Media, Marketing, and Images of the Older Person in the Information Age

Abstract

How do and marketing influence and reflect current images of aging? Gerontologists and others seem to have accepted a broad assumption that media promote youth culture in ways that universally demean and demoralize older people, and that elders passively accept and internalize media-generated images. But it is time to take another look. First, it is easy to forget that is a plural word, given the subjects treatment in many studies of popular culture. A lot has been written about media as if print, broadcast, film, and online sources were simply different instruments for playing the same mind-numbing tune. To confuse matters further, some researchers have failed to adequately distinguish among advertising, news, and fiction. This failure has allowed for free but often misleading comparisons between situation comedies and the nightly news, or between lipstick ads and the diversity of topics in a magazine. Many analysts are reduced to whining about media because they lack knowledge of the motives behind journalistic choices or the practical constraints on decision making. Underlying this state of affairs is a largely unexamined belief that most consumers are simply passive receptors of mass communication. In this issue of Generations, we offer academics, working journalists, and older people themselves the opportunity to comment on these issues. Several articles suggest that elders are active agents in constructing their own identities, not hapless victims of stereotypes. Other artides offer glimpses into the news industry, where perspectives on aging and older consumers are far from unified. Before taking up these topics, however, it is useful to consider why gerontologists have been slow to take into account major changes in popular stereotypes about the aged and how their perspective is thus limited. Medicare and the community-based programs created under the Older Americans Act of 1965 were political responses to the cultural construction of older people as frail, dependent, and a collective drag on the economic landscape. The fact that older people were singled out as medically vulnerable marks a significant difference between the United States and other western nations, where subsidized healthcare was considered a basic need for citizens of all ages. Gerontology emerged as a major research topic a decade later, when government money was targeted to study where other government money was going. Not surprisingly, especially in hindsight, much of the seminal research conducted during the 1970s cast old age as a problem for policy makers and for elders themselves. Researchers and service providers shared an advocacy role; minimally, they saw themselves as good guys working to combat stereotypes and win benefits for the underserved. Like all cultural constructions, the image of old age as a vulnerable period was transmitted to a generation of students. Able for the first time to specialize in the new field of gerontology, these students made their own contributions to research, policy, university teaching, and the expanding field of aging services. The need to protect the aged was even codified in institutional policy; review board guidelines for university researchers flag both children and subjects over age 65 as special or vulnerable populations (University of South Florida, 2001). As often happens, however, the cultural land scape evolved before the experts could cobble together a new model for detecting and measuring change. In the late 1980s, the public dialogue shifted from discussion of the fragile, dependent aged to a focus on healthy older people with self-serving lifestyles. A new group of lobbyists decrying a lack of generational equity said that old folks were hoarding resources in their gated condos and draining the medical coffers, with no end in sight. Portrayed as beneficiaries of fat pension portfolios, they were cited by fiscal conservatives as testimony to the wisdom of abandoning Social Security and the tax on capital gains. …

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