Hybrid Communicative Citizenship: Explaining the Everyday Digital Lives of Older Adults in Indonesia

Research on older adults in digital environments has been dominated by digital divide and digital inclusion perspectives, emphasizing access, digital literacy, and technological competence. Although valuable, these perspectives provide limited explanations of how older adults construct the meaning of digital life through social relationships, communicative practices, and algorithmic mediation. This study explains how digital citizenship is constituted through the everyday experiences of older adults. Using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, the study involved 35 young-old adults (aged 60–65) in Pontianak, Indonesia, who had recently retired after working in increasingly digitalized environments. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, digital observations, and digital artefacts, and analyzed using an iterative phenomenological process. The findings identified four interconnected experiential processes: Intergenerational Digital Scaffolding, Negotiated Digital Agency, Algorithmically Mediated Visibility, and Digital Presence as Everyday Lifeworld. These processes informed the development of the Hybrid Communicative Citizenship Model (HCCM), conceptualizing digital citizenship as a communicative process shaped by intergenerational support, communicative agency, algorithmic mediation, and everyday digital practices. The model demonstrates that older adults’ digital participation emerges through ongoing negotiation within social relationships and platform-based environments. The study advances communicative citizenship by integrating relational and algorithmic dimensions into digital ageing while informing communication theory, age-inclusive digital policies, and inclusive platform design.