Older people’s production and appropriation of digital videos: an ethnographic study

Abstract

Older people's production and appropriation of digital videos: an ethnographic studyWhile most of today's children, young people, and adults are both consumers and producers of digital content, very little is known about older people as digital content creators. Drawing on a 3-year ethnographic study, this paper reports on the digital video production and appropriation of approximately 200 older people (aged 60 to 85). They generated 320 videos over the course of the study. We show their motivations for engaging in digital video production, discuss their planned video making, and highlight their creativity while editing videos. We show the different meanings they ascribed to digital videos in their social appropriation of these objects, the meaningful strategies they adopted to share videos, and the impact on their perceived wellbeing. Furthermore, we outline the solutions the participants developed to overcome or cope with interaction issues they faced over time. We argue that the results portray older people as active and creative makers of digital videos with current video capturing, editing, and sharing technologies. We contend that this portrayal both encourages us to reconsider how older people should be seen within Human-Computer Interaction and helps to frame future research / design activities that bridge the grey digital divide.

Fame and fortune, or just fun? A study on why people create content on video platforms

“…Older people's production and appropriation of digital videos: an ethnographic study (Ferreira et al, 2017) n/a Older people's content production and appropriation of digital videos Sharing moments/information, maintaining memories, skill development, and social inclusion significant motivators in content creation activities…”

E-health for active ageing; A systematic review

“…[11], [31], [33], [34], [35] Management Focus on the management, coordination of e-health interventions and related elements, such as service delivery.…”

Understanding the Use and Motivation of Digital Music Technologies among Middle-Aged and Older Adults

“…Prior research argued that older adults have a benefit-driven approach to new technologies, which resonates with "perceive usefulness" in TAM [14] and other theoretical constructs such as "meaningfulness" and "perceived quality of products". For example, youth tend to produce digital videos for self-expression, while the contents of videos created by the elderly are mainly for archive use [17]. Also, the perceived control and confidence of using technologies (e.g., locus of control and self-efficacy in [1]) play a role in technology use when the elderly is already aware of the innovations [13,35].…”

“…However, a gap exists between adopting cloud-based technologies and community music participation, as such technologies were not designed for the elders" purposes and were hardly adopted by them without any difficulty [43]. Although a few previous studies provided qualitative evidences of the appropriation and motivation of online media systems (e.g., online video creation [17], blogging [5]), it remains unclear how the elderly would be motivated to use digital music services for their routines and social activities [28]. Our prior ethnographic study [33] showed that digital music technologies sustained the routine practices of group music making.…”