Who Actually Becomes a Silver Surfer? Prerequisites for Digital Inclusion

Abstract

The notion of silver surfers has been recurring in research for two decades. It often refers to elderly skilled and affluent users of digital media. Departing from domestication theory, and drawing on the concept of online repertoires, this article sets out to offer critical insights into what it actually takes, sociologically speaking, to become a silver surfer. The analysis starts from a set of interviews with 19 respondents (66–82 years) covering appropriation and incorporation of digital media and online repertoires. Based on insights from interview data, we turn to a quantitative analysis of a national postal survey (Swedish). In these data (N = 1,264), we first filter out the silver surfers and then perform a logistic regression analysis in order to investigate the factors that promote the status of being a silver surfer. Our analysis shows that only 19% of the sample could be categorised as silver surfers. It further reveals the important influence of factors such as age, income, interest and self-efficacy in particular. Silver surfers are a privileged group. However, contemporary ICT policy tends to assume that they are representative of senior users in general. Thus, there is a significant risk that current policy objectives will be misdirected.

KEYWORDS:

• silver surfer
• ICTs
• digital inclusion
• domestication
• online repertoires
• mixed methods
• ageing population

Introduction

A science and policy report from the European Commission (EC) in 2015 can serve as a point of departure. The report is called “Mapping of effective technology-based services for independent living for older people at home”. It aimed to produce an overview of available services for elderly people (Carretero 2015). What is particularly interesting about the report, for our purposes, is the way in which it connects two apparent threads in contemporary societal development to each other: On the one hand, the development towards an ageing population, on the other, the continuous development of a wide variety of internet-based services.

The two lines of development have also been connected to each other within both policy and research debates in other contexts (cf. Pang et al. 2015; Cumming et al. 2016). However, the aim of this specific report – to “identif[y] and ma[p] good practices in technology-based services that enhance the independence of older adults living at home” (Carretero 2015, 11) – made the connection particularly obvious. The report first pointed towards EC policy and stressed “the importance of prioritizing long-term care for the coming years” (Carretero 2015, 13) in order to handle the challenges of an ageing population. It then moved on to referencing EC policy again, connecting this line of argument to a need to pay attention to “ways of increasing the capacity of people to live independently” (Carretero 2015, 13). This is also the point at which technology enters the argument. In the words of the author, technology “could play an important role by helping older people to live independently for longer at home, improving their quality of life and health” (Carretero 2015, 13). The overall figure of thought is made particularly evident here, and it is straightforward: New technology can help solve problems related to the ageing population.

From this point of departure, the report maps what it refers to as “technology-based services for independent living” (Carretero 2015, 21) and categorises a variety of such services (from “smart homes” to “assistive technologies”). One of the categories is of particular interest in this context: “information and communication technology (ICT) products, services and applications.” At a more detailed level the category includes:

[D]evices such as mobile phones and applications on internet, that can be remotely access [sic!] from homes to engage older people in a range of activities: e.g. social, working, learning or entertainment activities. They can open up many opportunities for participation for people who have restricted mobility, for social contact with distant family or kin and in friendship networks. Older people can obtain consultancy, information and educational content and participation in cultural and political life, and improved technical preconditions which help them retain work. They can also access daily life services such as banking or shopping. (Carretero 2015, 19)

The quote is interesting. Firstly, in the way in which it makes explicit what are often implicit assumptions about what ICTs can offer to everyday users. The quote certainly brings these opportunities to the fore, and they include anything from remaining social relations to managing daily life services (such as banking). Secondly, it is interesting because the position from which it is speaking is very evident: It speaks from the side of technological opportunities inherent to ICTs and does not problematise the abilities of senior users to transform them into everyday realities. Hence, the presupposed users become elderly persons with access to the right devices and to the knowledge necessary to make good use of ICTs as “services for independent living.”

In popular debates, such presupposed and idealised versions of elderly users are not unusual models of thought. They also appear in celebratory newspaper depictions of elderly bloggers. For example, Dagny Carlsson, 108, known as Sweden’s oldest blogger, has appeared in television documentaries and numerous news articles.¹ Seniors as a growing customer category in e-commerce is a recurring theme in news media.²

However, idealised elderly users also appear in academic discourse. In this regard, the notion of silver surfers is both a popular and an evident example. As such, it is also in need of some conceptual reflections.

Silver Surfers as a Descriptive and Analytical Category

The notion of silver surfers has been recurring in research on elderly use and perception of internet-based media for more than two decades (cf. Cody et al. 1999; Selwyn 2004; Damodaran, Olphert, and Phipps 2013). The concept has attracted the attention of researchers from different traditions, who have made use of it with various ambitions in mind. Consequently, they have also come to interpret it somewhat differently.

