The Inside Out of the Ageing Self: Identity, Trust, and Friendship of Australian Seniors in an Online Community of Older People

Abstract

This thesis explores how older people are successfully connecting online and how they integrate those experiences into their everyday lives. While there is an emerging body of research contributing to the anthropology of ageing that is concerned with online sociality of older people, the interactions between online and offline sociability of older Australians has not been anthropologically examined. This thesis contributes a unique and in-depth long term ethnographic study to broader perspectives of ageing by adding the voices of older Australians to contemporary understandings of social connectedness in a world that relies more and more on using technology to maintain relationships with each other. The research is based on fourteen months of fieldwork, October 2009 to January 2010, conducted in an online community of approximately 12,000 members who identified themselves as sixty years of age or older. The ethnographic study design involved the creation of a profile, the development of online relationships, extensive exploration of the social networking site, and the creation of an online focus-group. In addition, home stays and face-to-face interviews were conducted in Australia to understand the relationship between placing self-aware content online in a trusting manner, and its convergence with understandings of the self within the social context of everyday lives. Examination of the experiences of older people ethnographically within the characteristics of their own social settings, online and offline, provides a rich understanding of social context that challenges predominant assumptions linked to ageing discourses. These include public health policies associated with loss and decline, popular cultural discourses and representations of ageing, and grievances related to the socio-economic burden that the ageing population is perceived to have on western states.Social isolation has been shown to be problematic for older people as friends diminish over the life span. This thesis argues that the Internet provides new pathways to source and establish new friends that are meaningful to participants based on their own likes and dislikes, and moral values. Older people bring to the online context well defined understandings of trust which they rely on to make friends with strangers. This thesis contributes to contemporary anthropological debates concerning trust, and the ability to establish trust online. Utilizing an acute awareness of the self, older people provided visual and textual cues as narrations of the self on homepages to describe who they think they are in terms that they perceived were accurate representation of identity. Graphics and text enhancement were used as symbols of meaning to create a culture of social inclusion that celebrated ageing amongst peers in a trusting environment. Technology affords older people with an opportunity to express the self in a variety of contexts without the distractions of the ageing physical self, and this allowed the youthful, unencumbered internal self to emerge and be shared with others. The ability to be able to maintain a continuity of the self with strangers was the reason why communicating online for older people was considered to be so rewarding and meaningful.