Our group has launched the new research project DP-DDS | ‘Digital Paradoxes’ in times of Data-Driven Surveillance. Disentangling the ‘privacy paradox’ and the ‘misinformation paradox’ from the perspective of older adults.
The aim of the project is to unravel the digital paradoxes that have emerged in recent years around the use of big data and surveillance technologies, and how these paradoxes affect the lives of older adults (aged 65+). Postdoctoral researcher Marta Cambronero Garbajosa will be in charge of developing this new research project, which stems from a collaboration between the UOC’s CNSC group and the Aging in Data project, led and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This research line, promoted by Sara Suárez-Gonzalo and supervised by Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, will be carried out between June 2025 and June 2026.
The concept of the digital paradox initially emerged to refer to the contradictions between the positive changes expected from introducing a technology in a given field and the undesirable results that contrast with the initial promise. This concept has also recently been used to refer to contradictory empirical results on how citizens deal with privacy protection and face disinformation in the digital sphere.
Previous studies suggest that people are aware that their privacy is being undermined—due to mass digitisation and data-based surveillance—and advocate for privacy protection practices in digital environments, but rarely implement them. This contradiction points to what is known as the privacy paradox. For its part, the disinformation paradox refers to the fact that people recognise the need to be cautious about sources of information—to avoid believing and spreading disinformation—while at the same time interacting with disinformation content in the same way as they do with content they trust.
The elderly population is one of the social groups considered ‘vulnerable’ —or, as we prefer, ‘peripheral’— in our society. Unraveling digital paradoxes by taking into account the perceptions and practices of older people is of particular interest and relevance for two reasons. On the one hand, it contributes to producing new knowledge from the perspective of one of the populations whose concerns and needs are often less taken into account. On the other hand, integrating this perspective into research is expected to reveal with some clarity the structural aspects of digital paradoxes, which to date have been explained in academic literature mainly from the level of individual behaviour.
This structural approach aims to answer questions such as ‘who has the power to monitor whom and why’ or ‘who has or lacks the ability to control a certain monitoring power that affects their life, and why’, which implies recognising the role of socio-technical systems and the power relations reproduced through them in mediatised societies. In the context of this research, this implies a shift in epistemic perspective from a more media-centred view—which seeks to explain ‘what older people do wrong’ in their media use—to one that takes into account people’s perceptions of themselves—which prioritises understanding ‘what older people want to achieve’ when using digital media and ‘why and how they succeed or fail in doing so’.
For further information, please contact: macambronero@uoc.edu
Photo by Gervyn Louis (Unsplash License)