Data talk: Mapping older Canadians' understandings of digital technologies and their data

Older adults' experiences with technologies and data are typically flattened amid a focus on the functionalities of “techno-fixes” for the “afflictions” of later life. In this paper, we challenge this narrow focus by presenting older adults' own understandings of and experiences with data. Reporting on an online qualitative survey with 70 older Canadians, we argue that rather than being passive agents amid datafication, older adults are agentively theorizing, tinkering with, and engaging with data and devices. Organizing our analysis around three thematic threads (data associations, affordances and pitfalls of data, and data in relation to the aging self) we reveal how older adults vernacularize circulating discourses about data, producing their own meanings and interpretations. This paper also demonstrates the methodological potential of online surveys for collecting unexpectedly rich qualitative data. Our ‘conversations’ with respondents deepened our understandings of older adults' own perspectives, jargon, and terminologies around data and digital technologies and revealed the importance of considering data in relation to their devices.