Scaling the ‘Ageing Migrant Body’ in Digital era: A Case of Older Chinese Migrants in Australia During the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Previous research on older migrants’ digital media use has primarily focused on understanding issues related to the ‘digital divide’, ‘transnational capital’, and ‘(im)mobility’. Few studies have investigated how these issues interplay and how they affect older migrants’ construction of selfhood, which informs their modalities of digital engagement. This article will address this gap, by drawing on the concept of ‘geographical scale’, to examine older Chinese migrants’ digital media use and their sense of self and belonging during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne Australia. To achieve this, I analysed 31 interviews, which were collected from two sequential studies conducted in 2020 and 2021. The interview data revealed that older Chinese migrants’ diverse media practices and imaginaries are embedded in and informed by multiple sets of scales of the physical body, the family and domestic realm, the community sphere, and transnational network. It is found that digital media allow participants to navigate, negotiate with and even reconfigure these scales to cope with the challenges of ageing, migration and a global pandemic. However, digital media also produce new scales that differentiate older migrants from the rest of the population to sustain the structural inequality and social unevenness in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital media
• ageing
• body
• Chinese migrant
• geographical scale
• COVID-19

Introduction

This study took shape in 2018, when I ran workshops on smartphone use at local senior Chinese associations in Melbourne, Australia. Workshop participants were migrants who were at least 60 years old (also referred to as older, or ageing). In these workshops, I answered their questions, for example, about how to install mobile applications (apps), change privacy settings on social media, or choose cost-effective phone plans. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns during 2020 and 2021, disrupted the delivery of these workshops. However, I managed to reconnect with some of my workshop participants, while reaching out to additional participants via two separate research projects. Through remote interviews during the pandemic, I learned that many of these older Chinese migrant cohorts were learning to use Zoom, an online conference software, to resume their associations’ gatherings and activities online. After two years of COVID-19 pandemic disruptions, I recommenced my workshops in early 2023. Interestingly, the questions participants asked had changed: they now asked questions about ‘fake news’, misinformation, scams, and data privacy. The changing topics of discussion before, during, and after COVID-19 restrictions seemed to indicate different phases of digital embodiment among older Chinese migrants. This prompted my interest in reflecting on how digital media have configured and conditioned older Chinese migrants’ sense of bodily self, and how they have been actively seeking to use digital media to reimagine their social positioning and subjectivity in Australia.

The Australian Government has long perceived internet technology as critical to improving older Australians’ personal and social wellbeing (McCosker et al. 2020). Further, the pandemic has reinvigorated scholars and industry practitioners’ calls for greater support and gaining a better understanding of older Australians’ experience with digital media (Siete et al. 2021; ACMA 2021). While the issues of access to technologies and digital literacy remain the dominant framing of research concerning older Australians’ digital experiences (Dykgraaf et al. 2022), my exposure to Chinese communities, as described above, points to the need for more nuances in studying and reflecting this topic.

The COVID-19 restrictions, including lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, international border closures, social distancing and curfews in Melbourne during 2020 and 2021, have exemplified and disrupted several concepts of space in relation to digitisation. First, the concept of binary opposition between mobility and ‘staying in place’ was disrupted, which is particularly relevant to older Chinese populations, many of whom frequently travel between Australia and ‘homelands’ for transnational care and family connections (Baldassar et al. 2022). Besides Australia closing its border for more than two years, many older Australians also limited their physical and social movements in Melbourne due to lockdowns, and the fear of contracting or spreading the COVID-19 virus. Digital media have played a crucial role in providing people with social connections and enacted older migrants and their families’ anticipation of the future during and beyond the pandemic (Baldassar et al. 2022: 1876).

The second set of binary concepts, which COVID-19 restrictions disrupted, is the spatial boundaries between the private and the public spaces. This disruption has started before the pandemic thanks to digital media. During city-wide lockdowns and movement restrictions, however, the disruption intensified and became normalised (for example, due to work and schooling from home) (Pangrazio and Mavoa 2023), in which digitisation became the condition of existence. Older Chinese migrants, many of whom had already struggled to adapt to the new social and cultural environments in Australia due to language barriers, limited mobility, and functionality (Ip et al. 2007), needed to quickly adjust to a new environment that was configured by digital media.

Expanding on the private and public spatial confluence, is the intertwining relations between the individual and the community, which the pandemic disrupted. Participating in community activities was either impossible or it had to be radically reimagined during Melbourne’s lockdowns and restrictions. However, community associations such as ‘the neighbourhood’, have long been identified as having the potential to provide older Chinese migrants in Australia with the required institutional, social and peer resources, to support their day-to-day lives and overall wellbeing (Gao et al. 2022) and develop their sense of belonging and settlement (Liu et al. 2021). Older adults’ desire to connect with and be active in local communities was identified as a potential ‘untapped strength’, which could be leveraged to enhance their digital capacity and resilience during a major public crisis (Moore and Hancock 2020).

