FINAL VIDEO

Here is my final video called “shifting focus” – available in full HD !

ABOUT “SHIFTING FOCUS”:

In our digital age not everyone is also a participating digital citizen. The digital divide, which refers to “those who have the resources and capabilities to use telecommunications technologies and those who don’t” (Crenshaw, 2010), excludes certain groups of people from the digital sphere.

My video project “shifting focus” focuses on one of these groups, senior citizens, a generation which forms part of “the so-called ‘grey divide’, a divide among seniors of age 65+ years” as it is found that “Internet use is strongly skewed in this age group leading to a partial exclusion of the old seniors (70+)” (Friemel, 2014, p.1) and this “social exclusion is related mostly to the third dimension of digital media literacy: the ability to create and participate.” (Park, 2012, p.1)

For the project I interviewed three people, aged between 68 and 82, with different digital media literacy. Judith and Thea understand the concept of social media and have their own Facebook accounts, though not very actively participating, they use them to keep in touch with people and look at photographs of their family. John on the other hand does not use a computer at all.

The project explores, through the subject of photography, the changes technology has brought and how the value of images has changed over time. This is created through two main approaches – the first one is to remember old images of themselves taken by someone else and the second one is to take a selfie with a smartphone. This means not only introducing a foreign concept to them but forcing them to point the camera towards themselves, unlike the old image that was taken by someone else.