Social representations

In substudies II and IV, social representations theory was applied. This theory was chosen because it was understood as being capable of tapping into the holistic nature of the construction of reality, that is, into the social, cognitive, and emotional character of the construction process, as well as its historical,

cultural, and structural conditions (Höijer, 2010, 2011; Pirttilä-Backman, 2012; Wagner et al., 1999). In addition, the author’s previous research on Internet nonuse pointed to the emotional character of nonusers’ accounts (Hakkarainen & Hyvönen, 2010a).

Social representations theory was originally developed by Serge Moscovici (1976, 2001a, 2001b, 2008); the key idea is that people gain an understanding of (new) phenomena by collectively forming social representations in their communication and social interactions. A social representation is “the ensemble of thoughts and feelings being expressed in verbal and overt behaviour of actors which constitutes an object for a social group” (Wagner et al., 1999, p. 96). Even if language is central for generating and expressing social representations (Moscovici & Marková, 2000), they also need to be observed in “images, sounds, and movement, even smell and taste” (Bauer, 2015, p. 58).

Social representations are models for the social construction of reality and models for communicating information about reality (Augoustinos et al., 2014; Flick, 1994; Wagner et al., 1999). Social representation means both the contents of shared lay conceptions and the process through which it has been constructed (Lage, 2014). According to Moscovici (2001b, p.

27), social representations form the social reality sui generis. Another key characteristic of social representations theory is the idea that the social groups’ shared conceptions of social phenomena differ from each other, and these conceptions are the basis for the groups’ communication and social interactions (Bauer & Gaskell, 1999; Moscovici, 1976, 2001a, 2001b, 2008;

Wagner et al., 1999).

The contents of social representations have been described as “biased”

(Lage, 2014, p. 54). Moscovici (2001b, p. 48) argued that the biases “do not express a social or cognitive deficit or limitation on the part of the individual but a normal difference in perspective between heterogenous individuals or groups within a society.” In a similar vein, Wagner et al. (1999, p. 100) argued that the metaphors and tropes that groups use for representing a particular phenomenon are not “correct or accurate in the sense of scientific truth,” but rather, they are just “good to think.” Attitudes are connected to the biased character of social representations, and they can be understood as the first

dimension of social representations: they guide the processes of information selection and opinion formation (Lage, 2014).

In the construction of social representations, information communicated by and through media has a central meaning (Höijer, 2010, 2011; Lage, 2014;

Moscovici, 1976, 2008; Pirttilä-Backman, 2012; Washer & Joffe, 2006; Wibeck, 2014). Already in his doctoral dissertation in 1961, Moscovici analyzed how the French press depicted psychoanalysis in the 1950s through diffusion, propagation, and propaganda, and for his dissertation, he collected and analyzed 1,640 articles published in 230 newspapers and magazines (Moscovici, 2008). Without using the current concept of the mediatization of society (e.g., Hjarvard, 2008), Moscovici (2008, p. xxvii) described some of its aspects, namely, the growing meaning of media in acquiring knowledge about and constructing reality:

Because we no longer can hope to grasp much of the knowledge that concerns us. It is assumed that competent groups or individuals will obtain it for us or supply us with it. Increasingly, it is through the in-termediary of other people that we are familiarized with theories and phenomena, and we cannot verify them on the basis of individual ex-perience. The bloated mass of indirect knowledge and indirect realities extends far beyond the shriveled mass of direct knowledge and direct realities, and it is spreading in every direction. Under these conditions, we think and see by proxy.

From the point of view of social representations, it is also significant that television, press, and the Internet utilize pictures that make abstract ideas more concrete (Lage, 2014; Wagner & Kronberger, 2001). In Finland, Wahlström (2012) studied the meaning of new media and ICTs, such as the Internet and smartphones, to social representations theory and the methods to study social representations. He concluded that with the development of digitalized communication, the gap between scientific and lay thinking has become narrower. Furthermore, Wahlström argued for the need to question the belief that social representations are connected to culturally specific

groups. As for the research methods, he called for more research on how people use different media.

The concept of representation has a long history in the social sciences and in the study of culture (Hall, 2010; Knuuttila & Lehtinen, 2010; Seppänen &

Väliverronen, 2013). In his understanding of social representations, Moscovici drew most clearly on Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective representation (Augoustinos et al., 2014; Pirttilä-Backman & Helkama, 2001). Moscovici wrote that “like all my precursors I took my inspiration from Durkheim’s notion”

(Moscovici, 2001b, p. 24). Durkheim’s concept referred to representations such as the myths, legends, and traditions that are collectively shared by the members of a society. Instead, Moscovici’s social representations theory capitalizes on the dynamic and fluid character of the representations and differences between the social representations shared by various groups (Augoustinos et al., 2014).