Research into the reconfiguration of spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic, looking at older (Chinese) migrants’ acculturation experiences and their digital media use, underlines the processes of the production and consumption of ‘spatial difference’, which is a key conceptual element in the ‘geographical scale’ theory (Smith 1982). Analytically, the ‘geographical scale’ theory (scale), identifies and measures spatial differences and their inherent inequality and injustice (Marston and Smith 2001). Conceptually, it explores the dialectic interplay between the construction of the self and the transformation of the social world.

By focusing on older Chinese migrants’ experiences with digital media use during the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, this article uses the conceptual lens of scale, to examine the construction of an ageing migrant body in a digital era. The theoretical framework of scale allows us to explore the interactions between digital media and the discourses around digitisation, and older Chinese migrants’ lives, their identities, and their ‘subject positioning’. This approach enables us to consider the dialectic relationship between subjection and subjectivity (Foucault 2020), during a time of spatial reconfigurations due to a global pandemic and the simultaneous process of rapid digitisation. Through understanding the participants’ imagination of their bodies across the different spatial scales with and through digital media, I will evaluate both the digitally-powered structural injustices against and the digitally-enabled opportunities for older migrants to express and imagine their subjective selves.

From the Production of Scale to Politics of Scale

The notion of spatial scale and the production of scale have gained persistent attention among critical scholars over the past three decades (e.g. Marston and colleagues’ works: 2000; 2005). It has been established that ‘geographical scales' and their production not only serve the internal requirements of capitalist uneven development (Taylor 1981; Smith 1982), but are also shaped by power relations outside the relations of capital and labour (Herod 1991; Marston 2000).

I contend that scale consists of at least three conceptual layers. First, scale refers to the empirical quantification of the spatial (re)structuring and governance of economic resources, capital, and relations of production (Taylor 1981; Smith 1982). Second, scale operates as a rhetoric of subjection and subjectivity. The material configuration of space and place frames one’s perceived reality, subject positioning and sense of subjectivity (Smith 1992b; Marston 2000). For example, literature on ageing migrants have noted that ‘home’ is not only a physical location or sheltering structure, but it also embeds emotional labour and social duties (e.g. grandparenting responsibilities), social positioning, and economic and identity affirmation (through home ownership) among older migrants in Australia (Liu et al. 2020). Digital media constantly remind older migrants about their transnational networks and allow them to imagine their selfhood and belonging beyond their immediate surroundings and social networks (Baldassar et al. 2022). A scale can confine and restrict subjects while allowing them to imagine their bodies beyond the immediate geographical scale of their lives (Marston 2000).

A third understanding is that the production of scale is an inherently political project of contestation and struggle (Herod 1991). This perspective sees the production of scale as both, the governing approach of ‘policing’, while it could – in turn – potentially encourage new politics of disruption and resistance (Smith 1992a). For example, literature concerning the ‘smaller’ scale of older migrants’ bodies and their physical and mental wellbeing (Moore and Hancock 2020) advocates for better policy responses and social changes to rectify the inherent injustices of the global digital economy. Such an expanded approach of scale has informed Blakey’s work (2021) about the political consequences of scale in policing the distribution of ‘the sensible’.

Blakey (2021) contends that the production of scale is effectively the governing technique of producing and reinforcing what the French philosopher Rancière calls the ‘police order’. The ‘police order’ and the general concept of ‘police’ refer to the ‘broader ordering of parts and roles in a community … and has a corresponding aesthetic configuration which normalises certain ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, acting, speaking and being in the world’ (630). In other words, by producing differences and unevenness, scales are produced to distribute the sensible by abnormalising the ‘insensible’, and by simultaneously legitimising the inherent injustice of differentiation (Blakey 2021). ‘Politics’ on the other hand, is a deviation from the ‘police order’, the so-called ‘normal order of things’ (Blakey 2021: 630). Scale theory hence allows us to consider moments when the imposed common sense is met with dissensus on the ground (Blakey 2021).

