I felt insecure about accepting an offer of website hosting from Dudu Balochini, who suggested we host the two websites we had developed together on his server at no cost. I asked him: “But what if you die?”. I was referring to my access to the servers, but he thought it was about his age since he was almost twenty years older them me (I’m 42). He then challenged me: “What if you die?” And that was how we laughed together and moved on. The first site we published together answered a need from the Center of Ageing Studies located at UNIFESP Medical School. Their researchers monitor the elderly population of a neighbourhood in Sao Paulo, and their studies include investigating the impact of physical activity on ageing. One of the interventions they made was to map out opportunities within walking distance for older people to exercise. This mapping was manually adapted to the address of each patient – a herculean task. But an informal survey showed that 70% of program-assisted seniors have smartphones. I had this information in mind when I met Dudu for a coffee. “Do you think we could make these activities accessible through Google Maps based on people’s location?”, I asked him. And he just said “I already know how to do that. I need two hours”. Twenty-four hours later, he produced the site we called Get Up and Go: nearby activities for the 60+. “I used the Store Location feature in WordPress, but it took me a while because it was blocked for developers from Brazil”, he apologised as though I thought he was late.

The second site is part of my delivery for the applied side of the ASSA Project – Anthropology of Smartphones, Smart Ageing and mHealth. With an ethnographic approach, I observed how WhatsApp was used for health purposes in Sao Paulo. I mapped the best practices and organised them into a set of protocols for communication within hospitals and clinics. I also developed a second set of protocols addressing nutritionists (obesity and being underweight are both health issues among older people in Brazil). Both materials are open-access and should be available for download. That is why I needed a website to publish them. This time, Dudu didn’t develop the website for me. “You’re going to become a SeniorGeek”, he told me. SeniorGeek is an initiative for digital inclusion of seniors created by him. At presentation events addressing older people, Dudu tried to demystify technological themes like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Chatbots. He believed older people should know about those things or they would be cut off from conversation with children and grandchildren and, moreover, with society. Dudu also believed he could enable seniors to become digital entrepreneurs through courses that teach how to build a website, or an e-commerce or a blog. This is how I became his student. By myself, with the autonomy he wanted all seniors to achieve, I developed and published my WhatsApp manuals at http://www.saudeeenvelhecimento.com.br. In my field site, entrepreneurship gains strength among older people as a means of reintegration into the labor market. This is a consequence of the desire of many to remain productive but it is also their way to respond to corporate ageism. Dudu himself used to say he lived in a limbo: too old for the market, but not a “legal” senior yet.

Dudu was also a public figure. He was often in the media, giving interviews about the relevance of digital inclusion for seniors. At 58, he used to say, “If you are old, you invented the Internet. The problem is that people accommodated and forgot about it”. And he has a point. We just have to remember that Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, creators of the TCP / IP protocol that enabled the Internet, are now aged 81 and 76 years old. However, ethnography showed me that this detachment from technology was also linked to retirement, when access to technology and needs in daily life change (Selwyn, 2004). Even so, Dudu’s speeches were inspiring and older people felt more confident because of him. Dudu died one week after I left my field site. An abrupt heart attack. On the one hand, he has achieved the death my informants desire the most: a death without illness or disease. I have written before about how my informants do not fear death. On the contrary, they see death as natural and even desire it when they think of the prospect of a future lived with physical, mental or financial limitations. On the other hand, it was an early death. Dudu was gone when he began to experience the purpose of life. I say experience because, among my informants, there is a feeling that the meaning of life is not something that can be explained by past achievements or by spiritual convictions. Therefore, they abandon philosophical reflections on the subject to focus on the present: they live today with purpose, filling daily life with pleasurable activities and, if possible, positively impacting the lives of those around them. Dudu brought these two accomplishments together in an intense agenda of events and courses.

