Paper short abstract:

Care providers have increasingly deployed digital devices to communicate with users. The presentation shows how even basic devices require an understanding of multiple cultural affordances to be used efficiently. Consequently, digital communication deprives immigrant mothers of critical information.

Paper long abstract:

Digital devices have become instrumental to contemporary cultures of communication. Health and social care providers, who benefited from education programmes in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have increasingly become pivotal, pertain to the relatively enskilled users of digital devices. These providers, and the institutions they work at, have increasingly proposed digital means to communicate with service users. Apps dedicated to health promotion, text messages to provide critical information about appointments or subsidies and internet-based appointment services now permeate the health and social system. For the enskilled ICTs user, it can be difficult to conceptualize the barriers to care that these developments in provider-user communication form. Drawing from an anthropology of skills and knowledge-making and based on an ethnography concerning how immigrant mothers use or renounce to use ICTs, this presentation will explicit the complex and overlooked knowledges essential to operate basic ICTs. These technologies and their operational tools such as windows, tabs, fonts or icons, constitute visual and spatial affordances which meaning relies on situated cultural clues. Far from being obvious, the interpretation of these affordances demands shared cultural representations and experiences between creators and users. For immigrant mothers who originally use another alphabet or code, as for instance in semitic languages such as Tigrinya, the communication through ICT in French or English requires a multilayered learning process. Immigrant mothers are hence often deprived of critical information regarding the access to health and social care, thus contributing to reproductive injustice.