the discourse about old age and digital technologies in FranceThis paper explores the representation of older people and their relationship with digital technologies in French mainstream media and professional debates during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Among other societal issues that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed in recent years, the place of and the issue of care for older people has received significant attention from politicians, civil society organizations and professionals from the healthcare sector. The mainstream media played a significant role in highlighting the issue and French people have increasingly relied on them to inform themselves. The nature of the problem at hand is twofold. On the one hand, academics demonstrated how the pandemic has revealed the underlying ageism operating in industrial countries (Ayalon, 2020). Others alerted us to how it fostered the harmful ideology of techno-solutionism (Milan, 2020). However, only a few have attempted to examine these issues together (Gallistl et al., 2021).Moreover, the issue at stake goes beyond the pandemic. The population’s ageing has been framed as causing multiple problems on the political, economic and social level. Digital technologies are increasingly promoted as solutions to any type of ‘problems’ (Morozov, 2014). Yet, suggesting a digital answer to the societal challenge caused by the demographic transition is reductive and harmful for older people as well as their younger counterparts. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theoretical work on the representation of ‘the Other’, this paper is situated at the intersection of Critical Age Studies (Hazan, 1994; Katz, 1996) and Science and Technology Studies (Turkle, 2011). It builds on the combined analysis of 200 French mainstream media articles related to the subject of old age and ageing and a digital ethnography of five events which took place in 2021 and 2022. The selected events gathered stakeholders with a political, economic or technological perspective on the subject of old age and ageing with a national or European dimension. Based on the analysis of this data, the paper argues that the French discourse about older people and digital technologies contribute to both ageist representations of old age and fallacious expectations towards technologies.Type: conference speech
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PublicationGoing beyond ageism? Intergenerational media and technological projects as alternative modes of encounters( 2023)This paper explores how intergenerational media projects, in France, can be analyzed as alternative modes of encounters between generations, media and society. In other words, it asks how specific media or technological assemblages can allow and affect encounters between generations. It aims at exploring how we can re-think intergenerational relations drawing on feminist STS, age studies and media studies (Haraway, 1988; Ahmed, 2002; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Being critical about how ageing and digital technologies can relate is fundamental. In this regard, scholars have addressed the risks posed by assuming a straightforward and solutionist relation between the needs of older adults and tech products and services (Gallist et al, 2021; Lipp and Maasen, 2022). Others have alerted on how ageist representations of older adults remain prominent in the imaginaries of developers designing new technologies for older adults and how they can be re-enacted through these products (Oudshoorn et al., 2016). However, it is equally important to examine alternative and careful ways in which ageing and technology can relate (Peine et al., 2021). This understanding is informed by feminist epistemological works which pose how doing careful research asks to address the invisible entanglements constitutive of a matter of care but also to reflect on its possible multiple futures. This paper thus presents the analysis of eight intergenerational media and technological projects identified along a two-year digital ethnography on ageing and technology in France. I ask to what extent entrepreneurs’ varied initiatives to foster a dialogue with older adults can be understood as an attempt to ‘inhabit the distance between’ generations and how their media and technological choices are constitutive of such endeavor. This paper contributes to a feminist theoretical exploration on ageing and technologies. It aims at promoting research that generates care for intergenerational relations through nuanced critique.