For example, the concept has been applied in a descriptive manner to simply refer to elderly users of internet-based media in general. This is the case in Stallmann (2012). Here, the notion of silver surfers is used to refer to people “above 50” who use online devices. In contrast to Stallmann’s very wide usage of silver surfers (to be “above 50” can mean anything from a female CEO of a global company to a 95-year-old man living alone with very few social ties), Cody et al. (1999) delimit the notion to include a selection of respondents averaging 80 years of age. It is also common that “silver surfer” per se does not become the subject of any particular reflections, but instead is applied as a word to descriptively signal “senior users.”

Other researchers have used the concept with more explicitly analytical ambitions. Olson et al. (2011) use the notion of silver surfers to filter out a subcategory of elderly users. They refer to silver surfers as “successful” elderly internet users with “adaptation patterns mimic[ing] younger adults” (23). In a similar manner, Russell, Campbell, and Hughes (2008) also refer to silver surfers as a segment of more qualified senior users. In their vocabulary, silver surfers are more “confident and competent” digital media users than elderly people on average (81). In a recent study, Tyler, Simic, and De George-Walker (2018) refer to the concept when analysing what they describe as elderly “super-users.” Their overall ambition is to discover “what it takes to be a successful ‘silver surfer’” (328).

Aim and Purpose

To some extent this article is inspired by the ideas of Tyler, Simic, and De George-Walker (2018) and their efforts to analyse why some elderly users become successful users. We are also interested in mechanisms that shape the “confident and competent” silver surfers who Russell, Campbell, and Hughes (2008) describe. However, it is not in our interest to contribute to a celebratory academic discourse on how much more simple life as a senior citizen is with access to and knowledge of ICTs. Nor is it our ambition to argue that we conceive of contemporary “silver surfers” as the forerunners of what elderly ICT users of tomorrow will be. Instead, our ambition is to offer critical, empirically grounded insights into the notion of silver surfers. What we are mainly concerned within this article is to explore and analyse the fact that it actually takes quite a lot, sociologically speaking, to become one of these “confident and competent” senior users. Rather than idealising silver surfers, we want to contextualise them socially and culturally in ways that reveal what needs to be in place beyond technology to actually become a “silver surfer”: What are the social factors that explain why some elderly become particularly knowledgeable and affluent when it comes to handling their everyday digital environment?

Compared to Tyler, Simic, and De George-Walker (2018) above, whose study builds on interviews with 11 self-identified “super users”, the data we draw on for our analysis is larger and more varied. Our analysis draws on two sets of data covering Swedes above 65 years of age. It draws on data from a national survey (n = 1,264) and data from qualitative, semi-structured household interviews.

It is important to emphasise that silver surfer is inevitably a relative concept. The status of being a silver surfer must be understood in relation to average use and non-use. Thus, it changes over time and between different contexts. In this article we analyse data from Sweden, often ranked as one of the most digitalised countries in the world (World Internet Project 2018).

Domesticating Digital Media – and Creating Online Repertories

Our interest in the everyday lives of silver surfers in general, and their digital whereabouts in particular, is informed by the idea that media – digital as well as other forms of media – are shaped and reshaped as they enter the everyday lives of users. They become a part of processes of social and cultural shaping as they enter people’s everyday worlds (cf. Williams 1974; Woolgar 1996; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). One particularly important contribution to this tradition of research is the concept of domestication (Silverstone 1994; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992; Silverstone and Haddon 1996). Silverstone describes domestication as an overarching concept, which contains subcategories of processes. Among these subcategories, appropriation and incorporation (Haddon 2016) are particularly useful for our analyses of silver surfers. The notion of appropriation refers to discussions and negotiations within a household taking place prior to the household’s decision to acquire new media technology, such as a mobile phone or a tablet. These decisions involve fundamental questions regarding technology per se, as well as household preferences. The term incorporation points to what happens as new media technology enters everyday life. Thus, it concerns the patterns of usage that emerge and the ways in which new media become part of everyday routines. These routines include general everyday routines, although it is specifically relevant to pay attention to how they intermingle with established routines of media usage.

