Old people, video games and french press: a topic model approach on a study about discipline, entertainment and self-improvement.
Résumé
Over the past few years, the French mainstream press has covered more and more consistently "silver gamers", those adults over sixty who play videogames. This article investigates the discursive and normative paradigms that underlie the unexpected enthusiasm of French mainstream press for older adults who play videogames. We use a topic model approach on a corpus of French articles that mention both older people and video games in order to identify topics, that is, sets of words related by their meanings and identified with a Bayesian statistical algorithm. We preface the topic modeling's conclusions with a discussion of the representations of older people and video games in French mainstream media. Our analysis explores how the French press' coverage of older people who play videogames simultaneously erases the moral panic about video games and reinforces the "successful ageing" discourse.