Content Creation in Later Life: Reconsidering Older Adults' Digital Participation and Inclusion

In increasingly digitalised societies, government initiatives to ensure that public services remain accessible for everyone typically focus on the digital inclusion of older adults. However, by solely viewing older adults as passive recipients or consumers of services, digital inclusion strategies under-emphasise the concept of digital participation. Highlighting the importance of older adults as active contributors in a digital society, we investigated the potential of content creation to increase older adults’ digital skills whilst also strengthening their digital participation. Through a workshop and interviews involving three different groups of older content producers, we show that content creation can stimulate older adults’ digital participation. We report on challenges faced by the content creators, including time constraints, lack of professional support and the preference to create content collaboratively. We propose that by facilitating collaborative content creation activities, local communities can better support older adults’ digital participation and facilitate inclusion across different life domains.