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- Convenors:
-
Shireen Walton
(University College London)
Xinyuan Wang (University College London (UCL))
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Identities and Subjectivities
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 2.03
- Sessions:
- Friday 6 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Could there be a global anthropology that responds to global-scale challenges? This panel considers such a response through an examination of the global impact of smartphones, with particular emphasis on the contemporary experience of ageing.
Long Abstract:
If anthropology is increasingly called upon to address global challenges, then one way it might respond is by developing a contemporary global anthropology - one that combines the parochialism characteristic of traditional ethnographic fieldwork with a broadly encompassing global perspective.
The topic of the panel concerns the impact of the smartphone amidst transformations in life expectancy. Smartphones and ageing today signify global transformations, though they are experienced as local re-alignments. With its ability to align highly parochial fieldwork with comparative studies that speak to global heterogeneity, Anthropology is well situated to represent and respond to such global challenges. In particular, ethnography allows us to match the 'smart from above' process of technological innovation with the 'smart from below' (Pype) experience of cultural appropriation, facilitating robust, comparative understandings of the issue.
This panel invites papers that speak to the above in light of the conference theme on Identities and Subjectivities, with particular interest in the well-being of bodies and social identities through digital engagements. One example the panel will present is the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project, based at UCL Anthropology. The ASSA project will be discussed in order to highlight ways that a comparative, global-anthropological study of smartphones and ageing might be undertaken, based on ten simultaneous sixteen-month ethnographies. The panel will consider these insights alongside a range of other ethnographic projects that touch upon the related themes, in order to stimulate debate about the potential of contemporary global anthropology vis-à-vis technological and socio-demographic change.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 6 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
How is the social category of age and the experience of ageing crafted on & offline via smartphones, relationships and domestic arrangements? This paper explores these themes in light of the global/EU focus on 'active ageing', with case studies from the ASSA project's Irish and Italian field sites.
Paper long abstract:
At a time when ideals of 'successful' and 'active' ageing have come to dominate policy discourses on ageing worldwide, there exists significant diversity in how such notions - along with ageing itself - is actually experienced, practised, and performed. In different societies reaching the age of 50, 60, or 70 may once have marked the entry into a category such as senior or elder and may be associated with changes in life such as retirement. But today it is more open as to whether people accept such categories, or repudiate them in favour of new freedoms, which find diverse expression depending on the particular social and cultural settings. Against the backdrop of common themes that are emerging from the global ASSA project (Anthropology of Smart Phones and Smart Ageing), this paper questions if and how older people in our fieldwork sites are engaging with both local and emerging global ideas on how best to age. Specifically, how is the social category of age and the subjective experience of it actively crafted, both on- and offline, for example via smartphones, relationships, activities and domestic arrangements? In addition to a broad comparative perspective, we will explore these themes through individual case-studies from our Irish and Italian field sites.
Paper short abstract:
The Singapore government has devoted immense resources towards 'Smart Ageing' as part of its technologically saturated Smart Nation programme. I examine how residents engage with smartphone and home-based sensors, and how they affect well-being and social relations throughout the life course.
Paper long abstract:
The Singapore government has devoted immense resources towards 'Smart Ageing' as part of its larger Smart Nation programme, which seeks to use digital technology to transform Singapore into a smart city. Through the usage of digital technologies (in particular, smartphones and data-gathering sensors in the home), the Smart Nation project attempts to regulate and manage ageing and resident health. It also aims to export these digital health technologies to other nations. Meanwhile, residents use smartphone technologies to navigate ageing in their own ways. Based upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, I examine how residents engage with digital technologies in Singapore, primarily smartphone and motion-tracking home-based sensors, and how they affect resident well-being and existing social relations throughout the life course. Though targeted at the elderly, mobile health technologies involve multi-directional processes in which children monitor and communicate with their parents, report on their own health and exercise routines, and interact with doctors, nurses, and social workers. These technologies, while deeply situated in local contexts, are imagined by developers as globally exportable. They exist in a global context, as people in many countries are increasingly living well into old age, causing a rethinking of what living well itself means in people of all ages. I propose, in discussion with the ASSA team, that we can use our anthropological experiences in our individual fieldsites to understand changes in ageing globally, exploring a central focus of anthropological practice: movements between the specific and general, that both we and our informants undertake.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the impact of digital visual communication on health and care in China and Japan. We demonstrate how the sharing of short videos (China) and visual messaging and video calling (Japan) are part of emerging visual cultures and shifting practices of filial piety and peer-support.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the impact of digital visual communication upon health and care practices in China and Japan. The research informing this paper is drawn from multi-sited, long-term (Feb 2018 - June 2019) ethnography conducted as part of the ASSA project with particular reference to everyday digital health and self-care practices among older people in China and Japan.