There is a dialectic quality to the ‘politics of scale’, which indicates that different scales must be examined in relation to each other because scales exist within each other (Smith 1992b). An example would be older Chinese migrants’ experience of using digital media to connect with their immediate families and social networks in Australia, while maintaining the cultural linkage with networks back in their homelands (Baldassar et al. 2022). The construction and imagination of their local and transnational networks and identities, and to a certain extent, individuals’ socio-economic status are determined by their capacity to access the global platform economies and their embodiment of the rhetoric of digital ideologies. At the same time, the cultural meanings, economic power and political significance of transnational technology corporations (e.g. Apple and Tencent), national and international network operators (e.g. Optus, Telstra and Vodafone) could only be materialised by being simultaneously legitimised at the micro-scales of users’ bodies, and the locality of their immediate environments. The ‘normal order of things’ is produced through the construction of the ‘proper and normal body’: it would only be sensible to use and know how to use a smartphone in modern life and the failure to do so would be ‘insensible’.

Social processes at the ‘micro-level’, in which the human body is positioned, are centric to Marston’s emphasis on consumption and the (re)production of scales in differentiation and resistance (Marston 2000: 233–234). The rescaling of the ‘home’ as the domestic space of women’s social and even political participation was strategically promoted in some geographic locations by linking domestic consumption (e.g. household appliances) with women’s identity, contrasted to men’s (de Grazia 1996). However, the structural imagination of female bodies through the frame of the home manager, or home maker role, has led women to recognise their social status, economic power and responsibility beyond the home or domestic scale (Marston 2000). Therefore, the female body was not only a ‘scale maker’, but an active agent in navigating, negotiating and configuring different scales, which female cohorts encountered (Katz 1993).

Similarly, older (Chinese) migrant’ identities have been framed and constructed as the primary carers within a migrant domestic space and their transnational subjectivity has mainly been defined through the family-centric frame of social relational networks (Baldassar and Wilding 2020; Hamilton, et al. 2021). The question then, also with regards to digitisation is, if the ‘older (Chinese) migrant body’ would, similarly to women, also recognise the social status, power and responsibility beyond the home and domestic scales. Findings from studies conducted before the pandemic indicate that this would very likely be the case (Gao et al. 2022; Liu, et al 2021). A further question then is, what and when are the moments, as described in Blakley’s (2021) theorisation of the ‘politics of scale’, that older migrants realise (differentiation), follow (policing), dispute (politics) and reimagine (reconstruction and rescaling) the imposed discourse about the different functionalities and capacities of the older migrant bodies in a digital era?

Research Design

This article relies on interview data from two sequential studies in 2020 and 2021, which were conducted in Melbourne, Australia.¹ The two studies shared the common objective of learning about older Chinese migrants’ digital media use and the role digital technologies play in their everyday communication, information-seeking and life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Both studies were driven by the research question of how older Chinese migrants have, actively or passively, reimagined their bodies concerning the intense processes of digitisation and physical mobility restrictions. The first study (2020) focused solely on the Chinese community, while the second study (2021) compared the experience of Chinese, Indonesian and Sri Lankan migrant cohorts. For this article, I extracted Chinese data from the second study (2021), as this data was sequential to interview data collected from the first study (2020).

Engaging the Participants – a Community Approach

Melbourne was chosen as the site of investigation, as the city had prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, and is home to Australia’s second largest Chinese population (ABS 2023), some of which have been long established since the Gold Rush era (1850s–1860s). The city provides a unique case that exemplifies the intersections between body mobility, digital media, and spatial scales during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has been a historical context and a unique moment that has transformed the general perception of inter-scalar relations (Yu et al. 2023), by bringing together the three processes of (global) migration, digitisation, and ageing. Older Chinese migrants live at the intersection of this triangulation and the pandemic has manifested the complexity, contradictions, issues, and dynamics of these three processes and this cohort’s sense of selfhood and identity.

My objective to evaluate participants’ experiences and perspectives with digital media during the historically and conceptually significant COVID-19 pandemic, led me to using qualitative interviews as the main research method for both studies. The advantage of using interviews is that it allows the exploration of participants’ lived experiences (Creswell et al. 2007) through enabling them to share personal stories about digital media (Givskov 2017) in a synchronised setting of time and space (Saarijärvi and Bratt 2021). As face-to-face interactions became difficult during the pandemic, conferencing software like Skype and Zoom offered alternatives to the interview practice (Irani 2018). In both studies, I also gave participants the option to conduct the interviews over the phone, being mindful of the digital divide among older users in Australia (Dykgraaf et al. 2022). Further, the participant’s preferred interview mode might indicate their confidence and self-perceived ability to use new communication software (such as Zoom) and devices (such as smartphones and tablet computers).

In both studies, I followed the common advice when working with vulnerable and hard-to-engage community members, contacting community leaders and relevant stakeholders (such as social workers and aged care workers) first, to bridge the gap to members of relevant communities (Stack-Culter et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2020). Through my contacts from previous research, I connected with five senior Chinese community associations and two aged care providers (one residential care and one in-home care) in Melbourne. After explaining the project, and attaining permission from community leaders and stakeholders, some of them even participated in the project themselves to ‘test’ the experience so they could better inform their members or clients, who decided their participation themselves. Figure 1 illustrates the participant recruitment process in detail.

