The Digital Competences and Agency of Older People Living in Rural Villages in Finnish Lapland

Päivi Rasi and Arja Kilpeläinen, both of the University of Lapland, have written the paper «The Digital Competences and Agency of Older People Living in Rural Villages in Finnish Lapland”. Their point of departure is that older people run a great risk of being excluded from vital functions of the society, because they fall short of digital competencies. They find it very important to strengthen the research in this field. The paper examines the digital competences and agency of older people who live in remote rural villages in Finnish Lapland and the authors argue that older people’s agency is the key factor that keeps them included in contemporary society. They found that the respondents’ digital competencies were diverse. They suggest that digital competence is very much a distributed competence of elderly dyads, families with three generations and informal networks of villagers and that it should not, therefore, be assessed solely as an individual characteristic.