The perpetual opportunism of the smartphone
An influential book about the mobile phone was called Perpetual Contact (edited by Katz and Aakhus, you can see Step 1.7 of this course for more details) because the advent …
Course: An Anthropology of Smartphones: Communication, Ageing and Health
The Fine Line Between Care and Surveillance
Even prior to Covid-19, the team had observed that the smartphone simultaneously facilitates our capacity for extending both care and also surveillance. We form WhatsApp groups to monitor and look …
Overview of the ASSA Project
Watch the video above to gain a sense of who we are and our range of fieldsites. In the video, each ASSA team member introduces her or his fieldsite, highlighting …
Smartphone Use During COVID-19
As with other members of the team, Shireen Walton continued to maintain contact with her research participants in Milan during the pandemic. Some early responses to lockdown in Italy such …
What happens when you google health information?
We might have expected that being able to easily research our health issues online would be one of the clearest examples of the positive impact of the internet. Certainly, looking …
Short Videos and Health Care Practices in Urban China
“Have you checked the video I sent you?” This is how Mrs. Shi greets her neighbour, Mrs. Cai, during the after-dinner stroll where they bump into each other. “Yes, just …
Visual conversation and care in Japan
While there have always been visual elements to communication (think of facial expressions and body language), our notion of a conversation has historically been restricted to just two media: oral …
Cameroon and Uganda Fieldsites
Each fieldsite had its own specific issues when it came to mHealth. Yaoundé, Cameroon Researcher Patrick Awondo found many ways in which smartphones are being used in the field of …
Beyond anthropomorphism
For more than a century, humanity has been fascinated by the development of the robot and its potential to realise our imagination of the anthropomorphic machine, which closely resembles a …
How older people get younger
As noted previously, in most regions, though not, for example, in Japan, smartphones initially were adopted mostly by younger users and became associated with youth culture. At first, this meant …
How is a smartphone a ‘transportal home’?
Take a look at the short film above, which we created to show how a smartphone can be thought of as what we call the ‘transportal home’. This film is …
Smartphones, ageing and health
This short film presents a summary of our experience in considering mHealth and of developing our own interventions based on our studies. Several of these cases will be discussed in …
What is mHealth?
The World Health Organisation (2011) defines mHealth (mobile health) as “medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices”. mHealth sometimes comes under the umbrella of digital health or e-health …
The smartphone as object
Before considering the use of the smartphone for communication, we need to acknowledge its presence as a material object. Its tangibility may matter more to some populations than others, as …
Traditional ageing and nonnas
As you would find from browsing the Cultural Context of Aging book mentioned in the last step, every society will have its own traditions of ageing. While this may not …
These articles are from the online course:
An Anthropology of Smartphones: Communication, Ageing and Health