Older Women In Social Media

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Social media use among older populations has grown exponentially over the past decade. Today, 64% of adults aged 50-64 and 34% of those 65 and over report using at least one among the mainstream social media platforms (Anderson and Perrin 2017). Within this group, older women are more likely to use social network sites (SNS) than their male peers are, with over a half (52%) of female internet users over 65 being social media users, compared with only 39% of older men. However, despite the fact that numbers of social media users in their 50s, 60s and beyond keep growing, adoption of these platforms decreases dramatically past 75, and, on the whole, older adults remain in the minority as these online spaces were recently still dominated by those under 30 (Smith, 2014).
Aside from constituting a minority of SNS users, older adults may face other difficulties ‘fitting in’ within the social landscape of these online spaces. Due to their increasingly image-heavy nature social network sites constitute a particular public or semi-public sphere for curated performances of selfhood that rely heavily on bodily display. Within the logic of SNS, bodies – female bodies …show more content…

Bearing in mind the low bodily capital of older women caused by ‘almost inescapable’ judgement of ageing female bodies as unattractive (Cruikshank 2003: 147) the research examines the ways in which older women negotiate visibility and social currency in the contemporary social media sphere dominated by younger

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