Author: Pauline Garvey.

Age Action website[1]

Recognising that over the next 30 years the number of people in Ireland over the age of 55 will double and the number over 80 will quadruple, there are lots of initiatives dedicated to positive and active ageing in the capital city. In 2013 the Irish Department of Health published the National Positive Ageing Strategy which set out a ‘vision for an age-friendly society through the achievement of four national goals (participation, health, security and research)’[2]. Dublin City Council claims the city was the first capital in the world to adopt a city-wide approach to becoming age-friendly[3]. In order to do this the Dublin City Age Friendly Programme 2014-2019 tackles nine key areas that may negatively impact on older individuals[4]. Under a series of headings it commits to providing alternatives to sheltered housing (Home and Community); supporting older people’s engagement with social and community life in which they live (Social Economic and Political Life); helping people volunteer or work in their locality (Learn, Develop and Work); providing facilities to engage in sports and activities (Healthy and Active Living). It also aspires to make the public sphere more manageable for older people such as providing adequate seating and level footpaths (Outdoor Space and Buildings); ensuring that public transport is adequate for journeys that older people are taking and the pedestrian crossings are timed at the correct speed (Transport, Safety) and finally ensuring access to information, both online and off-line for older individuals (Information).

Over the course of my research I will look at some of these initiatives more closely, but for now I’m interested in exploring how people access information. It is here that the digital divide can be most striking: when smart and competent people find themselves grappling with digital technologies such as simple commands on smartphones and computers. For an ever-growing number of activities such as booking a flight or reserving a table at a restaurant one is required to do it online. One organisation that is working to combat digital exclusion is Age Action and I was interested to note that one route to signing up for computing courses is by filling out an online form![5]. What at first glance looks like a contradiction is in fact something quite different. The Age Action website is directed to friends and relatives because feeling excluded from digital media impacts whole families and networks of friends rather than solitary individuals. One’s place in a social network is continually reiterated through simple messaging such as checking in with kin or organising meet-ups, allowing people to demonstrate care as well as receive it. Of course the question remains, what about the people who need help getting started but have no one who will intervene of their behalf? For these, the digital divide remains an insurmountable barrier.

1. https://www.ageaction.ie/how-we-can-help/getting-started-computer-training/sign-up
2. http://www.dublincity.ie/agefriendlycity
3. http://www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/content/HousingAndCommunity/Community/Age%20Friendly%20Charter-English%20A2.pdf
4. http://www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/content/HousingAndCommunity/Community/Age%20Friendly%20Charter-English%20A2.pdf
5. https://www.ageaction.ie/how-we-can-help/getting-started-computer-training/sign-up

Author: Daniel Miller

Photo (CC BY) newkemall

I have spent the last two months in my Irish fieldsite trying to answer a simple question: what is a smartphone? Actually, it’s a fiendishly difficult question. Several older people started our discussion by insisting that the only things they use their phones for are voice calls and texting. Once we looked at the phone in more detail, it turned out that just the most common functions include WhatsApp, maps, voice calls, camera, alarm/time, Facebook, text messages, calendar, weather and news. Once we add a variety of more specialist apps such as sports, music, airlines, banks etc. we easily reach the most typical result which would be that an individual uses between twenty-five and thirty different functions of their smartphone.

In the newspapers, the personalisation of the smartphone is understood as the advances in algorithms and artificial intelligence, which allow smartphones to learn from people and predict their behaviour. But, just as in our previous Why We Post project, for the ethnographer, these corporate developments pale into insignificance compared to the personalisation represented by the diversity of usage that will arise from the way an individual configures this multitude of apps.

Indeed, it may be the personality of the user that comes across most. A man expresses a particular version of masculinity in demonstrating how all his usage is based on need and pragmatism. He mentions more than once how, now his daughter is no longer in Australia, he will never use Skype again. By contrast, a woman, aged 69, has every last detail of her life, from the steps involved in paying each particular type of bill, to the slide decks from workshops she has attended, all carefully classified in nested hierarchies of icons on her iPhone. About the only thing she doesn’t like is the clumsy and intrusive Siri. In both cases the smartphone effectively expresses their personality. Sometimes a particular activity dominates an individual’s phone life; a phone where everything is geared to a retirement spent playing and teaching the banjo, or a phone that contains seven apps all associated with sailing.  It’s not that a woman is addicted to her phone, or even to YouTube per. se., it’s just that she can’t stop spending two hours a day following US politics on YouTube. More commonly the phone will revolve around three or four key activities and concerns such as a combination of family, sports, holidays, and photography.

Working with people in their 60s and 70s, I come to appreciate that they are not elderly, but that much of their life may be devoted to caring for an elderly parent in their 90s. For some of these people everything about the phone is connected with this responsibility of care, whether mobilising family care through WhatsApp, showing pictures of great grandchildren through Facebook, using maps to get to a hospital appointment, employing phone and text to negotiate with the local council and never turning the phone off, because you never know…

An equally important component of what makes the phone is people’s lack of knowledge. An older person is told to download an app, but she has never heard of Google Play and so attempts this action using an icon labelled ‘Downloads’. A man won’t buy a new Samsung Galaxy because it doesn’t have an inbuilt radio and he doesn’t know he can download radio as an app. Many users do not know the distinction between Wi-Fi and data that they have to pay for, so they won’t watch video while on Wi-Fi because they think it will cost them. Many can’t understand that a phone which ‘doesn’t work’, is not a broken phone, rather they just need to go about something in a different way. This is because the smartphone has so little in common with traditions of machines and tools. There is no manual they can actually use. Trying to work out precisely why one 80-year-old finds every little step impossible and another seems entirely comfortable in using these phones may give us many clues as to what, in effect, a smartphone is.

In the newspapers the smartphone appears as the constant development of new capacities – articles about the latest thing you can do with your smartphone are commonplace. For the ethnographer the smartphone is the myriad constellation of new actualities – we strive for an appreciation of what ordinary people create with or cannot understand about these devices.