Taking into account our interest in this article, which is to analyse who becomes a silver surfer and what typically defines a silver surfer, looking into usage practices becomes specifically important. In order to better capture important similarities and differences between various modes of use, we also draw on the concept of online repertoires (Olsson, Samuelsson, and Viscovi 2019).³

The concept of online repertoires takes a holistic view of online practices and covers the use of different devices and various kinds of online content and/or services. It is useful because the online digital world, just like the many devices that connect to it, offers a wide variety of possible patterns of use. For example, on the one hand, you can use online banking services with your tablet and, on the other hand, you can watch a film on your mobile phone. The concept of online repertoires (Olsson, Samuelsson, and Viscovi 2019) is user-centred in the sense that it encourages mapping and comparing user practices among different groups of elderly users. It is also interested in the entirety of elderly users’ online practices, meaning that it does not necessarily discriminate between the devices being used, but rather takes an interest in the online practices that emerge. The concept also has a specific ambition to understand the relationality of online practices, how they combine into various repertoires by different groups of users. The repertoires that various users and groups of users create are conceived of as outcomes of structural, positional and individual factors. This is also the approach to analysis that we will draw on in this article, and we will operationalise it below.

Operationalisation and Methodological Considerations

In this paper, we use two different empirical material: First, 14 semi-structured interviews and, second, quantitative data from a postal survey (n = 1,264). The overall idea is first to answer the research question by analysing the interviews and then to investigate whether the findings can be supported by the survey data.

The Interviews

Fourteen face-to-face interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017. In the sampling process, we did not search for any particular category of users or non-users. Instead, we looked for demographic variation, i.e. variation in age, gender, income, education, residence (rural as well as urban areas), marital status, etc. We interviewed a total of 19 individuals, 10 males and 9 females, who ranged from 66 to 82 years of age. The interviews lasted 60–90 minutes, were recorded on smartphones and then transcribed verbatim. On six occasions couples were interviewed together. The longest transcription was 15,000 words, the shortest 9,000 words.

The interviews were designed to inform about the seniors’ media repertoires in general and their online repertoires in particular. Selwyn’s (2004) ideas about “technological histories” have been a source of methodological inspiration. The interviewees were asked to relate their own life stories: whether they could remember when they first used a computer – which practically everybody could – and their first experiences of and thoughts about everyday digital technology. The interviewees were also asked about how and when they bought their own first devices and about their current everyday life situation, with or without digital media.

It was easy to sort the interviewees into three rough categories: non-users, average users and high users. Seven seniors were classified as high users and we subsequently found that these interviews matched the above-described criteria for silver surfers. Thus, they were suitable candidates for an analysis of why certain seniors develop more elaborate online repertoires than others. The analysis below will mainly focus on the silver surfers. But at times, we will give examples from the more moderate users in order to put them into context.

The Survey

A postal survey was sent to 2,000 individuals, aged 65–85 years, in autumn 2015. The sample (SRS) was drawn from the SPAR register – including all residents officially living in Sweden – administered by the Swedish Tax Authority. 1,264 questionnaires were completed (a gross response rate of 63%).

In terms of representativeness, the sample is, quite naturally, not a perfect reflection of all individuals in the age group. There is a slight overrepresentation of women among the respondents at the lower end of the age range and an underrepresentation of both men and women with a medium level of education (Appendix A). However, these biases are not unique and generally meet the standards that are widely accepted in Sweden.

In the survey analysis below, we initially filtered out the silver surfers and then undertook a logistic regression analysis in order to investigate the factors that promote the status of being a silver surfer. The following independent variables were used:

Individual factors: years online (dummy: 0 = 2001 or later, 1 = 2000 or earlier); interest in technology ⁴ (dummy: 0 = disagree/strongly disagree, 1 = agree/strongly agree), self-efficacy ⁵ (dummy: 0 = not at all/not particularly, 1 = fairly/very proficient).

Positional factors: age (years); gender (dummy variable: 0 = male, 1 = female); education (dummy: 0 < upper secondary school, 1 ≥ upper secondary school); household income (dummy: 0 ≤ 300 000 SEK, 1 ≥ 301 000 SEK); children (dummy: 0 = no children, 1 = children)

Structural factors: standard of housing (dummy: 0 = no fibre cable, 1 = fibre cable)

The variables for education and income are constructed in the way that individuals with the lowest income and the shortest education are reference categories. This is because we believe that a silver surfer is not necessarily a high-income earner and university educated. However, we believed that it was quite unlikely that we would find silver surfers among those with shorter education and a lower income. Furthermore, fibre cable was used as an indicator of standard of housing. House owners in Sweden must pay for fibre cable themselves, which usually involves an investment of more than SEK 20,000 (or EUR 2,000). Thus, we stipulated that fibre cables are more common in affluent areas than in relatively poorer areas.

Worth emphasising, in the analysis below we have a “pattern-oriented approach” (Hasebrink and Domeyer 2012, 763), which means that we started our work by mapping out online repertoires, qualitatively and quantitatively, and then continued by putting them into context. So, even though the regression analysis is conducted in a conventional manner, our main goal is not to identify which variables are the best predictors for being a silver surfer. Our ambition is to shed light on “lifestyles or social milieus” (763) and their bearing on online repertoires in everyday life.

