Ageism in the time of technological innovation: Understanding older people’s digital landscapes

Ageism continues to be the most invisible and persistent form of discrimination. Discriminative biases work in digital systems via different mechanisms. While there is some awareness of gender, racial and socioeconomic discrimination that are perpetuated and exacerbated via digital platforms, ageism has received less attention. COVID-19 has exacerbated and exposed these fault lines on several accounts; people who lack digital literacy or access have been less likely to use digital means to connect socially, use health-related technologies, access government supports and more. This timely project will examine how ageism tends to be amplified in the scripts, codes and programming that power digital infrastructures. In this project, we will disentangle the types of ageist mechanisms that are common in the approaches, design and implementation systems of digital landscapes.