Figure 1. Participant recruitment procedure.

To ensure ‘trustworthiness’ of the qualitative research process, specifically credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability (Connelly 2016), I used interview guides in both studies. Since the two studies shared the same research question and objective, the two interview guides covered the same four main areas of discussion:

1. Digital history and condition (environment and social networks) before and during the pandemic.

2. Social connection and digital practices during the pandemic.

3. Experience with Australia’s public health messaging and health information-seeking practices.

4. Experience with Australia’s digital health requirements (such as installing and using health tracking codes and digital vaccine certificates).

Both studies paid specific attention to the key ‘digital actors’ who helped/supported the participants’ digital use (Figueiredo and Aleti 2023) and the ‘poly/media environment’ (Ballantyne and Burke 2017; Braunwalder et al. 2021) of their lives before and during the pandemic. The four areas of discussion follow these intellectual insights and were formulated to ensure the internal validity (credibility) and the external validity (transferability) of the studies.

I conducted a total of 31 interviews, in which 15 originated from the first study (2020) and 16 from the second study (2021). All participants were Victorian residents who self-identified as Chinese and were at least 60 years old at the time of the interview. On average, each interview lasted for about 45 min. As I am fluent in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, the interviews were conducted in participants’ preferred language. Recognising the limited representation of the whole population and the fact that not all older Chinese migrants are associated with community organisations, I decided that a community-centric approach was (a) the most pragmatic one amid the lack of social and physical mobility of researchers and potential participants, and (b) able to shed light on community organisations’ role in defining the mode of digital use among the participants. In reflection, the community-centric recruitment approach also ensured the authenticity of the research practice and data as the approach allowed the research to convey the different realities of participants’ lives (Polit and Beck 2014). The sequential design of the two studies validated the findings of each other by citing the different phases and contextual realities of the pandemic in Melbourne. Figures 2 and 3 provide a summary of both study participants’ demographics.

Figure 2. Interview participants’ demographic & interview information.

Figure 3. Interview participants’ length of stay in Australia.

Verbal consent was recorded at the beginning of each interview. I transcribed interview recordings, anonymised participants’ identities using pseudonyms, and analysed interview data conducted a discourse analyses. Discourse analysis views language use as part of social life (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), and as intertwined with sociohistorical context, in which it aims at unveiling the social power in defining social relations, structures and narratives (Foucault 2020). It is a viable framework to critically evaluate the material and metaphorical dimensions of scales and how they interact in shaping social activities, relations and structure (Smith 1992a).

Although discourse analysis is normally deployed to understand the construction and practice of the power of media, a similar principle works well to understand media users’ experience of living with power. Particularly, as discourse analysis allows us to identify participants’ language use and expressions to describe their experience and ways of navigating, negotiating, and reimagining digitisation and the transformation of spaces. Importantly, conducting a discourse analysis allows us to identify and examine moments when the ‘policing’ and ‘politics of scale’ meet and encounter each other (Blakey 2021). In the context of this paper, analyses and discussions to come will focus on moments of policing a politics and importantly, how the older migrants’ subjectivity and sense of belonging during and beyond the pandemic in Australia.

Findings and Discussions

Drawing on study participants’ stories and perspectives, the following sections evolve around the different sets of paradox of the production and construction of scales and the contradiction between policing and politics that co-define and configure each other.

Digital Media as the new Rhetoric of ‘Reality’

Interview data indicates that digital media have integrated into participants’ lives and lived reality before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, with digital media constantly reminding participants about their ‘inter-scalar’ self. Digital media both produce and ‘police’ the older migrant body to adhere to the digitisation of lives. All but one participant owned a smartphone connected to the internet at the time of the interview. Of the other 30 participants, more than two-thirds of them had at least another digital device, such as a tablet computer or desktop computer. All participants were actively engaged in reading news and connected with social networks within and outside of Australia. WeChat was the main digital platform for the 16 participants from mainland China and WhatsApp was the main platform for the 13 participants from Hong Kong and Malaysia (except for one person who did not own a smartphone). All participants stated to use these platforms more during the pandemic.

While digital media might have produced a transnational scale of information sharing and networking, new technologies have also forced the participants to be confronted with and reimagine their ageing bodies. When asked about the reason for using multiple devices, the dialectic between the body (self) and a highly digitised society became more apparent. Brian (70s, from Hong Kong) explained:

‘The smartphone’s screen is too small, so I need a tablet to read the news and watch videos. The larger screen (on tablets) is easier and clearer for my eyes.’

