Socio-gerontechnology

Interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Ageing and Technology

Alexander Peine, Barbara Marshall, Wendy Martin, Louis Neven, Alexander Peine, Barbara L. Marshall, Wendy Martin, Louis Neven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000317534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Social change in the twenty-first century is shaped by both demographic changes associated with ageing societies and significant technological change and development. Outlining the basic principles of a new academic field, Socio-gerontechnology, this book explores common conceptual, theoretical and methodological ideas that become visible in the critical scholarship on ageing and technology at the intersection of Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS).Comprised of 15 original chapters, three commentaries and an afterword, the book explores how ageing and technology are already interconnected and constantly being intertwined in Western societies. Topics addressed cover a broad variety of socio-material domains, including care robots, the use of social media, ageing-in-place technologies, the performativity of user involvement and public consultations, dementia care and many others. Together, they provide a unique understanding of ageing and technology from a social sciences and humanities perspective and contribute to the development of new ontologies, methodologies and theories that might serve as both critique of and inspiration for policy and design.International in scope, including contributions from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, Socio-gerontechnology is an agenda-setting text that will provide an introduction for students and early career researchers as well as for more established scholars who are interested in ageing and technology.

Chapters 3, 5, and 15 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Chapter 1 Socio-gerontechnology: key themes, future agendas

Alexander Peine, Barbara L. Marshall, Wendy Martin and Louis Neven

Two key drivers that underlie societal change in the twenty-first century are demographic changes associated with ageing societies and significant changes in technology. There has been a proliferation of technologies within our daily lives, including a vast growth in digital devices and information systems of communication. Technologies have moreover become increasingly immersed into the daily lives of people as they grow older and have become significant to identities, lifestyles and social networks of people in mid-to-later life. At the same time, these two drivers of change have mostly been explored in different disciplines: Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The premise and focus of this edited collection is to explore the possibilities and limitations of bringing STS and Age Studies together as a means to improve the quality of life and everyday lives of people as they grow older.

In particular, we seek to establish the relevance of and the basic principles for a new academic field: Socio-gerontechnology. The book highlights work from academics and researchers from Age Studies and STS to advance a cross-pollination of ideas, theorising, research and methodologies and to highlight areas for future theoretical and empirical development. Our aim is to understand and overcome any divides between social and cultural analyses of ageing, on the one hand, and engineering- and design-based approaches, on the other. We endeavour therefore to develop more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of the constitution of ageing as intertwined with the use and design of technology, including digital technologies.

The contributions in this book present major themes from an ongoing conversation that the editors and the contributors have had, together with many others, over the last five to ten years. Our focus and overall topic of conversation – ageing and technology – is in many ways quite well established and popularised among policymakers, the public and academics. Yet, in the shadow of this broad mainstream attention, there is also growing concern from scholars in the social sciences, the humanities and design studies, that dominant approaches to ageing and technology have been under-theorised and over-reliant on troubling stereotypes of older people and underlying assumptions about the ways in which technology can ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ of old age and ageing populations. This book provides a forum for critical explorations of these assumptions and stereotypes and at the same time generates important theoretical and empirical insights as reference points for future research, policymaking and design.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429278266-1

A critical approach to ageing and technology

The first motivation behind this book is the simple but crucial observation that age and ageing are increasingly intertwined with the development, deployment and use of technology. Of course, ageing and technology have long been connected: one need only think of eyeglasses, hearing aids, walking canes and large-button television remotes, for example. However, the proliferation of digital technologies, with their potential to monitor and link individuals and their data, opens up a number of important lines of enquiry around ageing and technology today and into the future. On the one hand, a vast array of non-age-specific digital technologies like smartphones, fitness trackers, voice assistants, electrical bicycles and so forth have become part of the daily lives of older people. At the same time, we witness a wide variety of both well-endowed public innovation and technology development programmes and private consumer technology initiatives specifically aimed at older people, including, for instance, the development of care robots, alarm pendants, remote monitoring systems or health data tracking apps. While the former – the use of everyday digital technologies by older people – is still not fully appreciated and understood by academics and policymakers (Hebblethwaite 2016; Gallistl and Nimrod 2020), the latter – the design of gerontechnologies, that is, technologies specifically designed for older people – seems to follow a largely uncritical interventionist agenda (Peine and Neven 2019): There is still a widespread belief among the public, academy and industry that ageing and technology are separate and somewhat alien domains, so that age and ageing can figure neatly as an untapped potential in the technosolutionist dreams and fears of technology development and innovation policy (Neven and Peine 2017).

