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Paper short abstract

Focusing on older Parisians with limited connectivity, this paper examines digital affordances and introduces “digital shrinkage” to describe how expanding digital infrastructures can contract everyday possibilities in later life.

Paper long abstract

In Paris, as elsewhere, digital technologies have become deeply embedded in almost every domain of social life. Access to public and private goods and services - from banking and healthcare to public administration - as well as interpersonal communication, has increasingly shifted online. While this transformation creates new possibilities for autonomy, connection, and participation for some, it also generates new forms of exclusion, particularly for those lacking adequate equipment, connectivity, or digital skills.

This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted during my PhD with Parisians aged 75 and older who were minimally connected, or not connected at all, to the internet. It examines how these interlocutors experience the digitalization of everyday life through the analytical lens of digital affordances, with particular attention to their contraction. Building on Dokumacı’s concept of “shrinkage of affordances,” developed in the context of disability to describe how environments progressively limit possible actions for certain bodies (Dokumacı, 2023), I extend this framework to the field of digital ageing.

I propose the notion of “digital shrinkage” to describe how the growing integration of digital infrastructures into ordinary environments may contract affordances for older adults with limited connectivity. As digital technologies multiply opportunities for connected users, they can simultaneously narrow the scope of action, autonomy, and participation for those who remain partially or fully disconnected.

The paper invites a reconsideration of digital affordances from the perspective of those for whom they increasingly recede rather than expand.