Illustrating the Silver Surfers Through Qualitative Interview Data

Context: An Apparent (Upper) Middle-Class Lifestyle

The seven silver surfers are in good health and comparatively young: most of them are in their 70s. They live in prosperous areas with a high standard of housing. They are affluent, enjoy travelling and have a busy social life. “We’re a group of people here in Torp who stick together and do things together,” says Iris, who is a former civil servant and has worked for the Swedish Tax Authority for 45 years. Her local community of friends and acquaintances was formed 20 years ago. Their original shared interest was playing boules. Today, however, the main interest of the group is wine tasting:

In the beginning we were taught by a sommelier. But after a while … we decided to do it ourselves. … We meet at each other’s houses. Currently we’re about 20–22 people. … Last year, 17 of us visited Italy.

For her part, Greta, another female silver surfer – a former laboratory technician and engineer – prefers playing golf with her friends. She does this two or three times a week in the summer. Nils – who has many years of experience in digitalisation in the banking sector – regularly meets with his old friends in the so-called “poker gang.”

The silver surfers are both wealthy enough and healthy enough to travel, and travelling has also become an important aspect of their overall lifestyles. Anne – a retired nurse whose husband ran a profitable IT company – like most of them, prefers to organise the trips herself. She books tickets, makes hotel reservations and also books tables in classy restaurants:

We [recently] went on an autumn trip to Medelpad. I arrange trips every year. We are four friends. Very nice! We choose one province each year. We started with Scania and then we got the idea that we should meet every autumn. / … / So, to date, we have gone through 21 or 22 provinces. / … / It’s really enjoyable and we’re away from home for a couple of days.

Silver surfers are active and enjoy leisure activities such as golf, travelling and wine tasting and they have quite a busy social life. In other words, they have material and social resources that are favourable for the appropriation of digital media and they apparently have the confidence to organise and take care of things by themselves.

Incorporation and Everyday Routines

A middle-class lifestyle per se is not synonymous with the status of being a silver surfer, i.e. domestication of digital media and, more specifically, incorporation, is not an immediate consequence of structural and positional characteristics (cf. Hasebrink and Domeyer 2012; Hänninen, Taipale, and Luostari 2020). Apart from the necessary resources and confidence, digital media must also be conceived as being useful and fit into the users’ relevance systems (cf. Selwyn 2004) in order to find its place in everyday life.

Lars – who has a background in engineering and consulting services – uses various devices, a tablet in particular. His media repertoire, established long before the existence of digital media, has gradually, but not completely, been converted into digital devices and platforms.

You look at newspapers online, both Sydsvenskan and Aftonbladet. … You can look at them during the day. It’s most convenient to do this on the tablet. … And the weather forecast … as I said [earlier]: “Shall we play golf now or later? Yes, it looks like it will be a nice evening.” You see that easily, if you have the apps, it’s just to tap: Bang! And it’s all there.

Nowadays, Lars uses his laptop less frequently. Instead, his tablet has become his main device: “It’s very easy to handle. Play TV [streaming TV] and everything. There is TV on the tablet, from the sofa—to the TV. It’s much better than going back and forth to the computer.”

Like most silver surfers, Lars prefers high-brow media. He still subscribes to a printed broadsheet and reads it every morning. The subscription also gives him access to the online version (cf. Sydsvenskan above). He watches the news on TV in the evenings. He listens to the radio in the car, “nearly always P1.”⁶

Very similar to Lars, Siv has a laptop, but in her case, her smartphone has become the device she likes the most.

Siv:

I’m thinking of easy tasks like signing up at the gym … And I pay the bills. I take care of that.

Ove [husband]:

And you check the stock quotes. Telephone numbers.

Siv:

[nodding, yes.] Mobile payments … It all works very smoothly.

Interviewer [to Ove]:

Do you also do that?

Ove:

I don’t know. I don’t think so … [laughs ironically].

Siv also uses a heart rate monitor app when she exercises. Thus, she undoubtedly has a broad repertoire of uses for her smartphone. Her husband Ove, on the other hand, does not have a comparable repertoire, nor comparable skills. He primarily treats his smartphone as a mobile phone, for calls and for texting. Thus, while sharing his everyday life with Siv, Ove cannot be classified as a silver surfer (even though he submits his income tax return digitally). His repertoire and his sense of self-efficacy are too limited compared to Siv’s, which certainly illustrates what we claimed earlier: a middle-class lifestyle in itself does not determine an individual’s status as a silver surfer. It does, however, better your chances of becoming one.

