Results by title
10 books match the query 'Smartphones'
Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland
When Life Becomes CraftPauline Garvey and Daniel Miller
University College London, 2021
On the role smartphones play in the lives of the aging in contemporary Ireland.
This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.
This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Japan
Care in a Visual Digital AgeLaura Haapio-Kirk
University College London, 2024
How smartphones are shifting the daily lives of older adults post-retirement in Kyoto and Kochi Prefecture, Japan.
Ageing with Smartphones in Japan examines sixteen months of ethnographic research following older adults, age fifty and up, in urban Kyoto and rural Kochi Prefecture, Japan as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement in the age of the smartphone. It attempts to answer what this transition means for friendship, gendered labor, multigenerational living, internal migration, health, as well as life purpose for older adults. This book closely investigates how the smartphone challenges gender-based norms and how older adults creatively navigate them. Using comics, drawings, and fieldwork sketches it also explores how they use digital visual communication to socialize with friends and family.
Ageing with Smartphones in Japan examines sixteen months of ethnographic research following older adults, age fifty and up, in urban Kyoto and rural Kochi Prefecture, Japan as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement in the age of the smartphone. It attempts to answer what this transition means for friendship, gendered labor, multigenerational living, internal migration, health, as well as life purpose for older adults. This book closely investigates how the smartphone challenges gender-based norms and how older adults creatively navigate them. Using comics, drawings, and fieldwork sketches it also explores how they use digital visual communication to socialize with friends and family.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda
Togetherness in the Dotcom AgeCharlotte Hawkins
University College London, 2023
Examines the impact of smartphones and mobile phones on older people’s health and everyday lives as part of the global Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing project.
Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a sixteen-month ethnography about experiences of aging in a neighborhood in central Kampala, Uganda. Taking a convivial approach, which celebrates multiple ways of knowing about social life, Charlotte Hawkins draws from these expressions about cooperative morality and modernity to consider the everyday mitigation of profound social change. “Dotcom” is understood to encompass everything from the influence of information and communications technologies to urban migration and lifestyles in the city to shifts in ways of knowing and relating. At the same time, dotcom tools such as mobile phones and smartphones facilitate elder care through, for example, regular mobile money remittances.
This book explores how dotcom relates to older people’s health, their care norms, their social standing, their values of respect and relatedness, and their intergenerational relationships—both political and personal. It also re-frames the youth-centricity of research on the city and work, new media and technology, and politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, this monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us.
Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a sixteen-month ethnography about experiences of aging in a neighborhood in central Kampala, Uganda. Taking a convivial approach, which celebrates multiple ways of knowing about social life, Charlotte Hawkins draws from these expressions about cooperative morality and modernity to consider the everyday mitigation of profound social change. “Dotcom” is understood to encompass everything from the influence of information and communications technologies to urban migration and lifestyles in the city to shifts in ways of knowing and relating. At the same time, dotcom tools such as mobile phones and smartphones facilitate elder care through, for example, regular mobile money remittances.
This book explores how dotcom relates to older people’s health, their care norms, their social standing, their values of respect and relatedness, and their intergenerational relationships—both political and personal. It also re-frames the youth-centricity of research on the city and work, new media and technology, and politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, this monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil
A Work in ProgessMarília Duque
University College London, 2022
An exploration of technology’s role in the day-to-day life of aging urban Brazilians.
With people living longer all over the world, aging has begun to be framed as a socioeconomic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this book shows how older people in a middle-class neighborhood try to reconcile these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for old age by using smartphones. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedules. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, the author shows, older people are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs, and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink aging.
With people living longer all over the world, aging has begun to be framed as a socioeconomic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this book shows how older people in a middle-class neighborhood try to reconcile these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for old age by using smartphones. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedules. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, the author shows, older people are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs, and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink aging.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile
The Experience of Peruvian MigrantsAlfonso Otaegui
University College London, 2023
An anthropological account of the experience of aging among Peruvian migrants to Chile in the smartphone era.
What does it mean to be aging in Chile as a migrant? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyzes the experience of aging for Peruvian migrants aged around sixty who have lived in Chile for more than twenty years. Their lives, we discover, are informed by a series of experiences of being ‘in between’. They live between two countries, two generations, and two different stages in life, between giving care and not wanting care, and between a continuing legacy and not transmitting legacy. By focusing on the entanglement of aging, migration, and technology, this book is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile.
