Aging in e-place: reflections on online communities for the aged in India

ABSTRACT

In this short piece, I offer a reconfiguration of the term “aging in place” by analyzing media content of web-based senior-focused portals while demonstrating how these online consumer-driven spaces unwittingly re-create new social relations and imagined communities. Building on the sparse body of scholarship on extra-familial, kin-like networks, I reflect on the cultural possibility of internet spaces as surrogate “places” for later life non-kin sociality. In this exploration, I privilege the possibility of enriched selfhood of older Indians by moving away from the conventional gerontological trope of the (Indian) elderly as indivisible familial subjects, as a deliberate process of decolonizing the field of gerontology.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-kin
• sociality
• internet cultures
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A handful of authors have examined the promise of emerging cities in the Global South in promoting the World Health Organization’s (WHO, 2007) proposition of “age-friendly cities”. These studies focus on the social and infrastructural determinants of older adult wellbeing while discussing policy challenges to achieve active aging (see, Lin& Huang, 2015; Plouff & Kalache, 2010). However, a direct focus on “aging in place” is typically absent from such studies.

2. Finance focused print and electronic media in India offer reviews of the promising senior market in India. For example, see “Old is Gold: Startups for elderly hold a huge business opportunity in India” (Economic Times, Aug 12,2016) or “RPG group ventures into senior care e-commerce, invests $1 million” (Economic Times, September 7, 2017) suggesting how mid-life and old-age are increasingly becoming significant sources of market segmentation in India.

3. To understand nature and motivation of internet-use among older adults associated with ST, the author had administered an online survey which recorded participants’ (N = 47, ages between 54 and 80 years with 35 of them being women) top preferences for using social media. While staying in touch with family being the prime reason of using social media, a large majority of women (and men) reported finding both old as well as new, “like-minded people” were motivations that govern their social-media activity. Given ST’s operational location, all participants were residents of the south-Indian city of Bangalore.