Silver surfers’ homes are generally well equipped with digital devices. After many years as users, devices accumulate – PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs – and for these various devices, special tasks have evolved.

Interviewer:

When do you use the laptop?

Iris:

Oh, it’s when I have to write something. Like the bridge [contract bridge] … I’m responsible for organizing some evenings and afterwards we’re supposed to write a story about it and publish it on the club’s homepage. It’s much easier [than the tablet] … because I have a real keyboard. … Also, if we’re about to travel and get the tickets electronically – and I don’t want them on the phone – then, I print them using the laptop.

In light of the silver surfers’ rather extensive online repertoire, it is quite surprising that social media only play a very modest role in their everyday lives: none of the interviewees were particularly engaged in social network platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. Greta expressed some interest in a local Facebook group but remarks: “I’m not that interested in knowing about other people or sharing my own life.” Furthermore, none of the silver surfers reported that gaming was a part of their repertoire of online practices.

In summary, apart from social networking platforms such as Facebook, or gaming practices, digital media have been incorporated into the silver surfers’ lifestyle. Digital media, as well as the large variety of the services they make available, have found their place in the everyday lives of silver surfers to a significant extent, but also in a variety of different ways. Digital media also manage to intermingle with their established analogue media repertoires. Silver surfers perceive the new technology as a positive feature of their everyday lives: devices and apps are practical, they are “easy” to handle or they work “smoothly”. The broad online repertoires reveal significant capabilities of incorporating digital media into conventional media usage (reading papers, watching television), household administration (paying bills), consumption (buying tickets), as well as writing and publishing online. Apps are incorporated into activities such as golf and exercising. Digital media are also important for social intercourse and for maintaining social networks.

However, our empirical data also contain experiences that make up stark contrasts to the silver surfers’. Bengt, for instance, who is a former chef, and Inga, a former preschool teacher, live near Ove and Siv (above). Compared to their neighbours, however, they have integrated digital media into their everyday live to a much lower extent. They have decided to not connected their house to the fibre network – “so far, broadband works well”, says Inga. They use mobile phones, and share one tablet – and generally have a limited online repertoire. Bengt explains how he still prefers to pay with cash, and they have mobile phones who do not allow transactions: “You have to have a smart [phone]”, says Inga, “This one isn’t smart enough.” Both of them are well aware of the fact that a life offline can be problematic, but they find it difficult to broaden their skills and repertoire.

Technological Histories: Lived Experiences and Self-Efficacy

What silver surfers have in common is that they have been users of digital technology for decades. Most silver surfers became familiar with computers at an early stage of their working lives and all of them had bought a PC by the 1990s at the latest. Consequently, they have also been able to learn and get used to computers and digital media on a step-by-step basis, and in favourable conditions.

Lars is a case in point. As a young man, he studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he also spent some years as a doctoral student. At the Institute, he learned how to use punch card readers. He subsequently also became familiar with more sophisticated computers as an employee of a large Swedish industrial company. “Eventually, we were given Toshibas … they were called portable but we called them haulable, I recall. They weighed several kilos, with a large handle.”

Similar to Lars, Greta has also followed the development of digital devices quite closely over the years. She first worked as an assistant, then as an engineer, in various bacteriological laboratories for over 40 years. In the early days, the laboratory used punch card readers, and since this time, the labs have acquired new computers on an ongoing basis. In the 1990s, Greta continued her education and bought her own PC. “It cost 14,000 [EUR 1,800 in today’s money], which was quite a lot when you are living on study allowances.”

She remembers when email was first introduced. It replaced the old system that was used at her workplace. “We were given our first e-mail addresses in ‘95, but we already had an email address at home in ‘94, I think.”

Nils has had a long career in banking, a sector that was computerised quite early in Sweden. “I thought it was fun and interesting. I ended up becoming manager of the ADP department.” In many ways, Nils is a typical early adapter. He reads and learns constantly about new apps and devices. He also works voluntary for SeniorNet – a non-profit organisation in which seniors teach other seniors about digital media – as an instructor and operates as a warm expert (Bakardjieva 2005; Olsson and Viscovi 2018) for friends, his “poker gang” and his family. In many ways, Nils’ relationship to digital media is an extension of his previous work in supervising and teaching.

Iris and Siv have worked for decades for large public authorities comprising thousands of employees all over Sweden. These large and well-financed organisations were already computerised in the 1970s and had fairly extensive training programmes. “I was always interested and it was fun”, says Iris, “I first attended the introduction course and some of us moved on to ‘Step 2’. Then we took our ‘computer license’ after a few years.” Siv does not remember the details but states that: “It was always internal training, all the time.”

