Web Sites for Senior Citizens

Abstract

In the information era, the main source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbolic communication (Castells, 1996; Van Dijk, 1999). As Rifkin (2000) observed, it raises a service industry that substitutes the material economy, and the wealth relations are decided in the arena of the access and correct exploitation of these services. For sociological scientists, the biggest challenge is to overcome the classical sociological concepts of knowledge gaps (Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1970) and the digital divide, often technologically determined, aiming at investigating the social and cultural problems that obstacle elderly people, housewives, and many other social groups in using the Internet and making it useful for daily life. We need to make the cultural codes available for using new media through remediation work (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) linking digital languages to the main communication practices and media languages.