According to Moscovici (2001b, p. 37), “the purpose of all representations is to make something unfamiliar, or unfamiliarity itself, familiar.” In making the unfamiliar familiar, the processes of anchoring and objectifying are critical. Anchoring refers to categorizing a foreign and potentially disturbing phenomenon into a category we already know. Moscovici (2001b, p. 42) provided a metaphor to illuminate the concept: “It is rather like anchoring a stray boat to one of the buoys in our social space.” For example, in her dissertation on the social representations of the European integration, Sakki (2010; see also Sakki & Menard, 2014) found that integration was anchored in familiar forms of collaboration, values and ideals, geopolitical relationships and positions, and the present and future forms of collaboration. Sakki and Menard (2014) called for the need to use a continuing time conception (past – present – imagined future) in the analysis instead of holding only to the classic definition of anchoring, where the old, already existing categories of phenomena are central.

The second key process of social representations, namely, objectifying, refers to a process in which the categorized phenomenon is transformed into more concrete images, metaphors, or prototypical examples, for example, an artifact, a person, or a natural phenomenon (Sakki & Menard, 2014; Wibeck,

2014). Moscovici (2001b, p. 49) described the process and outcomes of objectifying:

[…] to objectify is to discover the iconic quality of an imprecise idea or being, to reproduce the concept in an image. To compare is already to picture, to fill what is naturally empty with substance. We have only to compare God to a father and what was invisible instantly becomes visible in our minds as a person to whom we can respond as such.

Research has indicated that lay conceptions of, for example, mental disorders have included the metaphor of “curdled milk” (Wagner et al.,1999, p. 99).

Sakki (2010) found that the objectifying of social representations concerning the integration of Europe was achieved through personification (e.g., Margaret Thatcher), metaphors (e.g., mountains of butter, lakes of wine), symbols (e.g., Deutche Mark, Euro), and figurations (e.g., institutions, maps). Furthermore, Wibeck (2014) found out climate change was objectified by Swedish study participants with prototypical examples of polar ice caps, as well as droughts and floods in developing countries. The participants also used movement and speed metaphors (e.g., taking small steps forward) when constructing climate change as either a gradual or unpredictable process.

Emotions are part of social representations (Gutiérrez, 2019; Höijer, 2010, 2011; Jodelet, 1991; Pirttilä-Backman, 2012; Wagner et al., 1999; Zavalloni, 2001). Pirttilä-Backman (2012, p. 175) considered the holistic nature of social representations theory as its strength: “Social reality is studied as meaningful entities, where emotions, cognition and activity are intertwined and realized in a certain context and in interaction with other individuals.”⁶ According to Lage (2014), emotions can be interpreted from the way the contents of social representations are selected and from what kind of attitudes and values can be seen in social representations. Emotions such as fear, hope, guilt, compassion, and nostalgia can be inscribed into social representations,

6 Author’s translation from the following Finnish text: ”Sosiaalista maailmaa tarkastel-laan siinä mielekkäinä kokonaisuuksina, joissa tunteet, ajattelu ja toiminta kietoutu-vat yhteen ja toteutukietoutu-vat tietyssä kontekstissa, vuorovaikutuksessa muiden ihmisten kanssa.”

whether they be in a verbal or visual form (Höijer, 2010). In addition, Moscovici addressed affectivity and emotions when writing about social representations, for example, in his study on how the French press portrayed psychoanalysis (Moscovici, 1976, 2008). However, very little has been written about the role of emotions in social representations (Höijer, 2011).

Höijer (2010, 2011) added emotional anchoring and objectification to the communicative processes through which objectifying and anchoring are achieved. Through these processes, “a new phenomenon is attached to well-known positive or negative emotions, for example fear or hope. In this way the unknown becomes recogniz able as, for example, a threat, a danger, or as something nice and pleasurable” (Höijer, 2010, p. 719). According to Höijer, for example, climate change may be emotionally objectified to the emotions of pity and compassion when presented with pictures of a solitary polar bear cub on a melting ice floe. In the present study, substudy IV used Höijer’s concept of emotional anchoring as one of the analytical tools.

Metaphors are important in the social construction of reality: in communication, thinking, and action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Gergen, 2003, 2009; Wyatt, 2021). They are important content of social representations as well (Arruda, 2015; Pirttilä-Backman, 2012) and were the focus of the analysis in substudies II and IV of the present study. Metaphors are important because without them, for example, the media would face difficulties in communicating abstract ideas for a lay audience (Lage, 2014). As for the present study, the metaphors related to computers, Internet, and older people’s digital competences were searched for and analyzed both in older people’s own accounts (substudy II) and in newspaper articles (substudy IV).

Prior research has focused on the metaphors used for the Internet, pointing to the following Internet-related metaphors in editorials, user discourse, pop culture, advertising, news media, scholarly works, and software and web designer discourse: tool, place, way of being (Markham, 2003); physical space, physical speed, destruction, salvation (Johnston, 2009); village square, frontier, highway, library, cloud computing, and data as the new oil or gold (see Wyatt, 2021).

