This document summarizes research on the cultural construction of age identity through media depictions of older consumers. It identifies several discourses around aging, including: the anti-senior discourse; the radical discourse depicting older individuals as active and rock-n-rolling; the eternal youth discourse emphasizing looking and feeling young; the hedonistic discourse of wealthy older consumers; and the soulful discourse emphasizing wisdom and experience over physical appearance. The researcher analyzes these discourses by exploring themes, symbols, subject positions, and antagonisms toward alternative views of aging. The goal is to understand how media representations shape cultural understandings and identities regarding the aging process.

1. Maria Ekström (Suokannas)

2. Older consumer
75 years

3. Older media
consumer

4.  Articles from trade magazines
 Interviews with media and marketing professionals
 Advertisements from magazines

5. Ways of talking about ageing
consumers and how they are depicted
in images

6.  To put forward a culturally constructed view on age
where age identity is seen as constructed and
negotiated constantly in the realm of encounters
between media and the media consumer
 To talk about how age is constructed culturally and
how it can be found in language use and in different
targeted communicative multimodal acts
(advertisements, videos, photos, art etc.).

8.  Chronological age
 Cognitive age
 feel-age, look-age, do-age och interest-age
 Subjective age
 Cultural age
 How different ideologies shape ”borders” for
interpreting your age and how your age identity is
constructed

9. • Obviously, the lifespan must be seen as
something more than a biological fact;
it is a discursive or imagined
production, symbolic of a culture’s
beliefs about living and aging […]
(Katz, 1996:39)

10.  Advertising performs much the same function in
industrial society as myth performed in ancient and
primitive societies: It is both the creator and
perpetuator of the dominant attitudes, values, and
ideology of culture, as well as the social norms and
myths by which most people live” (Kilbourne 2004:
252)

11. • In other words there is no point looking for the language
‘of’ advertising; rather we need to explore the operation of
language ‘in’ advertising, as one aspect of the operation of
language across and ‘in’ all of society (Kress 1987:123-124)

12.  Living persons are required to `take up' subject
positions in discourse in order to make sense of the
world and appear coherent to others. A subject
position is that perspective or set of regulated
discursive meanings from which discourse makes
sense. To speak is to take up a subject position and to
be subjected to the regulatory power of that discourse.
(Barker 2001:13)

13.  I read through the texts with the aim to find themes
which are the building blocks (using concepts as
chains of equivalence, antagonism and lived ideology)
 I read other texts (novels e.g) which accentuated the
discourse

14.  Senior
 Radical
 Forever young
 Hedonist
 Soulful

16.  THEMES:
 Antisenior, Mass market, Irreversible ageing, Invisbility,
Stereotypes, Born before the second world war, Boredom
 ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS:
 Discourses that do not accept biological, natural ageing
 SYMBOLS:
 Rocking chair, Slippers, Rollator, Knitting
 SUBJECT POSITION:
 The elderly as greyhaired (negative), wrinkled, quiet,
passive and ailing

18.  THEMES:
 Activity, Antisenior, Diversification, Change
agency, Cognitive age/Feel-age, Commodification of
age, Radicality, Rock-n-roll, social creativity
 ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS:
 Discourses that talk about inactiveness, silence and
calmness
 SYMBOLS:
 Rock music, Parties, Barricades
 SUBJECT POSITION:
 The elderly as the radical who changes the image of old
age, those who were young in the sixties

20.  THEMES:
 Eternal youth, Up-to-date, Cognitive-age/Feel-age,
Commodification of age, Market potential, Social creativity
 ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS:
 Discourses that only accept the irreversible ageing process
(chronological age). The same as the Radical discourse
 SYMBOLS:
 Botox, Products promising eternal youth
 SUBJECT POSITION:
 The elderly as eternally young and identifying themselves
with the youth

22.  THEMES:
 Hedonism, Not-born-before the second world war,
Qualityminded, Market potential
 ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS:
 Discourses that describe the elderly as misers who only
want to buy special offers
 SYMBOLS:
 Kroisos, Champagne, Golden
 SUBJECT POSITION:
 The elderly as rich and hedonistic with an expensive
taste

24.  THEMES:
 Body-mind (spiritual age), Wisdom
 ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS:
 Discourses that emphasize the body and looks instead
of the soul
 SYMBOLS:
 Grey colour as something beautiful
 SUBJECT POSITION:
 The elderly as wise and experienced and as a mentor
for younger generations

25. Go for the discourse
or against it?

26.  Why is it that so often attempts to speak about ageing
in a positive light result in a denial of ageing [… ] Old
people are in fact young people? Really? What
happens to all the years they have lived, the things
they have learned, the selves they have evolved from
and the selves they are becoming? (Andrews 1999:309)

27. © j koivusalo

28. © j koivusalo

29. © j koivusalo

30. © j koivusalo

31. © j koivusalo