Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Abstract

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 7. Coming of age with smartphones 8. Life purpose: narratives of ageing 9. Conclusion: threading together Bibliography Index vi Chapter summariesThis book is a fabric woven with the threads of multiple voices, ages and experiences. The resulting narrative is a combination of intersecting elements that make up the experience of age as, above all, the experience of living with and through many types of change. The northeasterly innercity 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 environment 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, discussing how individuals and groups invariably experience age and generation 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 Chapter SummarieS vii smartphone, as will be illustrated throughout the volume, has prominence 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 technological innovation, which, coupled with digital, urban and smart city developments in the city of Milan in recent years, has br...