Siv’s husband Ove, who has worked in sales and as a manager in the construction industry, has been involved in many generations of computer-based storage systems. However, he straightforwardly declares that he never really liked working with computers:

We could see the inventory status, what we had in stock … prices and so on. Then, bit by bit, we got more of it. Then, when the company was bought out, it got even worse! It was like they were sold on it. They changed programmes three or four times.

He continues:

Ove:

What I thought I needed, I learned. But I didn’t have that broad an interest.

Siv:

[laughs]

Ove:

It’s much more exciting doing business. But there were many who really dug themselves down in it.

Interviewer:

So, you didn’t take programming courses?

Ove:

No, no. Never.

Ove admits that a computer is a practical tool but, when used in the wrong way and in the wrong context, he perceives it as a problem: “As I saw it, we were a sales company. But those who were recruited, they were more like computer geeks.”

In the 1990s, the Swedish government subsidised PCs in order to promote digital literacy among Swedish citizens (Olsson 2002). Many employers also sold second-hand PCs cheaply to their staff. This naturally favoured white-collar employees in particular. Anne had a subsidised PC in the 1990s and she also took advantage of buying PCs from her employer: “I did it two or three times. And it worked fine. I mean, they are okay for a couple of years at least.”

Also, they described their now grown up children as being important motivators. In Iris’ case her two daughters were important motivators for buying a computer for the home:

Interviewer:

When did you get a computer?

Iris:

Does a Vic64 [Commodore] count [as a computer]? Because we had one, but it was mostly the girls who played sport games on it. You could hear the joysticks upstairs when they played athletics and such. … I think it was in the early ‘80s, when they were 8 or 10 years’ old. ‘82, ‘85, something.

The Vic64 was subsequently replaced by computers that Iris bought second hand from her employer, in 1994 or 1995. When her daughters were in their teens, they already had the Internet at home.

Siv and Ove bought a PC at the beginning of the 1990s, mainly for their son: “It was Ola’s … It cost SEK 10,000 [EUR 1,400 in today’s money].” “Quite expensive,” the interviewer remarks. “But he needed it for his schoolwork,” says Ove, with an ironic smile, but also admits that Ola learned a lot about computers and improved his English skills.

In summary, early on in their careers, and for many years, silver surfers have dealt with generations of computers and other digital devices. Above all, they have gradually learned what computers are and have found ways of using them. Also, this has generally taken place under favourable conditions: various forms of education have been offered and they have also generally had the opportunity to learn and share experiences with colleagues (at work) over longer periods of time. The silver surfers’ digital experience can be contrasted with the experience of another of our interviewees, Bo. Bo has been a carpenter for 45 years and has a very different technological history than the silver surfers. He has not been in a position to be able to learn early lessons of home computing, and his working life experience has not brought a lot of digital expertise. Consequently, he sees rather few points in using digital devices today, and partially jokingly says: “one doesn’t need a computer, can’t use it to hit a nail anyway” (c.f. Hakkarainen 2012).

Some of the interviewees also expressed very positive attitudes towards technology. Nils, for example, “thought it was fun and interesting.” In Nils’ case, as well as in the case of other silver surfers, it is easy to detect a sense of self-efficacy regarding digital media. This is not necessarily an individual characteristic, a trait of their personalities. It is equally likely that this self-efficacy has been shaped or structured by the supportive learning environments that emerge in the technological histories related above.

When home computers became widely available on the market, more basic versions in the 1980s and more advanced versions in the 1990s, silver surfers generally already knew what kind of objects were being marketed, and of course, they also had some experience of handling them. Furthermore, as white-collar workers, they had every opportunity to obtain one. Sometimes their children also played a part, as motivators for the acquisition of a PC for the home, although the children’s appropriation and understanding of computers diverge from their parents’: it was mainly a gaming device.

Britt has things in common with the silver surfers: she has worked with computers for at least 25 years, as a secretary at a university college, and has also taken some courses. However, she did not acquire a computer for private and online use until she retired. Her son was the initiator and helped her to buy a laptop second hand. Today she uses mainly a tablet, bought by her daughter – who supports Britt on a weekly basis with instructions and updates.

Finding Silver Surfer Characteristics Through Survey Data

The interviews suggest that silver surfers are socially and economically advantaged; they had white-collar jobs and underwent comparatively extensive formal education. They are also in good health, have a high standard of housing, have (now grown up) children and have been online for a considerable time. Furthermore, their experiences of digital devices, from work and home computing, have resulted in positive attitudes and a sense of digital self-efficacy.