Gerontechnology enthusiasts are right to argue that futures of ageing are bound up with technology. However, this scenario comes with risks, not the least of which is expressed in the tension between visions of late-life independence versus the surveillance of older people. Given the problematic assumptions of the interventionist agenda, one might reasonably assume that the social sciences and humanities would have a loud and clear voice on some of these questions. And indeed, the last decade or so has seen an upsurge of studies from the social sciences, humanities and design studies that share a critical view of the established thinking and theorising about ageing and technology in academic and policy debates. This sizeable and growing body of scholarship addresses the multiple and complex intertwinements of ageing and technology that already exists,¹ and has begun to replace naive bio- and techno-deterministic understandings of ageing and technology with the emergence of empirical studies in the design and use of technology by and for older people (Peine and Neven 2019).

It is this notion of critique that runs through the contributions in this book, and that is central to the formation of Socio-gerontechnology. It is thus important that we are specific about what we mean by critical. We write this introduction during a global pandemic, and while all contributions to this book were planned and written before the onset of COVID-19, the pandemic has sharply brought into focus a number of issues that demonstrate the value of a critical perspective. It has placed digital technologies in the spotlight as a means to mitigate the isolation of quarantined elders, permitting remote delivery of healthcare, as well as allowing families and friends to express care for, and sometimes say goodbye to, their dying loved ones. We are likely now all familiar with widely circulated images of sad-looking old women gazing wistfully out of windows that accompanied much of the press that aired these issues. At the same time, it is likely that older people also used technologies while quarantined for more routine domestic tasks, as well as recreational and creative pursuits – for example, ordering groceries, searching for recipes, participating in and producing content for social media, or engaging in online activism.

There are a number of far-reaching issues that we can unpack in these simple examples. These issues become visible when we appreciate them not as unfettered windows into the lives of older people but as also carrying and producing specific forms of ageing-technology relations. On the surface, images of sad-looking and apparently lonely older people seem to be well intended. They draw our attention to a problem that older people face. Because older people are considered to be a high-risk group for COVID-19, physical contacts with family, friends and care givers are considered to be especially risky, and even irresponsible for them, and in the case of care homes, often completely banished. The prevailing discourse is that many older people are in a very problematic and risky situation that needs our immediate concern. In this bleak vision of the lives of older people, where human-to-human contacts are ruled out as a possible solution, digital technologies already lurk in the background as shiny and obvious saviours.

A critical perspective makes clear that the sad-looking woman is not only a vignette of the impact that the global pandemic may have on older people. When broadening the perspective to include the political and cultural forces that are entangled within that image, she appears instead as yet another manifestation of a long standing narrative that tends to overemphasise the potential for technologies to ‘solve’ problems of declining health and increasing ‘frailty’ and social isolation among older people (Neven and Peine 2017). The global pandemic has worked as a pressure cooker that has produced new configurations of old ageist and gendered stereotypes of age and ageing as problems, in which technology is seen as a solution. Such configurations may justify more funding for existing research, but evade the more complicated questions of deeply engrained sources of social exclusion, isolation and inequalities or that may simply provide a new playing field for existing innovations, such as care robots or telemonitoring systems.

But on the flipside, related and even more interesting questions can now also be asked about the actions and policies that are left out in the images of sad-looking older people. What kind of “problems” and “solutions” come to mind if we take the creative use of social media and digital apps by older people during the global pandemic as our starting point? What if we focused on the many creative and resourceful technical and non-technical solutions (Giaccardi et al. 2016) that older people themselves have come up with, not only to cope with lockdowns and quarantines but in their everyday lives? This would imply focusing on a very different configuration of ageing and technology relations, with different sets of questions to be asked. One could ask, for instance, about the conditions under which the resourceful use of technology can flourish, or about the community conditions under which these can be shared and embedded into existing social and material arrangements of care (López Gómez 2015). By doing so, alternative worlds and ageing futures become conceivable, in which different types of innovation policies create different opportunities for improving the quality of life of older people; or where different creative solutions by older people to problems of care bring into focus different ideas of what legitimate care technology is to begin with (Bergschöld et al. 2020).

