Ageing with Smartphones in Japan
Ageing with Smartphones in Japan

Author: Laura Haapio-Kirk

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2024-08-29

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1787355764

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Older adults in Japan, one of the most ageing countries in the world, are starting to adopt the smartphone. What does this mean for friendship, gendered labour, multigenerational living, internal migration, health and indeed purpose in life (ikigai)? Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows people as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement. Examining how older women and men negotiate oppressive structures within society, the smartphone emerges as both challenging and perpetuating gender-based norms around care. In witnessing the response of older adults to the wider context of societal ageing and the various forms of precarity that it can engender, this book observes how people creatively navigate the challenges and opportunities of later life to define their own experience of ageing. The rise of digital visual communication among people in their 50s and older opens new possibilities for sociality and proximity among friends and family. It also presents a methodological challenge for researchers. This book responds with a series of graphic methodological experimentations, including co-created comics, participant drawings, and the author’s own fieldwork sketches and imaginative illustrations, to explore this fundamental shift in communication towards digital images. Praise for Ageing with Smartphones in Japan ‘An excellent and thoughtful book on ageing in Japan, focusing on the use of smartphones, but not limited to it. The truly innovative use of graphic and multimodal ethnography is not only effective but also showcases such methods for others.’ Iza Kavedžija, University of Cambridge ‘Highly original, extensively researched and thought-provoking, Haapio-Kirk rewards the reader with lively story-telling and beautifully crafted images that invite another level of sensory and emotional engagement – an impressive achievement.’ Jason Danely, Oxford Brookes University

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan
Ageing with Smartphones in Japan

Author: Laura Haapio-Kirk

Publisher:

Published: 2024-08-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781787355774

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Older adults in Japan, one of the most ageing populations in the world, are starting to adopt the smartphone. Based on 16-months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows people as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement.

The Global Smartphone
The Global Smartphone

Author: Daniel Miller

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-05-06

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1787359611

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The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy
Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Author: Shireen Walton

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-05-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1787359719

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‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other. Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a ‘constant companion’ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability. Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this 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 and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Japan's Far More Female Future
Japan's Far More Female Future

Author: Bill Emmott

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-09-25

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0198865554

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Through analysis of trends and policy options, combined with interviews with 21 female role models from business to the arts, Bill Emmott takes an optimistic look at how a society with an extreme level of gender inequality, an ageing population, and slow economic growth can achieve greater social justice and sustainable prosperity for the future.

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth
An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

Author: Charlotte Hawkins

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1787354237

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This book proposes a radically different anthropological approach to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare. An Anthropological Approach to mHealth is based on ten 16-month ethnographies in settings across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America that showed how conventional health apps may be irrelevant particularly for older people. Instead, the studies found that many people use their mobile and smartphones for health purposes to a surprising extent. They take the communicative apps they have become comfortable with, such as LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp, and are highly creative in turning them into their own health apps. These are the practices from which this book seeks to learn, in what we call a ‘smart-from-below’ approach. This body of research also provided many additional insights, including the consequences of googling for health information, the role of the smartphone in specific settings such as an oncology clinic in Chile or tele-psychotherapy in Uganda, and the lessons learnt during Covid-19 around the problems in self-tracking. Overall, the authors show how an anthropological approach situated in the observation of everyday life can be the foundation for an alternative but highly promising perspective on the future of mHealth.

Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda
Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda

Author: Charlotte Hawkins

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2023-09-28

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1800085133

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Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda is based on a 16-month ethnography about experiences of ageing in a neighbourhood in central Kampala, Uganda. It examines the impact of smartphones and mobile phones on older people’s health and everyday lives as part of the global ASSA project. 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 ICTs 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, politics and service provision in Uganda. Through ethnographic consideration of everyday life and self-formation in this context, the monograph seeks to contribute to an ever-incomplete understanding of how we relate to each other and to the world around us.

Older Japanese Adults and Mobile Phones
Older Japanese Adults and Mobile Phones

Author: Kumiko Hachiya

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9781124538655

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The aging of Japan's population is advancing as Japanese baby boomers are getting older and the birthrate is low, and the government is concerned about how to bear the financial burden of increased pension payments and increasing medical costs for aging retirees with a much smaller work force as a tax base. The government has been building a high-speed broadband infrastructure since 2000 to streamline its services through the Internet; the majority of the aging population is not online.