The survey data are not fine grained enough to allow us to test each of these findings. For example, the survey does not inform about previous jobs or health status. Nevertheless, it contains items on age, gender, income, education, family, standard of housing, and also on attitudes towards technology and years spent online. However, taking this into account, and based on insights from our household interviews, we hypothesise that silver surfers:

• are younger seniors,

• could be female as well as male,

• have an above-average formal education,

• have an above-average disposable income,

• enjoy a high standard of housing (fibre cable),

• have children,

• have been online since the 1990s,

• have a positive attitude towards digital media,

• perceive themselves as being confident users.

Before we conducted any tests to statistically substantiate our insights from the household interviews, we needed to filter out respondents in the database that could be classified as silver surfers. A first step, naturally, was to exclude non-users. A second step was to separate ordinary users from silver surfers. By taking into account the findings in the qualitative analysis above – the online repertoires and skills – as well as the limitations of the survey data, we can stipulate that silver surfers match the following criteria.

A silver surfer:

• is online five times a week or more,

• has access to at least two devices (of which one is a smartphone),

• has an internet bank and is able to pay bills online,

• reads the news online at least once a week,

• at some point has used the online service of a public authority,⁷

• has purchased products or services online a few times at least.

After this filtering process, 234 individuals remained, i.e. 19% of the entire sample of 1,264 elderly Swedes. In the following analysis, only users are included (n = 776) since our aim is to explain why some users become silver surfers, while others do not. Our research question – What are the social factors that explain why some elderly become particularly knowledgeable and affluent when it comes to handling their everyday digital environment? is well suited to logistic regression analysis (Table 1).

Table 1. Logistic regression analysis: silver surfers.

	Model 1		Model 2		Model 3		Model 4
	B (SE)	OR	B (SE)	OR	B (SE)	OR	B (SE)	OR
Constant	5,975 (1,538)	–	4,812 (1,613)	–	3,675 (1,721)	–	3,058 (1,771)	–
Age	-,117 (,021)	,89***	−1,09 (,023)	,90***	-,106 (,024)	,90***	-,100 (,025)	,90***
Gender	-,455 (,179)	,64*	-,392 (,186)	,68*	-,048 (,203)	,95 n.s.	-,058 (,208)	,94 n.s.
Education	,728 (,180)	2,07***	,572 (188)	1,77**	,559 (,202)	1,75**	,529 (,208)	1,70*
Income	,703 (,207)	2,02**	,575 (214)	1,78**	,718 (,229)	2,05**	,751 (,234)	2,12**
Fibre cable	,690 (,176)	1,99***	,628 (,182)	1,87**	,585 (,195)	1,80**	,565 (,200)	1,76**
Children	,643 (,348)	1,90 n.s.	,805 (,357)	2,24*	,796 (,378)	2,22*	,727 (,389)	2,00 n.s.
Years online			1,036 (,193)	2,82***	,829 (,206)	2,29***	,639 (,215)	1,90**
Interest in technology					1,660 (,200)	5,26***	1,202 (,218)	3,33***
Self-efficacy							1,183 (,220)	3,27***
Nagelkerke’s R^2	,189		,239		,356		,400
Correct classification	72,7		72,3		75.9		78,9

OR: odds ratio. Significance level of OR *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. n.s.= not significant.

The odds ratio, abbreviated to OR, informs about how the likelihood of being a silver surfer changes if the independent variable increases one step or unit. Values lower than one means that the influence is negative, for example, age in Model 1: Age and the OR value 0.89 should be understood to mean that every additional year means that the likelihood of being a silver surfer decreases by 11% (0.89–1 = −0.11). Also, in Model 1, the odds ratio for education is 2.07 and indicates that individuals with a higher level of education are 2.07 times more likely to be a silver surfer than just a surfer. Or put somewhat differently: with a higher level of education, the likelihood increases by 107% (2.07–1 = 1,07).

Also, in Model 1, gender has a negative effect. It appears that women are less likely to be silver surfers although the gender effect disappears when the analysis is elaborated in Models 3 and 4. Likewise, the effect of children is not constantly significant in the four models. Thus, we cannot say anything statistically significant about the influence of having children.⁸

In the following models 2, 3 and 4, three additional variables have been included: years online, interest in technology, self-efficacy; the final result is shown in Model 4. It reveals that the negative influence of age remains (0.90). Income (2.12), education (1.76) and fibre cable (1.70) all increase the likelihood that a given person will be a silver surfer. Further, and most prominently, interest in technology (3.33), self-efficacy (3.27) as years online (1.90) are all statistically significant and have a strong impact.

The explanatory power of Model 4 can be interpreted by the proportion of correct classification. Given the information in the independent variables, the model predicts correctly whether or not someone is a silver surfer in 78.9 out of 100 cases.