And it was precisely the technology Dudu was so enthusiastic about that mediated his farewell. The news of his death spread via WhatsApp and was shared from group to group, giving rise to dozens of messages. Information about his funeral was also shared throughout the night, as well as information about the seventh day mass. For this last meeting, friends used WhatsApp again to prepare a last tribute. They have the idea to reproduce the “uniform” worn by Dudu, a black T-shirt, with the SeniorGeek logo. And during the days leading up to the mass, they spoke about how this production was made feasible all through their smartphones, as Dudu would like. The mobilisation was properly registered. And the pictures dominated social media again, now accompanied by the text “We are all senior geeks”. Dudu’s original WhatsApp group for his SeniorGeek initiatives was deactivated. A new one named “Senior Geek Connected” was created instead. It’s still a place where older people can find information about technology and new learning opportunities, keeping Dudu’s original idea alive. For him, above all, SeniorGeek was a manifesto against the invisibility of older people, something he believed only technology could solve.

Selwyn, N. (2004). The information aged: A qualitative study of older adults’ use of information and communications technology, Journal of Aging Studies, 18, 369–384

Photo (CC BY) Marilia Duque.

Author: Marilia Duque

I am packing up to leave my field site after a 15-month ethnography with older people in Sao Paulo. One thing I learned is that a smartphone is not smart by default. Most of the time, especially for older people, a smartphone could be a stupid little thing that releases a new set of problems they now have to deal with, just like a Pandora’s box.

The character of Pandora can be perfectly represented by a 70-year-old lady I met who just received her box in the form of a gift from her son. This pandora’s box contained many gifts: a telephone, camera, calendar and computer and they were all hidden inside a Samsung Galaxy phone. Pandora’s husband warned her: “You should never turn this on. We are not supposed to steal technology from the youngsters”. Pandora then left the smartphone inside its box for weeks until she found out she was not invited to her old school annual reunion. The explanation they gave to her? “It was all set up through our WhatsApp group, dear”. In a mix of rage, sorrow and curiosity, Pandora immediately opened her smartphone’s box and turned it on.

As in the Greek myth, our Pandora also released some plagues and devils she now has to deal with. In her case, she faced fear, low self-esteem, and anxiety. She first experienced fear of breaking the device, fear of being charged for something she was not using, and fear of erasing something important, like the pictures of her youngest grandson’s swimming competition. She then experienced a lost of self-esteem because her smartphone’s display was set to sleep after just 30 seconds of inactivity and she just didn’t have the proper time to think about what to do before the screen turned off. And when she asked her son for some help, he simply had no patience to explain to her what was happening. Instead, he took her smartphone from her hands, reset the sleep mode to 5 minutes and gave it back to her saying “it is intuitive, even children are supposed to learn how it works”.  Pandora still doesn’t use her smartphone to its full potential, but a friend from her church has downloaded WhatsApp for her. She has finally joined her old school friends’ group and also her charity group, her meditation group and her family group. Now Pandora experiences anxiety because she has to manage so many messages that just keep coming without interruption. Pandora doesn’t understand that the connection is on 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, but she can choose not to be.

Curiosity was what made Pandora open her smartphone’s box and turn it on for the first time. But it is also curiosity which is the only thing that can save her. With curiosity (and with a little help from her friends), Pandora can dig deeper into her smartphone until she finds a solution – ‘hope’. It is hope that was left remaining in Pandora’s box. She will make ten mistakes for each thing she does right. She will be annoyed because she can enlarge the font size and the display size of her smartphone, but this will disrupt her WhatsApp screen lay-out and she will feel lost again. Even so, with time, she will become more confident to try new things and make new mistakes and learn with them. In doing that, Pandora will discover that one more gift was left inside her smartphone. Pandora will finally experience the smartness of her smartphone. A smartness that is only achieved in practice, when the smartphone provides a solution for someone’s need or desire.

Fear, low self-esteem and anxiety will still exist. But Pandora won’t have time to pay much attention to them. She is now checking Google Maps for the easiest way to go to a museum with her friends. She is deciding to take an Uber so she can improve her English with Duolingo during the trip. She is experiencing that fraction of smartness that makes her think that her smartphone was actually a gift from the gods to mankind. A gift she had the curiosity to open and the courage to keep it on.