digital inclusion Archives

Digital Repertoires

Digital Repertoires explores the intersection between ageing and technology, presenting the concept of ‘digital repertoire’ as a powerful tool for researchers across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, gerontology, public policy, communication studies and design. This book offers new theoretical and empirical insights, and highlights the diverse ways in which older adults engage with digital technologies across five continents. With studies from Australia, Brazil, Finland, Japan, the Philippines and Sweden, the book provides a global and cross-cultural analysis on a pressing issue.

The notion of the digital repertoire has broad appeal, making this book relevant not only to scholars and practitioners focused on ageing but to anyone interested in the heterogeneity of digital technology use across different age groups and cultural contexts. With a balanced approach that combines conceptual, theoretical and empirical perspectives, this volume is an essential resource for teaching, research and practice in the ever-evolving field of digital technology studies, as well as the development of technology for older adults.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil

With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil shows how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship.

Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedule. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, they are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink the very representation of ageing.

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan

Older adults in Japan, one of the most ageing countries in the world, are starting to adopt the smartphone. What does this mean for friendship, gendered labour, multigenerational living, internal migration, health and indeed purpose in life (ikigai)? Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows people as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement.

Examining how older women and men negotiate oppressive structures within society, the smartphone emerges as both challenging and perpetuating gender-based norms around care. In witnessing the response of older adults to the wider context of societal ageing and the various forms of precarity that it can engender, this book observes how people creatively navigate the challenges and opportunities of later life to define their own experience of ageing.

The rise of digital visual communication among people in their 50s and older opens new possibilities for sociality and proximity among friends and family. It also presents a methodological challenge for researchers. This book responds with a series of graphic methodological experimentations, including co-created comics, participant drawings, and the author’s own fieldwork sketches and imaginative illustrations, to explore this fundamental shift in communication towards digital images.