Reclaiming Digital Inclusion as Collective Market Practice

Digital exclusion is routinely framed as a technical or social problem of access and skills. Access and skills are necessary conditions for participation, but they are insufficient to explain how participation may be sustained or constrained within digital markets. We argue that digital inclusion is not only an individual achievement secured through access or skills, but also a collective market practice shaped by market design (how services, interfaces, and rules structure participation), institutional responsiveness (how organizations respond, adapt and remain accountable), and participatory infrastructures (collective mechanisms that sustain engagement over time). When digital inclusion is reduced to devices, connectivity, or competencies alone, marketing shifts responsibility onto individuals, treating participation as a personal accomplishment and, in doing so, making exclusion appear as an individual shortcoming rather than a structural outcome.

The narrow operationalization of inclusion is embedded in how digital markets are imagined, evaluated, and governed. Research in public policy and marketing often approaches digital participation through aggregate diffusion, adoption, and usage metrics (Huang and Chen 2010), obscuring how participation is produced through market design and institutional conditions. Within this evaluative logic, older adults are particularly vulnerable to demographic denial (Jolly 2002), as their participation is rendered residual within dominant digital marketing and policy frameworks (Nunan and Di Domenico 2019). Complementing this view, marketplace inclusion has been conceptualized as an outcome of design choices that align or misalign consumer abilities with market environments, underscoring that exclusion is structurally produced rather than merely experienced (Lteif et al. 2025).

If exclusion is produced through markets, then inclusion cannot be treated as an add-on or delegated solely to social policy. Marketing is accountable. Decisions about how participation is invited, how services are automated, and how competence is assumed shape not only consumer outcomes but also the legitimacy of markets themselves. Importantly, inclusion is not generated solely by design. Research has increasingly recognized that participatory processes are constitutive of inclusion in markets, enabling consumers to engage, interpret, and negotiate their place within those markets rather than simply being counted by adoption metrics (Kipnis et al. 2021). Recent strengths-based codesign research demonstrates how engagement, reflection, and reciprocity can redistribute power and support meaningful participation without relying on deficit-based assumptions (Figueiredo et al. 2026).

We illustrate this argument through two community-based projects involving older adults’ engagement with digital and civic technologies, which reveal how participation is enacted through market design, institutional responsiveness, and participatory infrastructures.

Beyond the Digital Divide

The persistence of the “digital divide” metaphor (Huang and Chen 2010) reflects marketing's preference for problems that can be addressed through access and uptake, obscuring the need to organize and sustain participation through markets. By framing inclusion as a bridge consumers must cross, this logic individualizes responsibility and deflects attention from the institutional arrangements that structure participation.

This framing is increasingly inadequate for understanding how digital markets operate. Participation is not secured once access is achieved. It is sustained through trust (stabilizing engagement by reducing perceived risk and enabling recovery from failure), user confidence (built through scaffolded mastery and emotional safety, reducing anticipatory withdrawal), and social support (embedding participation within relational infrastructures that distribute risk and problem-solving capacity) (Figueiredo et al. 2026; Lee and Coughlin 2015). Research on digital exclusion demonstrates that barriers often persist even after connectivity and skills are in place because engagement depends on social support, institutional responsiveness, and how consumers interpret their position within markets (Kaufman-Scarborough and Childers 2009). Studies of digital inclusion in later life further show that engagement is shaped through socialization processes such as reciprocity, shared problem-solving, and peer learning, positioning inclusion as a relational achievement rather than an individual acquisition (Aleti et al. 2024). These dynamics are visible in the cases that follow, where peer mentoring and collective interpretation operate by building confidence, reducing uncertainty, and sustaining engagement beyond initial access.

What Older Adults Reveal About Participation

To ground our argument about digital inclusion as collective market practice, we draw on two projects in which some of us were directly involved: (1) PEER Digital Mentoring and (2) Empowering Senior Voices. Both projects were developed at the intersection of community engagement and market participation, positioning older adults, a commonly digitally excluded group, as active participants navigating digital services, platforms, and institutional interfaces. Although the domains in these projects differ (everyday service use and civic engagement), they share a premise: Inclusion depends on how markets organize participation rather than on individual skill acquisition alone.

