This is probably due to the increase in third age rhetoric in the media, picturing older people as healthy and as potential consumers, enjoying life and living their golden years. Media representations of older people have moved from visual under- and misrepresentation (negative images) to more positive depictions.Vickers, K. (2007). Aging and the media: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Californian Journal of Health Promotion, 5(3), 100-105.Ylänne, V. (2015). [null Representations of ageing in the media. In] J. Twigg, & W. Martin (Eds.). (2015). Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology (pp. 369–375). London: Routledge. These days, visual ageism in the media tends to come wrapped in the guise of the positive attributes of third age representations of older people, while adults in their fourth age continue to be underrepresented. One possible explanation for this is that healthy third agers might prefer not to be associated with fourth agers, as they remind them too starkly of what lies ahead in their own near future. Although this discomfort or even fear about mortality is undeniably common, from a societal point of view this kind of (self)ageism is hurtful to fourth agers as a group and in a sense to third agers as well, as they risk to become fourth agers themselves one day.