The complaint about smartphone screens and keypads being too small is a commonly shared perspective among the participants and is often the main reason for them to own several digital devices.

There were other creative strategies older migrants used to overcome their design issue with smartphones. For example, Shaun (80s, from Hong Kong), who lived in a residential aged care facility, relied on a ‘polymedia’ approach:

‘Those buttons on (smart)phone are so tiny. My fingers can’t move flexibly, and I struggle to see those letters and numbers. I have recently started hand-writing things I want to say on a piece of paper, taking a photo and sending it to people whom I need to talk to. That is much easier (laugh).’

The significance here is threefold. First, Shaun and Brian’s remarks indicate digital media has differentiated the older bodies from ‘the rest’ and policed such differences by reminding them about their ‘inability’ to fully master the technology. Second, and more importantly, the participants seem to have accepted these differences and realised the biophysiological difference compared to their younger counterparts – based on their bodies’ ‘digital compatibility’ with smartphone. Note that in this article I understand ‘digital compatibility’ as one’s physical capacity rather than digital knowledge and skills. The design of the smartphone and digital media in general, were inherently a project of ‘differentiating’ and ‘policing’ of the old bodies’ perceived reality about their ‘less-capable’ digital media use.

Shaun and Brian’s remarks, however, also exemplify the moments when their creative, non-conventional thinking beyond the imposed technological boundaries and restrictions of the ‘non-ageing-friendly’ design of smartphones. Indeed, we can even say both Shuan and Brian had learned their respective digital devices so well that they were able to draw on resources from other communicative and informational scales (such as handwriting and paper), and digital scales (using a different digital device), to overcome the passive subjection to ageing imposed by the process of digitisation. They ‘deviated’ from the ‘normal’ technological functionalities, boundaries and possibilities of conventional smartphone use.

This phenomenon was also illustrated by Laila’s (90s, from Malaysia) experience, who was the only participant who did not own a smartphone at the time of the interview. She, however, had access to tablet computers to watch YouTube videos, which she accessed with the help of staff at her residential aged care facility. As Laila was illiterate in English and Chinese and therefore unable to find new videos by typing in the key search phrases, she relied on YouTube’s ‘recommendation system’ to find and access videos. While Laila might not have understood YouTube’s algorithms, she was aware of YouTube’s recommendation system and had learned to utilise and exploit such a function to create a personal leisure and entertainment space. Laila’s experience demonstrated how older Chinese migrants navigated technological features to re-orientate their bodily practices accordingly.

The Paradox of Social Interaction

Neil Smith (1992b: 73) explains that the production of scale occurs during social interaction, which does not refer to networks formation but refers to the act to differentiate geographical scales and establish the unevenness of geographical structures (Smith 1992b). The topic of ‘social interaction and connection’ has served as a central line of inquiry in many previous studies about digital media use among older adults/migrants (Givskov 2017; Baldassar et al. 2022; Dykgraaf, S.H. et al. 2022). Smith’s conceptualisation could lead to critical reflection on the meaning of (digitally enacted) social interaction amid the social and economic structures in older migrants’ lives.

The interview data suggests that none of the participants could be considered digitally incapable, particularly in using the digital media popular in their community. However, all participants played down their digital competence in the interviews. The two most common and repeated phrases were: ‘Technology is very complicated to our older generation’ and ‘Learning new technologies is very challenging for myself and older members of our senior associations’. These statements are paraphrased versions of original quotes, which participants commonly raised at the very beginning of the interview. These upfront and explicit statements were often followed by the participants’ elaborated accounts of how they managed to use digital media throughout the lockdowns. The lack of confidence was also partly reflected in the interview modes: two-thirds of participants opted for a phone interview, rather than a Zoom interview, even though they all had used and accessed Zoom since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia in early 2020.

There are two possible explanations for this paradox. A first possible explanation follows the tradition of ageing research that social prejudices against ageing have been normalised and accepted by all social actors, including the older adults under study themselves by accepting te idea that their bodies are ‘different’, ‘weaker’, and ‘unproductive’ (Stephens and Breheny 2018). Older adults have learned to internalise ageist prejudice for survival.

The second possible reason, however, could be related to the structural force imposed through ‘social interaction’ and in the context of the present studies, a methodological issue. The participants’ experience and perceived realities about digitisation were also produced through their social relational networks and interactions. My positionality of being a younger person with the title ‘digital media researcher’, I could have reminded my participants about the socially perceived ‘digital differences’ among the younger and older bodies. I might have, albeit unintentionally, policed such a form of digital differentiation and unevenness to prevail. Hence, they could have ‘played down’ their digital competence in front of this perceived ‘perfect digital body’. However, I made a deliberate attempt to engage participants with a casual conversational style of interviewing, which meant that participants shared more nuanced insights about their digital technology use as the interview progressed.

