The aim of this chapter is to investigate how young people experience the adoption and use of everyday life technologies, such as television, radio, mobile phone and computer, by their grandparents and by elderly people in general. Due to the rapid ageing of populations in contemporary societies, the relative importance of older people as a target of both academic studies and as technology users increases. According to the United Nations, there were 901 million people aged 60 or over, corresponding to 12% of the global population, in 2015. The size of this age group is growing at a rate of 3.26% per year and although Europe has the highest percentage 60+ population (24%) in the world, rapid ageing is occurring in all continents save Africa (UN, 2015, p. 7).
The importance of the older population also relates to the fact that they have become healthier and wealthier than in the past (Piketty, 2014) with more education and more time to spend (Kearney, 2013). There is a burning need to understand better the magnitude of these changes in the nature of later life and the changing network of their family members, who use various digital technologies to organize and maintain their everyday life. In this study, young people were used as key informants to study older people's use of digital technologies in Italy. In Italy, the student key informants have typically a direct and immediate relationship with older members of their families. They are also widely considered as the experts on technology within their families (Schofield Clark, 2013), hence particularly suitable to give first-hand information on the use of technology by their aged family members.
