This paper concludes with an empirically-based discussion of how older adults contribute to creating spaces that add to what Williams and Alkalimat (2008) call cyberpower. In these spaces, everyone’s agency is acknowledged and appreciated, and through this collective agency the community can powerfully use new technologies to instantiate social change. This discussion suggests an alternative mode of operation different from the dominant trends identified in this study. The seeds of this mode are already present in the sites studied, suggesting that with support, and with additional research, they could become more prevalent. They represent a different, and possibly better, way to think about older adults, technology, and the society in which we live.
Staff who have not fully become socialized into the professional norms of the institutions sometimes develop innovative techniques that nimbly respond to the needs of users. For instance, despite official limits on how much time librarians can spend helping patrons learning technology, at Main Library a library technician — significantly, not a full librarian — always supports patrons on their personal devices in whatever form they want, for however long they want, whenever she works at the adult services desk.
In another case, one part-time employee of the park district who worked at Tubman Senior Center for six months spontaneously started supporting the Tubman Senior Center’s quilting group with their smartphones. As they quilt, these women sometimes use their smartphones to show each other things they have found online, and so the part-time employee offered assistance to the women, especially with iPhones, which was the device she owned. Unfortunately, in April 2015, the employee left the senior center, and her practices were not institutionalized. Her replacement did not continue the tradition of offering technology support to the quilters; technology support was not part of her job, so she did not provide it. Nonetheless, through transgressive actions like these, limits are broken and new forms of technology support services may emerge.
Staff and volunteers also sometimes learn technology alongside older adults, in the process flattening the hierarchies of “learner” and “helper,” “young” and “old.” One volunteer, a young university student, discussed a technology support session she had with an older adult at one of the libraries: “When she shared her method for creating and remembering passwords. I wrote it down and thanked her multiple times for the tip! It was really great.... We hugged at the end.” Through this emotive encounter, the older adult learned that they have digital wisdom they can share with young people, and the young student learned that older adults can teach them new things about technology.
Another counter tendency to the dominant trend occurs when older library staff support older patrons with technology. At Metro Library an older woman came to the adult services desk and started chatting with a librarian, who was herself an older adult who had retired from the local university and now works part-time as a reference librarian. During their conversation, the two older women discussed the frustrations they have had trying to stay up-to-date with phones. The librarian shared with the patron some of the tips she has used to learn to use her new smartphone. At Main Library a similar interaction took place between an older library technician (who retired mid-way through fieldwork) and an older patron. These examples illustrate how the aging library workforce (Davis, 2009) could in fact play a pivotal role in changing ageist attitudes through participation in technology support services.
Conclusions
This study showed that older adults adapt community-based technology support services to the diverse rhythms of their community lives. Despite ageist structures and policies, older people are active agents in their local communities. The older adults here studied do not need (or particularly want) informatics solutions applied to them. Rather, they want the sustained support that will enable them to continue to powerfully contribute to, and participate in, their communities as they age.
The older adults, staff, and volunteers that collectively compose technology support services could productively work together to learn how to powerfully participate in the still emergent information society. In this alternative mode of operation, illustrated empirically in this study, everyone learns technology together. This alternative tendency emerges in part through the struggles of older adults. More research is needed to understand to what extent and how these different tendencies structure technology support services provided in other places, with other populations. Nonetheless, the findings of this study do suggest that supporting and nurturing the agency of older adults, and actively working to combat ageist representations of older adults using technology, is a viable way to create more powerful, and effective, community-based technology support services for people of all ages
About the author
Noah Lenstra is an assistant professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research in the field of community informatics considers the roles of libraries, archives, and museums as community institutions in the digital age. He received his Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in June 2016.