older people Archives

O Smartphone Global: Uma tecnologia para além dos jovens

O smartphone está tão frequentemente debaixo de nosso nariz, que assumimos saber o que ele é. Mas sabemos mesmo? Para descobrir, 11 antropólogos realizaram pesquisa de campo de 16 meses em países da África, Ásia, Europa e América do Sul, tendo como foco pessoas mais velhas.

O livro O Smartphone Global apresenta perspectivas inéditas a partir desta pesquisa comparativa. A primeira descoberta é: os smartphones não são mais uma tecnologia restrita aos jovens, estando nas mãos de todos, independente da idade. Além disso, observou-se uma grande ambivalência entre aquilo que as pessoas falam sobre os smartphones e os modos como elas os usam na prática. Os smartphones se tornaram tanto um lugar em que vivemos, como apetrechos que providenciam um tipo de “oportunismo perpétuo”, por estarem sempre conosco. Vão além de um “repositório de aplicativos”. São um dispositivo sem precedentes em termos de potencial de transformação, assimilando rapidamente valores pessoais. Para compreender esse processo, considerou-se um leque de nuances nacionais e culturais, como a comunicação visual na China e no Japão, o dinheiro móvel em Camarões e Uganda, e acesso a informação sobre saúde no Chile e na Irlanda – juntamente com trajetórias variadas em relação ao envelhecimento em Al-Quds, no Brasil e na Itália. É dessa perspectiva global, e a partir do mapeamento de contextos diversos, que o livro se propõe a responder à pergunta O que é um smartphone? e a analisar suas consequências.

The Global Smartphone

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young.

The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them.

The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other.

Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a ‘constant companion’ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability.

Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

There are not many books about how people get younger. It doesn’t happen very often. But Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland documents a radical change in the experience of ageing.

Based on two ethnographies, one within Dublin and the other from the Dublin region, the book shows that people, rather than seeing themselves as old, focus on crafting a new life in retirement. Our research participants apply new ideals of sustainability both to themselves and to their environment. They go for long walks, play bridge, do yoga and keep as healthy as possible. As part of Ireland’s mainstream middle class, they may have more time than the young to embrace green ideals and more money to move to energy-efficient homes, throw out household detritus and protect their environment.

The smartphone has become integral to this new trajectory. For some it is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has brought back the extended family and old friends, and helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though facilitating new forms of grandparenting. It has also become central to health issues, whether by Googling information or looking after frail parents. The smartphone enables this sense of getting younger as people download the music of their youth and develop new interests.

This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland. How do older people in Ireland experience life today?