If direct interaction with a digitally capable, ‘normal’ body reinforced and policed the participant’ perceived self-vulnerability and incompetence in a digital era, then this might explain why some participants tried to avoid from direct interaction with some ‘digitally normal’ bodies in their lives, a line of inquiry I take inspiration from Blakey’s work on the politics of scale (Blakey 2021). Many participants emphasised how they did not rely on younger family members for digital help, before and during the pandemic. Instead, non-family and external networks, such as social workers, community volunteers, and peers were the ‘go-to-person’. Yushi’s (60s, Hong Kong) statement exemplifies a common experience among many participants:

‘Volunteers and social workers from my local (Chinese) senior association helped us to set up Zoom. They guided us step by step over the phone … my children couldn’t help because I couldn’t even see them (living alone) … since I joined this association I participated in many Zoom events and gatherings. I don’t feel as lonely.’

But even Laura and Shinghong (70s, a couple from China), who lived with their adult children, did not rely on their family for digital support:

‘Our son sometimes helps but he’s not very patient and unwilling to explain things to us … we sometimes ask our friends and gradually, we can start figuring things out ourselves. We now can install apps ourselves (laugh).’

The distinction between family and non-family networks was consciously constructed by participants to present a sense of social and digital independence. At first glance, it seemed to be a discourse of self-empowerment. However, further conversations revealed the reason to be of a deeper, cultural nature about parental love and care. Statements such as ‘I could not wait for my children to teach me’, ‘they have no time’ or, ‘they are busy with their own life’ show participants’ desire to remain active agents in constructing their domestic space despite previous literature have noted their weakening role and positioning within the scale of family, due to retirement and migration (Wanka 2019). Digital media were presented as an extension or prolongation of the older migrant body as an active, independent parental body within the Chinese cultural norm, which is also observed in previous studies on ageing Chinese migrants (Wang et al. 2020). A further reason for not relying on their younger family members for digital help could be related to their desire to navigate scales beyond the domestic family spaces, which is considered in the next section.

The Older Body and the Construction of (Transnational) Communities

As previously mentioned, all study participants had experience using Zoom to participate in social and community gatherings, events and activities. Zoom was the most prominent software used, partly due to Australia’s national acceptance of this software during the pandemic. Participants generally had a positive perception of Zoom and wished the software would be used beyond the pandemic. Siufun (60s, from China), for example, explained:

‘I like online gatherings. It’s very convenient, I don’t have to travel and worry about being infected. Zoom is particularly good for someone like me, I can’t drive.’

Jenny (60s, from China), who used Zoom to participate in a local English class, also found Zoom offered a lot of conveniences:

‘I could not participate in the English class before (COVID-19) because I had to stay at home to look after my grandchildren, but now, I can attend the (Zoom) class while keeping an eye on them. Of course, I turn off my videos and audio to avoid interrupting others.’

The discourse of Zoom’s convenience carries a profound meaning regarding defining one’s ability to navigate and live across multiple scales in life. As Jenny’s and Siufun’s experiences show, Zoom extended their mobility in terms of physical travelling, as well as negotiating and managing different duties and expectations in the social, family, and domestic scales. Zoom made the overlapping of scales possible. Digital media have provided our participants with a means to negotiate the boundaries between these two scales on the one hand and, enable them to be more flexible in ‘jumping between’ different spatial scales in their lives (Marston 2000) on the other. Specifically in this case, the two participants were able to pursue their interests, maintain their social networks, while fulfilling their family duties.

The community provided a crucial scale for many participants to become what they perceived as more ‘digitally competent and capable’. For example, WhatsApp was the main instant messenger used among the 13 participants from Hong Kong and the two participants from Malaysia, in which six of them also use WeChat. When asked about their WeChat use, these participants raised the changing migration pattern of the Chinese community. June (70s, from Hong Kong) was involved in a local senior Chinese association and cited the increase of older migrants from mainland China, stating ‘they all use WeChat’. June then learned to use WeChat and specifically used it when connecting with her new networks from mainland China. June made a conscious and considerate effort to use WeChat to make her senior association more inclusive, diverse, and transnational.

