Jaelle Fuchs

University of Zurich | UZH · Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung – IKMZ

Studies on disconnection from social media and related technologies tend to focus on the user’s disconnection from one specific technology, and consequently provide an incomplete view. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 57 older adults ages 59+, we find that replacement is more common than complete disconnection, which suggests that research shoul...

Theoretical and empirical work on digital media use and social connectedness has often considered face-to-face communication to be an available option. But how do various digital media uses relate to social connectedness when face-to-face communication is not, or much less, possible? Drawing on survey data from 2925 US adults during the early month...

Older adults include highly sophisticated digital media users among their numbers for whom diverse methods of using online technology are a daily occurrence. Given that some older adults are quite tech-savvy, it follows that they may also provide digital media support to others. This study examines technological support-giving abilities and experie...

While the stereotypical older adult is one who is clueless about technology, research on this age group paints a different picture. Adding to the literature about older adults’ varying tech savvy, this paper focuses on the technological support-giving abilities of those in later stages of life based on interviews conducted in four countries. Far fr...

Governments and public health institutions across the globe have set social distancing and stay-at-home guidelines to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. With reduced opportunities to spend time together in person come new challenges to remain socially connected. This essay addresses how the pandemic has changed people’s use of digital communication meth...

In March 2020, like much of the rest of the world, we went into lockdown. A week into our new reality, we decided to do a survey study about how people were experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. In this piece, we describe what motivated us to do the study, how we went about it, and what others can learn from our experiences.

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes about how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic globally wit...

Given that older adults constitute a highly heterogeneous group that engages with digital media in varying ways, there is likely to be large variation in technology support needs, something heretofore unaddressed in the literature. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with a multinational sample of older adults, the authors explore the suppor...

Older adults comprise a highly heterogeneous group that engages with digital media in varying ways, therefore a large variation in technology support needs is likely. This study examines the nature of support for using digital media among older adults. We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with older adults (age 59+) in Hungary, the Netherla...