Older people and smartphone practices in everyday life: an inquire on digital sociality of italian older users

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the use of smartphone in older people everyday life and it is based on an empirical research involving 30 Italian smartphone users aged 62–76. The research drawn on the analysis of 75,089 log data, 3 collective and 20 face-to-face interviews. The paper describes the digital practices through which older users use smartphone to construct social relations within their everyday life as well as elaborate their own media ideologies. The article’s findings show that participants use smartphone for a limited amount of time and mainly to access WhatsApp. The smartphone is mainly used as an organizational device for activating momentary social connections to accomplish practical tasks. The ludic use of smartphone is rarely carried out. Specifically, we observed that through the smartphone, participants put into existence three kinds of “social spaces”: 1) a working space (with peers); 2) a space of augmented co-presences (with children); 3) a space of mutual digital education (grandchildren). In conclusion we argue that the forms of sociality participants put into existence through smartphone are marked by degrees of network privatism. While the media ideology they articulate around their everyday use of smartphone can be conceived as social media phobic.

KEYWORDS:

• Older people
• smartphone
• digital practices
• log data
• digital sociality
• media ideology

Data availability statement

Data not available due to ethical restrictions. Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ As Fernández-Ardèvol et al. (2019, p. 3) explain, the deficit model reduces older people’s lives to mere “inputs and outputs of gero-design technologies and conceptualizing later life according to instrumental pre-defined tasks”.

² Regarding sociality we paid attention to intergeneration relations. One of the effects of population aging is the co-habitation of different generations at once (grandparents, parents and grandchildren) (Kim, 2012). Existing international literature insists a lot on this aspect. On the one hand, such relations have the chance to be enhanced by digital media, especially by mobile ones (Colombo, Carlo, & Aroldi, 2014). On the other hand, the intergenerational exchanges improve older people digital skills (Rossi & Scabini, 2016), which, in turn, translates in benefits in terms of well-being (globally intended) (Wright, 2000).

³ For example, the famous notion of gray digital divide has been widely criticized exactly for this reason, since it tends to frame older people as belonging to a uniform social segment characterized by a lack of digital skills and problematic relations with digital technologies (Millward, 2003). Moreover, this kind of representation contrasts with the way in which older ICTs users perceive themselves (Fernández-Ardèvol et al., 2020).

⁴ See https://www.rescuetime.com.

⁵ Among the other things, in the informed consent we specified that participants were fully entitled to uninstall the App – or ask us to do so – at any moment and without prior notice. No one opted out. In fact, participants were not particularly bothered about the invasivity of the App as well as possible breach in their privacy. Mainly they were concerned about the technical functioning of the RescueTime. Specifically, they feared that RescueTime would have consumed their data and band. So, we reassured them, since RescueTime does not cause these kinds of inconveniences.

⁶ We checked manually the consistency of websites and applications with each category and eventually fixed the false positives. Also, from the category Utilities we expunged all the background activities, which do not depend on users’ actions but are registered by RescueTime anyway. Although dealing with a big dataset, we managed to check it manually, since the analysis of log data extended for a period of five months and was carried out by the four authors plus a research assistant.

⁷ All names of participants have been anonymized and abbreviated with the letter “P”.

⁸ This article appeared on The Atlantic in 2017 and was edited by the physiologist Jean M. Twenge. The article had a great resonance across the Web. Nevertheless, within the academic community, it has “been widely criticized for its arguable causal interpretations” (Gui & Gerosa, In press, para. 1; Livingstone, 2017, July 24; Pavlick, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondazione Cariplo (Bando 2017, ricerca scientifica: Ricerca sociale sull’invecchiamento: persone, luoghi e relazioni. Project name: “Aging in a networked society. Older people, social networks and well-being”) – No Grant Number.