Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy Care and community in Milan and beyond Shireen Walton First published in 2021 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Author, 2021 Images © Author and copyright holders named in captions, 2021 The author has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial Non- derivative 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC- ND 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use provided author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Walton, S. 2021. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and community in Milan and beyond. London: UCL Press. https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787359710 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ Any third- party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third- party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 973- 4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 972- 7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 971- 0 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 974- 1 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1- 78735- 975- 8 (mobi) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781787359710 Contents Chapter summaries vi List of figures xiii Series Foreword xvi Acknowledgements xviii 1. Introduction 1 2. Experiences of ageing: policies, perceptions and practices 21 3. Everyday life, activities and activisms 43 4. Social relations: social availability 61 5. Smartphones: constant companions 81 6. Health and care in digital times 107 7. Coming of age with smartphones 129 8. Life purpose: narratives of ageing 142 9. Conclusion: threading together 161 Bibliography 171 Index 182 v Chapter summaries This book is a fabric woven with the threads of multiple voices, ages and experiences. The resulting narrative is a combination of intersecting ele- ments that make up the experience of age as, above all, the experience of living with and through many types of change. The northeasterly inner- city neighbourhood in Milan’s zone 2, which in recent years has been termed ‘NoLo’ (North of Piazzale Loreto), is the physical setting of the volume, while much of the ethnography also took place in digital spaces and places that extend to the rest of Milan and, as the title of the book suggests, to much of the world beyond. As outlined in the Series Foreword, this book forms part of a series based on the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy is not specifically a study of digital technologies among urban seniors in Italy. It approaches the subjects of ageing, smartphones and the urban Italian context in a broad anthropological frame, drawing on the holistic benefits of long- term urban and digital ethnography in order to examine the experiences of a wide range of people, of different ages and backgrounds, and how their lives play out amid multiple scales. These scales include multiple social contexts within the neighbourhood of NoLo, in the broader urban envi- ronment of Milan, across the country, and transnationally and digitally online in a changing Italy, Europe and world. A main focus of the book is the experience of midlife and older age, reflecting the ASSA project’s collective research objectives and interest in studying ageing and technologies among older populations. However, this book also examines the lives of younger adults in Italy as a complementary perspective, discuss- ing how individuals and groups invariably experience age and genera- tion as an identity marker, alongside gender, sexuality, class and race. A range of categories and classifications are shown to impact upon individuals’ sense of self, subjectivity and well- being at different points in their life, including where they feel they belong as they grow older or ‘come of age’ within – and beyond – the national context of Italy. The vi smartphone, as will be illustrated throughout the volume, has promi- nence in this figuring-out of life and the self, through the individual and collective forms of expression that the book examines. The book is set within a broader global moment of rapid techno- logical innovation, which, coupled with digital, urban and smart city developments in the city of Milan in recent years, has brought about a number of changes in how people live, communicate, work and retire. At the same time, ageing also involves experiencing a number of signifi- cant physiological changes, to and within the body, that affect how people live, view themselves and regard others. The book highlights how the smartphone device that accompanies people in their daily lives becomes embedded in wider practical, emotional and existential questions that in turn shape the embodied experience of life and the passing of time in this context. The smartphone, in this particular, anthropological account of ageing in a neighbourhood in Milan, is shown to be a tool for life, and for the multiple and creative ways in which research participants seek to tackle the various challenges and contradictions they experience and feel, or what I refer to as the ‘ethical entanglements’ of life’s course. Key findings One of the core findings of the book relates to how categories of age are evolving in the light of wider changes in human sociality, mobility and aspiration in the digital era, and this is the focus of chapters 1 and 2. Research participants across the middle and older age groups expressed that they did not generally feel their age. Age may be associated with specific categories or expectations of being ‘old’ that might reflect normative ideas about being a grandparent, being at home or experiencing frailty, but ageing itself was part of a broader phenomenon, of experiencing life and its many changes. Official categories of age of course have specific implications in Italy as elsewhere; for example, the official retirement and pension age (currently 67) and the receipt of social support benefits apply to older adults, while for the children of citizens born in another country, who can apply for Italian citizenship only after the age of 18, age is a distinct political and legal marker. The book argues that it is impor- tant to acknowledge and deconstruct the top- down categories of age and separate them from the broader and subjective experiences of people in their everyday lives, including situating age and ageing within a broader framework of social and political justice concerning inequalities and dis- criminations throughout society. The experience of (older) age in a social CHAPTER SUMMARIES vii sense is therefore differentiated from the experience of frailty, as a sig- nificant scholarship over many decades on the anthropology of age and ageing across the globe has highlighted,1 and which is consistent with evidence from other fieldsites in the ASSA project, such as Ireland and Brazil, where people expressed similar distinctions. In NoLo, Milan, initiatives aimed at older people (anziani), such as ‘active ageing’ or retirement groups, did not necessarily appeal to research participants who were retired. This was particularly seen among women, many of whom had experienced new forms of social agency through retirement, or generally in older age through volunteering, public service and neighbourhood activities, which constitute the focus of chapter 3. This chapter discusses how people in their sixties and seven- ties are very present and active in the public sphere in Milan, undertaking volunteering and a range of activities within the neighbourhood of NoLo, from allotment clubs, sewing groups and choirs to charities, church groups and cultural NGOs that work with migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Social (and political) engagement in everyday life reflected people’s moral and social outlooks through altruistic activities, and char- ity and social work: through these engagements people experienced an ethical engagement and a sense of purpose, and daily life in retirement had structure, routine and meaning. These public forms of participation were enhanced by WhatsApp and social media participation and interac- tions. The range of activities presented in chapter 3 highlights the signif- icance of cross-generational and cross-cultural social participation across the neighbourhood and in the experience of ageing with smartphones in this context. At the same time, sociality has its limits. The theme of monitoring one’s social life is something I pick up in chapter 4, which is built upon a theoretical framework I call ‘social availability’. Social availability as a theoretical concept describes how people modulate their social participation or ‘availability’ to others via a range of mechanisms, from closing window shutters at certain times of the day to obtain some shelter, per- haps from sunlight or cold weather, or from the obligation to be social, to the smartphone version of this, such as exiting an app or purposely being seen as ‘offline’. The issue here is about individuals’ sense of autonomy and privacy in the social contexts of their lives, and how time for oneself is carved out and enjoyed amid broader social and care responsibilities, off- and online, and locally, transregionally or transnationally. Wanting to be variously socially ‘available’ or ‘unavailable’ can be about individual desires for social and private time, which may also reflect concerns about surveillance and privacy that arise from smartphone use and the viii CHAPTER SUMMARIES sharing of personal data.

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