Despite increasing social pressure to use new digital technologies, older people’s adoption of them remains below other age groups. This article contributes a sociological dimension to exploring what facilitates learning and using digital technology in later life. We focus on the understudied group of older people who are frail, living in care homes and most likely to be digitally excluded or restricted. Drawing on data from a longitudinal mixed methods study of a co-designed communication app for older people, we explore how attempts to bridge the ‘digital divide’ unfold in time. Using the concept of affordances, we show how adoption of a new communication technology is shaped by its design, learning contexts and surrounding social actors. With this work we contribute to novel sociological understandings of technology adoption that are critical for digital inequality research.

尽管使用新数字技术的社会压力越来越大，但是老年人对新数字技术的采用仍然低于其他年龄组。本文在探索促进晚年学习和使用数字技术的方面提供了社会学意义。我们关注的是年龄偏低，体弱，生活在养老院中并且最有可能被数字排斥或限制的老年人群。利用针对老年人共同设计的通信应用程序的纵向混合方法研究中的数据，我们探索了如何弥合及时弥合“数字鸿沟”的尝试。我们使用负担能力的概念，展示了新通信技术的采用是如何通过其设计，学习环境和周围的社会参与者而形成的。