Also, scientific thinking and language uses metaphors, and studies have focused on what kind of metaphors are typical for scientific theories in

different fields of research (Kuusela, 2003). Recently, Wyatt (2021, p. 408) argued that besides analyzing the metaphors of other social actors, critical Internet and digital media scholars need to be mindful of how they themselves use metaphors:

[…] We also need to be reflexive about our own use of language so that we do not unwittingly reinforce power structures that serve to exclude groups, organisations or regions, by promoting the inevitability of par-ticular sociotechnical configurations, for example.

Metaphorical thinking operates by using analogies, meaning that a certain thing or phenomenon is described through equating it with another thing or phenomenon. This relatively broad definition of “a metaphor” has also been used in social scientific studies on metaphors. However, to communicate well, a metaphor needs to be adequately alike and different: a metaphor that is too far-fetched will not be understood (Kuusela, 2014). In the construction of social representations, the selection of metaphors is not arbitrary (Kuusela, 2014; Wagner et al., 1999). Here, the selection process is guided by the experiential world of the group, and the differences in the social, historical, cultural, and structural conditions of groups delimit the array of metaphors available for objectification (Wagner et al., 1999).

Sakki and Menard (2014) argued that besides objectifying and anchoring, naturalization is the third key concept of social representations. The authors underlined the need to study naturalized representations because these are unquestionable, normative, and, therefore, also a means to exert power.

A naturalized, hegemonic representation refers to a representation that has become a general, unquestioned resource in everyday discussions. In a similar vein, Wyatt (2021, p. 409) argued that “metaphors are not simply descriptive. They often also have a normative dimension.”

Because social representations are understood as including various elements, the empirical research on them has focused on both their content and structure (e.g., Abric, 2001; Aim et al., 2018; Moscovici, 2001a, 2001b). For example, Abric has studied social representations in terms of their central core and peripheral elements (Abric, 2001; Moliner & Abric, 2015; see also

Augoustinos et al., 2014). In addition, the functions of social representations have been the focus of prior empirical research (e.g., Eicher & Bangerter, 2015; Jost & Ignatow, 2001; Lahlou, 2001). For example, symbolic coping has been shown to be one of the functions of social representations, meaning the collective behavior of a group in a situation where its worldview is threatened by a novel and unexpected event or phenomenon (Eicher & Bangerter, 2015;

Wagner & Kronberger, 2001; Wagner et al., 1999). The present research also considers the functions of social representations in substudies II and IV.

On the other hand, the social representations approach has received criticism because of its static nature, individual centeredness, and making a sharp distinction between scientific and lay thinking (Pirttilä-Backman &

Helkama, 2001). The approach has been criticized as “typically not been concerned with the ways in which particular representations are constructed in particular contexts to perform particular actions” (Gibson, 2015, p. 215). In terms of research methods, the use of multiple methods has been seen as a strength of the social representations approach (Philogène & Deaux, 2001;

Pirttilä-Backman, 2012).

International research on social representations has typically focused on controversial social issues, which have also attracted extensive attention from the media (Augoustinos et al., 2014; Pirttilä-Backman, 2012), such as climate change (Höijer, 2010; Wibeck, 2014), biotechnology (Wagner & Kronberger, 2001), citizenship (Álvarez Bermúdez & Juárez-Romero, 2019), health (Aim et al., 2018), and infectious diseases (Eicher & Bangerter, 2015). In Finland, the approach of social representations has been applied in doctoral dissertations (see Pirttilä-Backman, 2012) focusing, for example, on teachers’ relationship with technology (Kilpiö, 2008), new foods (Huotilainen, 2005), conceptions of social skills (Saaranen-Kauppinen, 2012), images of addiction (Hirschovits-Gerz, 2014), and visual representations of teachership (Martikainen, 2020).

Research applying the approach of social representations on the topics of the present study, that is, on an individual’s relationship with the Internet and computers, is scarce. Some of the few exceptions are the studies by Kilpiö (2008), who studied teachers’ relationships with technology, and Flick, who, along with his colleagues (see Flick, 1994), studied how people psychologically cope with technological change in France and in East- and West-Germany.

Flick et al. found out that the social representations of computers varied culturally; for example, in East-Germany, lay conceptions of the computer were symbolically more loaded: the computer was understood as a means to stay abreast of technological development. In Italy, Capozza et al. (2003) and Contarello and Sarrica (2007) studied the social representations that students had of the Internet, exploring how the representations were related to their subjective well-being.

In summary, research on social representations has focused typically on their construction processes, contents, characteristics, structure, cultural variations, and functions. The present study connects most clearly to the research on the construction processes, content, characteristics, and variations within social representations.