The Cricital Approaches of Socio-Gerontechnology

One field of study the sociology of age and ageing focuses on is technology use in later life. Since, in the past, many research projects showed the tendency to be techno-optimist and mostly concerned with the question how technologies can improve older people's lives, recently, more cricital approaches evolved. These new approaches - widely refrerred to as Socio-gerontechnology -  criticise ageist stereotypes about "technology use in later life in design processes and the paternalist stance toward older adults resulting from it" as well as the techno-optimism of gerontological research. 

This includes, on the one hand, a deeper empirical engagement with design processes and innovation policy to highlight how new technologies not only address alleged problems or challenges of individual or population aging, but how they create and select certain ideas about aging that work well as targets for design or innovation policies (Bischof and Jarke, 2021; Peine and Neven, 2021). In such a view, design processes and innovation policy become important sites for our empirical understanding of age and aging, too, because they produce and reinforce societally shared ideas of how we can and should age—ideas whose contingent nature can be revealed by empirical inquiry (Lipp and Peine, 2022).

Socio-gerontechnology is also concerned about "the everyday life of older people, aging bodies and the construction of age and aging in relation to technology", how ageing is shaped by technologies and how ageing is quantified by technologies which again creates the image of the ageing body as one that is "constantly iprovable and invevitably in decline" (Gallistl et al., 2023).

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- Gallistl, V., Katz, S., Kolland, F. & Peine, A. (2023). Editorial: Socio-gerontechnology - New perspectives on the digital transformation of later life. Front. Sociol, link
- photograph by Dennis Feldman via