In sum, the assumptions or hypothesises above (derived from our analysis of qualitative data) have, to a large extent, been statistically confirmed. Silver surfers:

• are younger seniors – confirmed by the regression analysis

• could be female as well as male – confirmed by the regression analysis

• have an above-average formal education – confirmed by the regression analysis

• have an above-average disposable income – confirmed by the regression analysis

• enjoy a high standard of housing (fibre cable) – confirmed by the regression analysis

• have children – not confirmed by the regression analysis

• have been online since the 1990s – confirmed by the regression analysis

• have a positive attitude towards digital media – confirmed by the regression analysis

• perceive themselves as confident users – confirmed by the regression analysis.

Conclusion

Departing from domestication theory as an overarching theoretical framework, and using the concept of online repertoires, the study has enabled us to map and analyse variations in access to and use of digital media among elderly Swedes. Our qualitative analysis has shed light on conditions for, and trajectories to, “successful” appropriation and incorporation (including the creation of expansive online repertoires) and its outcome in the form of silver surfers. Furthermore, the notion of silver surfers has been operationalised and the initial findings from the interviews have been analysed and tested quantitatively – a measure that also allows for statistical generalisation. Thus, we can establish, for example, that 19% of the sample could be categorised as silver surfers. In this context it is particularly important to emphasise that 19% is not only a figure. It is also a finding that calls for further discussions on policy in a digitalising society.

As presented in the introduction to this article, digital devices and applications have come to be perceived as a solution to a number of the challenges posed by an ageing population. The long list of opportunities for digital technology to assist in solving the problem includes the following “[o]lder people can obtain consultancy, information and educational content and participation in cultural and political life” (Carretero 2015, 19) and they also can “access daily life services such as banking or shopping” (19). Related ideas also frequently appear in Swedish policy debate. For example, the Swedish National Digitalisation Council states that “Sweden has an objective to be the best in the world at utilising the opportunities created by digitisation.”⁹ The government obviously has great expectations that e-government, welfare technology and such like will improve public service as well as increase cost efficiency.

With a technology-centred approach, digital media as a facilitator and problem solver seems quite obvious. However, technological opportunities are not easily put into practice. In reality, it is only a relatively small number of seniors, 19%, who correspond to the model user (cf. Eco 1984) that policy makers appear to imagine. Silver surfers represent a privileged group that have the resources, motivation and skills to make daily use of digital media.

Relying on digital technology as such – together with pledges from the tech industry about easy-to-use, plug-in-and-play devices – are not a good premise for political decision making within the area of ICT-technology. Digitalisation policy instead ought to be based on solid knowledge of people’s everyday life circumstances, not least when it comes to elderly users. Otherwise, there is a significant risk that digitisation will lead to a lower, not a higher quality of life for most senior citizens.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Familjen Kamprads stiftelse, The Kamprad Family Foundation for Entrepreneurship, Research and Charity.

Notes on contributors

Tobias Olsson

Tobias Olsson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Culture, Language and Media at Malmö University.

Dino Viscovi

Dino Viscovi is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Social Studies, Linnæus University, Växjö, Sweden. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Svensk Mediedatabas (Swedish Media Database), “Dagny Carlsson.”

2 Mediearkivet (Media archive), “seniors + e-commerce,” etc.

3 Our notion of online repertoires, as we have dealt with it elsewhere, is inspired by the concept of media repertoires. The latter concept has been elaborated by Uwe Hasebrink in conjunction with various co-authors in a number of publication (cf. Hasebrink & Domeyer 2012; Hasebrink & Hepp 2017; Hasebrink & Popp 2006).

4 Survey item: I like trying new technical devices and gadgets.

5 Survey item: How proficient are you as a user of digital media?

6 P1 is a public service channel that mostly covers politics, science and culture. Music is rarely played.

7 This specifically means that the respondent has used the online service of either the Pension Agency or health care or the Tax Authority.

8 On second thoughts, it is difficult to find any correlation since nine out of ten elderly people actually have children.

9 Swedish National Digitalisation Council: https://digitaliseringsradet.se/om-webbplatsen/english/

Appendix A

Age distribution and educational level of population and sample (%).

Table

Age	N	n
Men
65–70	42	45
71–75	28	27
76–80	18	17
81–85	12	11
Women
65–70	39	43
71–75	27	30
76–80	19	16
81–85	15	11
Educational level
Men
Low – compulsory	38	48
Medium – vocational, folk high-school, etc.	23	12
High – upper secondary and higher	39	39
Women
Low – compulsory	35	35
Medium – vocational, folk high school, etc.	34	25
High – upper secondary and higher	31	40

N = Statistics Sweden 2016.