The contributions in this book are critical in the sense that they focus on the relations between ageing and technology as being constitutive of each other (Peine and Neven 2020). In terms of theoretical reflexivity, they voice critique towards the instrumental view of technology that is so deeply engrained in current debates around ageing and technology and that produces and indeed understands ageing – however fine-grained it is described – as a target for technological interventions. All contributions raise questions about fundamental assumptions in dominant academic and political debates – not only about any form of ageing or technology in particular but about the nature of their relations. Critique is directed, in a broad variety of forms, at the assumption that ageing and technology are separate or unproblematically separable. Instead, the contributions in this book show, theoretically and empirically, how such separations are made in practice and which versions of ageing and of technology are produced as a result. As feminist philosopher Karen Barad would say (Barad 2007), separation of ageing and technology is part of the same “agential cut” that also enacts older people and the technologies they incorporate, use or otherwise relate to. This perspective offers new opportunities for theorising about ageing and technology.

Along with theoretical reflexivity, the normative stance of Age Studies also demands practical criticism in studies of ageing and technology. In this form of critique, it is essential that we move beyond considerations of ageing and technology that presuppose age as a marker of diminished access to, interest in or ability to use technology, and that deploy ageing as synonymous with physical decline and decrepitude (and by extension, as a drain on public resources). While these may indeed be issues that deserve empirical exploration, we argue that there are larger questions at stake, many of which demand a fuller, more socio-political account of how older bodies become problematised, let alone how technologies are marketed as solutions, and how particular kinds of knowledge or expertise about ageing are valorised. Critical studies of ageing and technology lay bare the underlying social, infrastructural, political, economic, cultural and material processes that produce and hold in place such considerations.

A further notion of critique pertains to the various non-positivist approaches that have informed the contributions in this book. Critical studies in ageing and technology reject determinist notions of ageing as solely the matter of biology and corporeality as much as they reject determinist notions of technology as solely the matter of nuts and bolts and engineering practice. Instead, a critical agenda of ageing and technology underscores the need for empirical analyses that unpack exactly how ageing and technology are related to each other, how the technical, the biological, the social, the political and so forth are seamlessly entangled (Hughes 1986) in these relations, and it feeds results thus gained back into normative discussions and generalisations that can inform practical questions. Such analyses are not limited to stereotypical places like homes, neighbourhoods, care facilities and ocean cruise liners but can be studied in places less familiar in more traditional scholarship on age and ageing, like laboratories, design studios, boardrooms of technological corporations, innovation policy discourses, and media representations of new devices and their users, to give some examples (Peine and Neven 2020).

Interdisciplinary studies of ageing and technology

Yet, while criticism has emerged in various fields, it has also remained scattered and fragmented. This brings us to the second motivation behind the formation of Socio-gerontechnology and indeed to the crux of this book: to tap into the potential of the interdisciplinary boundary zone in which critical studies of ageing and technology lie. In taking the intersections of Age Studies and STS as our starting point, we seek to nurture what we believe is the potential for a particularly fruitful dialogue. While we cannot claim to be comprehensive or deny the diversity that necessarily exists, it is our intent to show that this dialogue is indeed significant and mature enough to warrant the proclamation of a new academic field – that is, that there is a common ground both broad enough to carry a new research field and also specific enough to show how this field is different and new.

Two developments have been important for shaping our perspective. The first is a turn in Age Studies towards technology. We use the term Age Studies to collectively identify a range of critical scholarship that has challenged and offered alternatives to the biomedical hegemony in understanding age and ageing (Katz 2014; Twigg and Martin 2015b) to focus instead on how age and ageing themselves are socially and culturally produced. In Age Studies, technology has increasingly been recognised as part of the production of age and ageing (Katz 2018). For instance, recent work has turned increasingly towards a view of age as measured and experienced in ways which reject a reduction to chronology, and attends to the technical tools of measurement and standardisation as these call forth particular ways of managing age and ageing populations (Marshall and Katz 2016). Increasing quantification and digitisation of ageing bodies raise important questions about the circulation and aggregation of data as it contributes to the surveillance of, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Note on contributors
• Note on editors
• 1 Socio-gerontechnology: key themes, future agendas
• 2 Age, actors and agency: what we can learn from Age Studies and STS for the development of Socio-gerontechnology
• PART I Bridges: critical frameworks of ageing and technology
• PART II Encounters: empirical approaches to ageing and technology
• PART III Design: critical reflections and new approaches
• Index