The PEER Digital Mentoring project, articulated through “technology cafés” and U3A (University of the Third Age) tutorials, addresses digital inclusion in the context of everyday market interactions, including banking, health care portals, government services, and platform-mediated communication (Figueiredo et al. 2026). Participation is organized through peer mentoring. Older adults learn with and from one another as they encounter login procedures, interface prompts, verification steps, and automated service journeys. Through these shared encounters, participants interpret what digital services demand, reflect on exclusion, and develop strategies to sustain engagement. Inclusion is enacted through sustained participation and shared sense-making, making visible how market design assumptions about speed, autonomy, and competence shape whether engagement is maintained or abandoned.

The Empowering Senior Voices project, which follows the broader Our Voice framework (King et al. 2020), extends this participatory logic from everyday service use into civic and institutional market environments. Older adults use digital photography and storytelling to document everyday encounters with transport systems, public spaces, retail environments, and service access points. Participation involves producing digital artefacts and interpreting what these encounters signal about accessibility, safety, and belonging. These interpretations are mobilized in dialogue with institutional actors (e.g., service providers, planners, and policy decision-makers) responsible for designing and managing service environments. Digital tools render lived experience visible and actionable within decision-making processes shaping market conditions.

Together, the cases show that digital inclusion is not a by-product of access or training but emerges from how markets organize participation. Across the cases, this participation is shaped by the interaction of three elements: market design, institutional responsiveness, and participatory infrastructures (Table 1). This shifts the analytical focus from correcting excluded consumers to designing markets that enable meaningful participation.

Table 1.

Reclaiming Digital Inclusion as Collective Market Practices.

	Collective Market Practices
	Market Design	Institutional Responsiveness	Participatory Infrastructures
Definition	How services, interfaces, and rules structure participation	How organizations respond, adapt, and remain accountable	Collective mechanisms that sustain engagement over time
Market-level function	Configures access and interaction by embedding assumptions about competence, autonomy, and interaction into services and interfaces	Enables adaptation, feedback, and recognition of lived experience	Enables collective engagement by creating spaces for learning, interpretation, and negotiation within markets
Case 1: PEER Digital Mentoring	Market design is visible in the interface demands and procedural logics of banking, health care, and government platforms that older adults must navigate	Ongoing organizational and service adjustments to meet user needs	Participation is enacted and sustained through peer mentoring and shared sense-making
Case 2: Empowering Senior Voices	Market design shapes participation through transport systems, service environments, and civic infrastructures that structure access and usability	Municipal acknowledgment and response to citizen-generated data and recommendations	Participatory infrastructure sustains forms of collective documentation, file sharing, storytelling, and the civic feedback channels for institutional dialogue

While anchored in older adults’ digital inclusion experiences, the framework also applies to other contexts in which participation is shaped by structural design assumptions, including low-literacy consumers, disabled users, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Implications for Policy and Practice

If digital inclusion is understood as a collective market practice, marketing and policy actors share responsibility for organizing markets that sustain meaningful participation rather than merely expanding access. For organizations and digital service providers, this requires revisiting how participation is configured within digital service journeys. In practical terms, this includes authentication processes that offer alternatives to time-limited one-time codes or complex identity checks that assume speed and digital fluency. Services may incorporate human-in-the-loop escalation options, enabling users to request assistance when automated pathways fail. Interface design may also avoid segmentation defaults that assume high digital confidence, instead offering guided interaction modes, slower pathways, and visible help prompts that allow users to pause, recover from mistakes, and continue the interaction. For regulators and public policy agencies, the findings suggest moving beyond connectivity benchmarks toward governance mechanisms that assess whether digital markets sustain participation over time. This may include accountability requirements for automated service journeys, such as mandating clear escalation routes to human assistance. Regulators may also require accessible service alternatives so that essential services are not exclusively digital, and establish structured feedback and redress channels that enable citizens to report barriers and ensure these insights inform service redesign.