Further, most participants were not satisfied to just use digital media for self-entertainment and interpersonal purposes, but they desired to use the new technology to reach the larger community network. Yan (70s, from Hong Kong), a professional, working photographer, had been running photography classes in Melbourne for 11 years. In the second half of 2020, after learning to use Zoom from a social worker, she restarted her photography classes on Zoom (for students who were all at least 60 years of age). Likewise, Shirley (60s, from China) had never used Zoom before and was just starting to learn it in 2020. A year later and at the time of the interview (November 2021), she was organising a karaoke competition between Chinese communities in Canada and Australia on Zoom.

These accounts not only show how some older migrants envisioned themselves, hence, their digital practices that move beyond the personal domestic scales but towards the community and even transnational scales. Yan and Shirley used digital media to contribute to their respective communities. As mentioned in an earlier section older Chinese populations tend to develop a feeling of settlement and sense of belonging in Australia if they feel part of and can contribute to the local Chinese communities in Australia (Liu et al. 2021). Ben (70s, from China) exemplified this claim:

‘I feel it’s more important to do something for the organisation … it’s not just about I possess the (digital) skills but I want to share and use them for my friends and families.’

He shared a photo-based video with me after our interview in November 2021. The video was based on screen captures taken from the Zoom gathering of the mid-autumn festival, an important traditional festival in the Chinese culture, of a senior Chinese community he was part of. He told me it was a little ‘gift’ to his friends in the community association for a unique (lockdown and online) experience of an important cultural festival.

This study’s participants have been actively reimagining their ageing migrant bodies from passive to active agents, proactively seeking to help and contribute to the community. Some of them have been using digital media to transcend the domestic scales, which tends to reinforce stereotypical roles, such as (grand)parenting and isolation, to one who is actively disrupting the social boundaries and structures the older migrant body is imposed to confine in Australia.

Yet, Digital Inequality Persists

The Australian authorities became more reliant on digital media technologies to manage the pandemic in 2020. This brought digital inequality to the forefront, which highlighted structural inequalities and the normalisation of differentiation produced by digitisation. Specifically, despite study participants’ success in learning new digital media and utilising them for interpersonal, community and even transnational activities, none of the 16 older Chinese migrants interviewed in 2021 was able to download the state of Victoria’s official contact tracing app (Service Victoria), or the digital vaccination certificate from the Australian government’s myGov platform.²

One first, obvious explanation for the inconsistency was the English-language barrier, as Kevin (80s, from China) pointed out:

‘I am sure I would be able to install these apps if there were step-by-step instructions in Chinese.’

Kevin’s experience presented a common struggle observed among older Chinese migrants in Australian lives (Ip et al. 2007). None of the instructions about obtaining a vaccination certificate and installing the contact-tracing app were available on digital platforms that the older Chinese migrant participants in this study were familiar with. Official COVID-19-related information, English and translated versions, were mainly available on the health and government authorities’ respective Facebook, Twitter and official websites. None of the participants interviewed over the two studies were active Facebook users, and none had a Twitter account.

The English-dominant and US-platform-centric communication produced a techno-informational scale that was, as previously described by Kagawa Singer and colleagues (2016) an inherently mono-cultural sphere. Imposing the Angelo and US-centric digital sphere on all Victorian residents, regardless of their cultural and linguistic background, or media preferences, effectively differentiated the populations based on their familiarity with certain western digital culture rather than their digital skills and digital literacy. Older migrants who failed to adjust to the US platforms in time for the pandemic management could have become ‘dysfunctional’ or been perceived as ‘abnormal’ in digital governing regime (Wang 2022). Not participating was not an option, as failing to scan the contact tracing app or providing the vaccination certificate would have prevented older migrants from accessing the most basic material aspects across different scales in life (such as shops, workplaces, and public transport).

However, there were further issues about different experiences with information datafication. For example, Yan’s (70s, from HK) illustrates:

‘Getting the (vaccine) certificate was so complicated, even my daughter had to spend an hour to figure things out. The process required my bank details, we needed to look for those by checking with the bank.’

Likewise, Shaun (80s, from Hong Kong) also shared his experience:

My son and the aged care staff spent few days to help me to obtain the certificate. I didn’t have a passport and driver’s license, the online system could not verify me. My son had to keep calling different places. I don’t know what they did and how they did that but they managed to get the certificate for me.

Shaun and Yan’s experiences highlight how digital COVID-19 governance was operated at the federal and state governments’ administrative scales. Victorian residents needed to access and synthesise the mobile app myGov (federally managed) and Service Victoria (state-managed) platforms. These platforms were empowered by data from multiple, non-health-related authorities such as Centrelink (social service), the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), My Aged Care, VicRoads (the road registration and licensing authority of Victoria), the Australian Department of Home Affair’s (with regards to immigration and citizenship information), and non-government institutions, such as banks. To a great extent, the myGov and Service Victoria apps demonstrated what Marston and colleagues (2005) termed as a ‘flat, horizontal ontology of scales’. It was a network of policing power: not only the sense of ensuring the system could cover and hence regulate, most, if not all, residents in Victoria, but the network also produced differences among residents based on the status and progress of digitising their profiles.

