摘要：Social media are important in the lives of family members and friends, but we know little about how the elderly people among us perceive this way of communicating. Here, we present qualitative results from a survey, from focus group interviews and from in-depth interviews on why some older people use social media while others do not. Our findings show that the non-users are older. They have smaller social networks; and strong social ties are given priority. They perceive social media as cold and impersonal, colliding with their opinions about what social interaction should be about. Older people who use social media also give priority to strong social ties, but find that Facebook is well suited for this purpose. They are younger than non-users, and they tend to have larger social networks with several close resource persons around them. They therefore experience social media as more relevant so long as they receive help to overcome technical and cultural barriers.