In Shanghai (China), sharing health-related short videos (duan shi pin) has gained popularity among retirees, not only as part of a daily practice of traditional Chinese 'body cultivation' (Yang sheng), but also as a popular way of expressing care among family and friends. In urban Kyoto and rural Kochi (Japan), forms of care at a distance are practiced through the exchange of messages, photos, emojis and stickers (illustrated messages), and also through video calling, allowing people to demonstrate care while maintaining privacy and reducing a sense of burden.
We find that digital visual communication practices are facilitating informal care and enabling new practices of filial piety and peer-support in China and Japan as older people adopt the smartphone. Understanding caring in the digital age is critical given the challenges posed by ageing populations in both sites.
Paper short abstract:
The smartphone is unprecedented as an anthropomorphic machine based on intimacy and personalisation. Ethnographic study of this `smart from below' process in its wider social and cultural context is perhaps the best way to establish what the smartphone has now become.
Paper long abstract:
This paper suggests that the smartphone provides an important alternative to robotics in understanding the development of the anthropomorphic machine. Robotics is more superficial starting from appearance. The smartphone, by contrast, is unprecedented in creating anthropomorphism through intimacy to become an aspect of persons. While much of the focus upon algorithms and Artificial Intelligence concerns data extraction, for most people their current impact has been enhancing the potential for personalisation, socialization and the dynamic relationship between smartphone and user.
Based on our ethnographic study of smartphones in nine countries, we also show how understanding smartphones is more than simply addressing the culture of Apps. The smartphone presents an ecology of Apps based on the specific configurations of the individual user. These can only be understood through the ethnographic method of holistic contextualisation, in which it is the linkage with all aspects of offline life, as much as the internal organisation of the phone, which creates what the smartphone now is. This creates a particular role for anthropologists who are well placed to tackle these fundamental questions about smartphones because they can gain access to this intimate and mainly private configuration and processes of personalisation within their social and cultural contexts. Using Pype's concept of `Smart from Below' we provide Illustrations showing how ordinary users create smartphones. The evidence comes from our Palestinian, Irish and other fieldsites within the ASSA project
Paper short abstract:
We examine the problems faced by older people confronted with the transfer of governmental procedures to digital environments in Cameroon and Chile. Striking similarities appear in the adaptation of these 'digital immigrants' to an environment usually associated with youth culture.
Paper long abstract:
People aged 60 and over constitute the fastest growing demographic in the world (WHO 2014). In Chile, as is the case worldwide, most governmental bureaucratic procedures are being digitalized and transferred to online platforms. Older people can face issues of digital exclusion from these new processes. In 2018, around 80% of the access to the internet in Chile and Cameroon was done through mobile devices. Despite this, there has been little significant research addressing the problems faced by older people in adopting this technology. Based on our fieldwork in Santiago (Chile) and Yaoundé (Cameroon), as well as other field sites within the ASSA project, we examine the difficulties older people experience during this process of becoming 'digital immigrants' (Fozard et al. 2009). These include technical difficulties in learning how to use new mobile devices (Leung et al. 2012) as well as social issues, such as the availability of kin to provide assistance. Our preliminary results reflect the essential ambivalence of digital culture (Horst and Miller 2012). Our evidence that older people view this process of adaptation as one that creates overwhelming stress and frustration. Yet simultaneously they often express both enthusiasm and curiosity. The smartphone is first confronted as a sign of youth culture for this age group, an alien territory. However, an alien territory, that these digital immigrants want to make theirs.
Paper short abstract:
The ASSA project applies an anthropological perspective to mHealth. We outline 'informal' mHealth practices evident in the Kampala and Sao Paolo fieldsites. By reporting to digital health practitioners, the researchers apply ethnography to supplement practical digital health aims and practices.
Paper long abstract:
Given growing access to smartphones around the world, mHealth has been the focus of much digital development enthusiasm, being viewed as an opportunity for improving accessibility to healthcare and health information.. This has often resulted in pilot schemes which then prove unsustainable and leave new gaps in their wake. The ASSA project applies an anthropological perspective to mHealth, finding that existing uses of mobile phones for health purposes such as WhatsApp and mobile money practices, are more productive than bespoke mHealth apps. This paper focuses on examples from our Kampala (Uganda) and Sao Paolo (Brazil) fieldsites, as well as elsewhere in the ASSA project. In a survey within our low-income Kampala fieldsite, 54% had made health related calls in the last month, and 27% of their previous three remittances were for health purposes. Phones are thereby utilized for mobilizing support and obligation within families split between Kampala and the village, particularly in times of poor health. In Sao Paolo, although telemedicine is not yet regulated , WhatsApp is embedded in everyday health practices. 87% of doctors claim to use WhatsApp to communicate with patients and many services use the app to bypass bureaucracies, saving time and money spent in health services. The platform is helping families to take care of relatives at a distance and, especially among older people, the app is used to fight isolation and depression. By reporting evidence of these practices to digital health practitioners, the researchers aim to to supplement current digital health aims.