Talking 'costs': Seniors, cell phones and the personal and political economy of telecommunications in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seniors, defined as persons aged 65 and up, are becoming a much larger demographic in Canada at the same time as the wireless telecommunications industry is expanding. Yet in terms of academic research, few studies have examined how seniors understand and negotiate the influx of digital communications devices, such as the cellular telephone, into their world. Using industry and government data, as well as individual and group interviews and observations with over 120 Canadian seniors, this paper examines the repertoire of 'cost' in the group discussions held with this cohort. It does so from the perspective of a feminist political economy that takes into account individual experiences in the context of macro-level, structural analyses of institutions and industry. This preliminary study suggests that financial considerations play a significant role in seniors' cell phone practices and may lead to a strategic decision to impose restrictions on their use. These restrictions to access often run counter to the desire, amongst many seniors, to have access to a cell phone for 'emergency purposes'. The comments made by this cohort make apparent the way that personal economies within a household on restricted or fixed incomes intersect with the practices of the wireless industry and suggest future avenues for media and ageing studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".