Context
ICT has severely contributed to change our everyday life and has turned letters to e-mail, market shopping to on-line shopping, apps and automatic replies to human technical customer support, and in particular in the field of culture a great deal of contents are now available online, free to be used and enjoyed, yet the lack of skills and online awareness often prevent adult users to benefit from online cultural offers.
Online availability certainly has improved and speeded our life conditions and our quality of life but the Internet has also a dark side if we consider spam, malware, hacking, phishing, denial of service attacks, click fraud, invasion of privacy, defamation, frauds, violation of digital property rights, etc. With the total value of fraudulent transactions annually amounting to €1.8 billion, according to the latest European Central Bank (ECB) and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) reporting the Trend Micro and Europol highlight the increasing sophistication of cyber criminals in terms of how attacks are planned and orchestrated.
The category more exposed comes to be that of late digital. Indeed, a research carried out by Lloyds Bank in 2019 has calculated that a single fraud steals over 2,500 pounds to under 34s, but it is much worse for those over 55, with an average of almost 11 thousand pounds stolen per each. In between are those between 45 and 54 years old with £ 3,500 lost.
Although the rapidly growing group of people aged 65 and over in the European Region represents a rich cultural baggage of experience, skills, contributions and special needs, elderly people have a crucial challenge to face: coping with a society where everything goes faster and travels at an average of 5 Mbps speed of bandwidth, thus being cut out of society and online cultural offer.
How to
In an increasingly IT-driven society with an ageing population, S.O.S. Creativity is designed to support the development of IT key competences for adults to let them exploit cultural offers and artistic contents available online, while boosting their level of consciousness toward the potentialities and the risks of the net such as phishing, fraud, fake news, invasion of privacy, defamation etc. that can arise while navigating free contents website or paying to subscribe to some cultural contents or even looking for books to be read online.
Being in line with EU sectorial priority related to promoting Erasmus Plus among all citizens and generation, including by offering activities of education and exchanges of experiences to seniors, with a view to building and adding solidity to European identity, SOS Creativity addresses issues that fully respond to EU transnational perspective in relation to Seniors social inclusion and welfare, and hence could not be undertaken in the isolation of an individual national context. Moreover, this project aims at developing skills and competences in adults to support creativity and its exploitation, in a non-formal education to reinforce cross-sectorial cooperation.