There was an unexpected temporal dimension to the scale of digital governance in Australia. Out of the 16 participants interviewed in 2021, the five participants (Shaun, Yan, Yushi, Laura and Shinghong) who had more difficulties accessing the vaccination certificate and the contact tracing app, had all immigrated to Australia more than 25 years ago. Their health and social information were not initially digitised, and their bank accounts were opened before the introduction of online banking. By contrast, Sifun, Claire and Kevin, who had only lived in Australia for five years or less at the time of the interview, all had a relatively smooth experience, albeit needed help, in obtaining the digital certificate and contact tracing apps. In contrast to the previous cohort, their Australian lives started in the digital era.³ This exposes an invisible chronological inequality, which was produced due to the uneven temporality of the state- and nation-wide compulsory digitisation of health information and biometric.

The participants were effectively placed into different techno-institutional scales: those whose profiles were digitised versus those whose profiles were not. Despite living in Australia for much longer, some participants needed to reverify their identity and residential status as Australian citizens and residents in the new digital systems, which they were not yet part of. It seemed that digital platforms for pandemic management have differentiated the Australian population based on their data input and turned individuals into micro-operators of the overarching digital social-governance regime. Yet, issues such as non-user-friendly technology designs, an assumption of a homogenous cultural sphere, and the lack of migrant and community-focussed platforms, discriminated against those who failed to be on board.

Conclusion

The emergence of the older Chinese migrant body during the pandemic was inherently linked to the digitisation process before and during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, WeChat and WhatsApp had already dominated the participants’ everyday lives and defined their bodily activities. However, what changed was that existing platforms commonly used by the community, was complemented with ‘new’ global software, such as Zoom (social connection), YouTube and Google (news and entertainments), as well as local pandemic governance platforms, such as myGov and Service Victoria. Older Chinese migrants continued to navigate, negotiate with, and reimagine the techno-social opportunities to affirm their sense of self and belonging in Australia.

The notion of scale has been useful in guiding the conceptual, analytic and methodological frameworks to examine the impact of digital media on older migrants’ lives and identities and to evaluate the forces and structures that produce social and geographical unevenness during the triangulation of ageing, migration and digitisation. I have identified that digital media was a ‘new weapon’ (to borrow Smiths’ term 1992a, b) to differentiate bodies in the population while it also encouraged the participants’ agentic creativity to reimage their relations with the social world . The conceptual distinction between production and creation is important. The former refers to the regulatory and governance quality (‘policing’) of scale in creating common sense and normality, and the latter reveals that scales can trigger agentic response and subjectivity to deal with, and at times, circumvent and reimagine scales in lives (‘the politics’). These attributes were illustrated by the participants’ seemingly contradictory accounts of digital media as both, suppressive and supportive. Their subjective selves have evolved through these paradoxes and contradictions of digital media. Analytical, scale theory provides valuable guidance in identifying the intersection between the structural and personal, and policing and politics related to digital media in older migrants’ lives and evaluating the (in)consistency between participants’ perception and practice regarding the broader social narrative and discourses on ageing and technology.

Understanding the production of scales concerning digital media is also a political project. Accordingly, future research is needed to develop a more systematic approach to not only identify, but map and measure the geo-social unevenness and inequality faced by digitally marginalised and vulnerable populations. Acknowledging the dynamic and malleable quality of digital media, future research could utilise the pandemic as a historical reference rather than merely anchoring within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as this study has done, to compare with future techno-social changes. Through learning about older Chinese migrants’ first-hand digital media use experiences, non-inclusive technological design, uneven resource allocation to community groups, lack of appreciation of the cultural diversity and complexities of digital platforms, and the persistence of prejudice against ageing and older populations, were identified as key issues. Some participants made behavioural adjustments to overcome the raised issues. Even though these actions may appear small and insignificant to an outsider, they express opportunities to rethink the design and reimage the use of digital media for a more inclusive future. More studies and evidence are needed to identify the opportunities and formulate strategy to inform the appropriate policy change and rectification.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The two studies received Ethic Approval from the University of Melbourne. Approval number #14352 (2020 study) and #22532 (2021 study).

2 The Service Victoria’s contact tracing app was launched in November 2020, and the digital vaccination certificate from myGov was launched in October 2021.

3 Since around the early 2010s, it has been mandatory to open online accounts to access mainstream social services, such as Centrelink and Medicare (via myGov), as well as banking services.