The background of this proposal is a newly established Danish research project on the representation of ageing in the media and elderly people ́s media use. It investigates ways in which elderly people’s media practices and interpretations shape the experience of ageing. Part of this project focuses on how the new digital media environment influences the daily lives of elderly people and the meaning they attribute to ageing. The first specific focus of ours is on how elderly people relate to new media and how media for interpersonal communication influence and shape elderly people’s social relationships. The other specific focus is on how the Internet’s abundance of information on health and the available technologies for self-monitoring bodily functions influence the daily lives and self-understanding of elderly people. Theoretically, we are working with the concepts of domestication and mediatization to get closer to an understanding of how media on one hand are naturalized elements of elderly people’s everyday life serving a variety of purposes and on the other hand influence and set the agenda of what seems important to elderly people to be interested in and concerned about.
We propose to present the main aspects of our theoretical and methodological approaches in order to further interdisciplinary discussion about how the life course perspective and theoretical aspects and methods from media research combine into productive methodologies that specifically address the relationship between ageing, media, body, and meaning.