Workshop: Digital generations from the life course perspective

Workshop: Digital generations from the life course perspective

The Communication Networks & Social Change (CN&SC)  of the IN3-UOC is pleased to organize a workshop offered by Dr. Sakari Taipale, Adjunct Professor at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), where he is running a five-year research project on intergenerational relations in digital societies. Dr. Taipale will be an IN3 Visiting Scholar invited by the CN&SC group until next July.

Abstract

The short lifetime of digital media and communication technologies means that generational identities are difficult to establish around any particular device or application, let alone technological “revolutions”. In this workshop, Dr. Taipale will discuss the limits of traditional “generation thinking” which considers youth as the main formative period for generational consciousness and identity building. He will argue that in connection to digital technologies, each stage of life provides new building blocks for shaping generational experiences and identities. It is not only adoption and actual use, but also the collective attitudes of a particular age group towards these technologies and their experiences of digital technologies that serve as potential markers of generational differences. This standpoint to generations, that can be called as “post-Mannheimian”, makes apparent the redrawing of generational lines across the human life course and especially in later life. The presentation will concentrate on the two domains of life, family and consumption, where digital technologies serve as means to define generational boundaries perhaps more than ever before. The presentation is based on the contributions included in the forthcoming book “Digital Technologies and Generational Identity ICT Usage Across the Life Course” (Routledge, 2017).

Short bio

Sakari Taipale, PhD, Adjunct Professor, works as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Presently, he is running a five-year research project on intergenerational relations in digital societies. Taipale has published on the social aspects of new media technologies and mobilities in many highly ranked academic journals, such as British Journal of Sociology, New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, Social Science Research, Telecommunications Policy, European Journal of Communication, and Mobilities. He is a co-editor of Social robots from a human perspective (Springer, 2015) and the leading editor of the forthcoming book Digital technologies and generational identity: ICT usage across the life course (Routledge, 8/2017).

The workshop will also be broadcasted via live video streaming. You can send your questions to the lecturer via Twitter using the hashtag #SakariIN3