Academic Studies of Ageing
Most studies of ageing have concentrated on people defined by age, focusing on either those defined as young or the elderly. There are many valuable disciplines that contribute to studies …
Course: An Anthropology of Smartphones: Communication, Ageing and Health
Intergenerational relations
A point made in an earlier step is that in many of our fieldsites, younger members of the family seemed quite impatient when it came to helping older people learn …
Summary of Week 2
Week 1 developed several generalisations to help us understand what a smartphone is. But anthropologists are always alert to the specifics of the social context of use: in this case, …
The digital divide around age and smartphones
Smartphone users and non-users There is, however, another factor. It is not just that people are able to do more things when they can use smartphones. They may also find …
How to teach smartphone use
In our fieldsites in Brazil, Chile, Ireland, and al-Quds, team members spent some time teaching smartphone classes to older people. It was the ideal way to understand why they may …
Crafting retirement
Retirement means very different things across our fieldsites. The Peruvian migrants in Santiago, Chile could not imagine retiring from work, as they could not picture themselves without an occupation, in …
Introduction to Week 2
Sometimes, it is hard to believe the things that we experienced only quite recently. Prior to this project, several of us were involved in the Why We Post study of …
The smartphone apps for everyday life
An app machine One of the most obvious ways to think about the smartphone is simply as an app machine. Yes, the smartphone is a handset, but perhaps it is …
‘Smart-from-below’
As noted in the film you watched in the previous step, the first reason our strategy towards our mHealth interventions changed was simply that older people, at least as yet, …
How different communities use smartphones to connect with others
There are ways that smartphones are used to help organise community activities of the kind that older people can get involved in. The term community is being used in a …
How smartphones change families
Family life For many older people at the heart of life lies their family, the people they love and are devoted to (and perhaps also quarrel incessantly with). For one …
These articles are from the online course:
An Anthropology of Smartphones: Communication, Ageing and Health