What does it mean to be aging in Chile as a migrant? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyzes the experience of aging for Peruvian migrants aged around sixty who have lived in Chile for more than twenty years. Their lives, we discover, are informed by a series of experiences of being ‘in between’. They live between two countries, two generations, and two different stages in life, between giving care and not wanting care, and between a continuing legacy and not transmitting legacy. By focusing on the entanglement of aging, migration, and technology, this book is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China
From the Cultural to the Digital Revolution in ShanghaiXinyuan Wang
University College London, 2023
An anthropological account of the experience of aging in the smartphone era in China.
The current oldest generation in Shanghai was born at a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off using smartphone apps. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the “two revolutions” experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions and argues that we can only understand the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis here provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, addressing such topics the digital and everyday life, aging and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories, and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.
The current oldest generation in Shanghai was born at a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off using smartphone apps. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the “two revolutions” experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions and argues that we can only understand the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis here provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, addressing such topics the digital and everyday life, aging and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories, and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.
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Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy
Care and Community in Milan and BeyondShireen Walton
University College London, 2021
An anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan.
This book is an anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan, exploring the relationship between ageing and technology amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including the advent of mobile health, smart cities, and a number of wider socioeconomic and technological transformations. Through extensive urban and digital ethnographic research in Milan, Shireen Walton shows how the smartphone has become a “constant companion” in contemporary life, accompanying people throughout the day and through individual and collective experiences. The volume argues that ageing with smartphones in the contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change, and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with others.
This book is an anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan, exploring the relationship between ageing and technology amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including the advent of mobile health, smart cities, and a number of wider socioeconomic and technological transformations. Through extensive urban and digital ethnographic research in Milan, Shireen Walton shows how the smartphone has become a “constant companion” in contemporary life, accompanying people throughout the day and through individual and collective experiences. The volume argues that ageing with smartphones in the contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change, and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with others.
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Distracted
A Philosophy of Cars and PhonesRobert Rosenberger
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
Applying insights from philosophy and cognitive science to address the urgent issue of smartphone-induced distracted driving
Although the dangers of texting while driving are widely known, many people resist the idea that phone usage will impair their driving. And connectivity features in new cars have only made using technology behind the wheel more tempting. What will it take to change people’s minds and behavior? Robert Rosenberger contends that a better understanding of why this combination of technologies is so dangerous could effectively adjust both habits and laws.
Rosenberger brings together ideas from philosophy and cognitive science to leverage a postphenomenological perspective that reveals how our smartphones make us such bad drivers. Reviewing decades of empirical studies in cognitive science, he shows that we have developed habits of perception regarding our compulsive technology use—habits that may wrest our attention away from the road.
Distracted develops innovative concepts for understanding technology-related habits and the ways that our relationships to our devices influence how we perceive the world. In turn, these ideas can help drivers be more cognizant of the effect that smartphone usage has on their perceptions, better inform efforts to enact stricter regulations, and help us all to be more reflective about the technologies that shape our lives.
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Going Mobile
Developing Apps for Your Library Using Basic HTML ProgrammingScott American Library Association
American Library Association, 2012
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Smartland Korea
Mobile Communication, Culture, and SocietyDal Yong Jin
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The dramatic advancement of cellphone technology has fundamentally changed our daily lives. Smartphones and their applications have created new capital for information and communication technology corporations and changed the way people communicate. Because of an interesting awareness of the significance for digital economy and people’s daily culture, many countries, from the U.S. to China, have massively invested in the smartphone industries since the early 21st century. Among them, South Korea has become one of the centers for technology development and digital culture, although the country was once lagging behind in the penetration of the phones and their apps. Yet within the last few years, the country has taken a big step toward their goal of becoming a ‘mobile game wonderland’ by appropriating smartphones and it now exists as a curious test-bed for the future of smartphone technology. Smartland Korea, as the first attempt to comprehensively analyze mobile communication in the context of Korean smartphones, looks into a largely neglected focus of inquiry, a localized mobile landscape, with particular reference to young Koreans’ engagement with their devices and applications. Dal Yong Jin focuses not only on the celebratory achievement of technological advancement, but also the significance of social milieu in the development of the smartphones. He situates the emergence of smartphones within the growth of mobile technologies and overall telecommunications industries embedded in Korea’s information and communication technologies. The book examines the technology’s innovation and the evolution, the digital economy through the lens of political economy, and the youth culture embedded in the Korean smartphone context.
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