Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013

This article adopts a cultural approach in order to provide an empirical grounding to the multidimensional concept of media generations. Data from the representative survey ‘Me. The World. The Media’, conducted in autumn 2011 among members of the Estonian population aged 15–74 (N=1510), are used to map similarities and distinctions among four age groups with regard to the use of media technologies and channels, format and topic preferences, spatial orientations of media use, and attitudes towards the Internet. The findings demonstrate significant and multifaceted differences between the age cohorts, suggesting that in addition to the ascent of new media technologies, broader social and cultural changes need to be considered in interpreting generational groups’ relations with the media. The study partially confirms the hypothesis that media experiences shared with members of another media generation are related to a weaker perception of inter-generational gaps.

In times of global ageing, it is striking that little is known about the media habits of older adults, an increasingly growing group with a lot of leisure time. This article provides insight into the day-to-day media use of 40 nursing home residents throughout their life course. The residents under study live in two nursing homes in Flanders (Belgium), one located in a rural and the other in an urban context. In semi-structured interviews, the residents were asked about their use of and interest in a range of media. The life course perspective provides an opportunity to track the evolution of media use from the residents’ childhood to older adulthood. Here, processes of both change and continuity were found for media use throughout the life course. The residents consistently prefer local content and news and are loyal to channels or titles throughout their lives. In contrast, some media use and interests of the nursing home residents change over time, as contextual (society, media landscape) and personal circumstances (e.g. time, money, health) change. Finally, interesting differences were found between rural and urban residents in terms of media use and interests, mostly based on class distinctions.

The retired population in the United Kingdom is rising and statistics show that growth in the use of digital technologies and the Internet are also increasing within this age group. Small but substantial proportions are using the Internet for something more than to search and consume online goods and materials. This article explores what and where retired people learn digital technologies, skills often more directly associated with people born into a digital world. Through the use of qualitative data this article provides an insight into the (re)education of retired Internet users who are using digital technology and web media to create and share their own content. Digital technology within this sample of over 65s is often learnt unintentionally as a consequence of adopting a new hobby or interest in retirement or the rediscovery of an old one that they may not have been able to explore prior to retirement.

The aim of the study was to explore the reasons that Estonian three-generation families use different web-based platforms for family interaction. Semi-structured interviews (N=13) were carried out with representatives of four Estonian families to study their motivations for communicating with each other through web-based communication channels. Furthermore, we were interested in learning how they had selected the platforms for communication, what topics they discussed and what information they exchanged while communicating online. The findings of our study suggest that web-based communication channels were firmly domesticated in the everyday family routines of our respondents. Our interviews revealed that the Internet and web-based communication channels play an enormous role in supporting and partly also re-establishing inter-generational communication and, thereby, strengthening family bonds.

Based on a qualitative study, this article discusses the role of folk-like schlager music for elderly people in Germany. Music preferences and aspects of fandom are analysed from a cultural studies perspective, and are elaborated through frameworks including stereotypical attributions, ascribed meanings of music content, taste history and functions of music. Additionally, cultural and group identities are analysed. Finally, the article discusses the possible age-specific forms of fandom and advocates for the abolition of fandom studies’ dominant, stereotypical distance towards popular culture preferences of elderly people.

This article is a contribution to the ‘new cinema history’ vein of media studies concerning the experience of American films in foreign, local contexts. It explores the cinema memory discourse of senior citizens living in a post-industrial mining region in central Sweden. The informants offer a variety of narrative strategies of cinema memory that can be related to social differences within the group based on class, membership in social societies and local geopolitics. The informants also take care to mention Swedish films and actors in more or less equal proportion and with similar enthusiasm compared to American ones, yet Swedish film has only had a limited amount of screen time throughout the age of cinema. The elderly informants’ cinema memories are constructed in dual terms: on the one hand acknowledging traits of cinema culture in terms of glamour, sincerity and novelty tied to the dominant Hollywood fare and on the other hand taking care to anchor the experience of cinema-going in a strong sense of national community. The contention is that the informants are evoking a cinema-going culture that caters to a deeply felt human need of belonging, and this belonging is identified with the prosperous Swedish post-war nation state.

The role that age and generation play in shaping patterns of (news) media consumption is a particularly significant issue in current media studies. By virtue of the interplay of the theoretical concept of generations and the critical study of language, the article, empirically rooted in the Estonian context, seeks to outline the ways in which language reflects some media-related practices and perspectives. Analysing qualitative data from focus groups conducted in autumn/winter 2011 among Estonian media users aged 16–72, the article attempts to shed light on the complex nature of the generational consciousness that manifests itself through interaction with people of the same age and with a socially shared framework in terms of the perception of news media’s role, as well as the adoption of novel forms of media and technologies. A specific focus is on four generations who reached their ‘formative age’ in one of four possible periods (1) the post-war period, (2) the Soviet period, (3) the period of restoration of national independence, and (4) the period of transformation into a democratic society and highly technologized media culture.

It has been posited that different generations are largely influenced by the characteristics of the media landscape they inherit and grow into in their formative years. However, we also know from empirical studies that individual media use changes over the life course. At present no empirical study has analysed and compared the use of several news media among different generations in relation to both life cycle factors and media development over significant periods of time. Hence, this article explores the topic through its cross-generational comparison of transforming news media usage. As a point of departure, the generation analyses use the widely recognized classification of the dutifuls (1926–1945), the baby boomers (1946–1964), generation X (1965–1976) and the dotnets (1977–1995). Five analytically distinct media system eras, covering 1986 to 2011, are utilized for embedding the empiric analyses into distinct media system contexts. The findings evidence the generational hypothesis on formative socialization, especially with regards to the dutifuls and the baby boomers. Nevertheless, age and life cycle are also identified as critically important factors. The findings show that the elderly persist with legacy news media, while younger generations predominantly orient towards news platforms that have emerged in the digital mediascape, even though this traditional classification seems to be too broad for analysis of media development. Consequently, researchers should ideally acknowledge this double effect of age in future research on media usage, as well as work further on developing relevant classifications of generation relevant research for our understanding of transforming media use.

In the recent sociological debate, the concept of the generation has been used increasingly frequently as a tool for interpreting current social change and the role played by the young in this process. This wave, which also involves media discourses, has created a sort of narrative, whose main feature is the existence of a ‘digital global generation’ characterized by the use of Internet and mobile devices. This new generation has been described as being very similar to that of the protagonists of social movements of the 1960s. This article discusses and criticizes this ‘generational storytelling’ from two different perspectives: on one hand, it focuses on a more complex definition of the generation and its connections with mediascapes, while on the other, through evidence that demonstrates the ‘glocal’ dimension of the web, it confronts the complexity of the concept of social ‘activity’ and the powerful role of inter-generational interaction in the shaping of collective identities.