Book notes: <i>The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology</i>

Miller, Daniel; Rabho, Laila Abed; Awondo, Patrick; Vries, Maya de; Duque, Marília; Garvey, Pauline; Haapio‐Kirk, Laura; Hawkins, Charlotte; Otaegui, Alfonso; Walton, Shireen; Wang, Xinyuan

doi:10.1177/02673231211045280b

Cited by 24 publications

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“…Centro Risorse LGBTI 2017, cited in Selmi et al 2019. On the theory and concept of the Transportal Home see Miller et al 2021. 11.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

2021

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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...

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“…Centro Risorse LGBTI 2017, cited in Selmi et al 2019. On the theory and concept of the Transportal Home see Miller et al 2021. 11.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…9. For more on this idea of the smartphone as 'Transportal Home', see the ASSA project's collective volume, The Global Smartphone (Miller et al 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

2021

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“…To date, much research has been conducted on how research participants in different global and local settings use, adapt, and appropriate digital media technologies such as mobiles phones and smartphones (e.g., Hjorth & Arnold, 2013;Miller et al, 2021;Slater & Kwami, 2005). Less attention has been given to methodological considerations of smartphone use by ethnographers/researchers themselves, although research has provided growing insights into innovative ways of using the smartphone as a valuable tool, with all its beneficial and problematic sides, for relationship building, data collection, and teaching (Favero & Theunissen, 2018;Kaufmann, 2018;Verstappen, 2021).…”

Section: Smartphones and Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

Jovicic

2022

MaC

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“Hanging out” and establishing “rapport” is an essential part of the ethnographic encounter in anthropology. But what happens when the smartphone, seemingly a distraction from the relationship in the making, creates a wall between the anthropologist and the interlocutor? While smartphones have been widely explored as a media technology used by the interlocutors, or as research tools, their affective grip on the researchers themselves has received less attention to date. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with visitors of two youth centers in Vienna, Austria, in 2019, I argue that the moment when the smartphone becomes part of the affective triad, alongside the researcher and the interlocutor, also presents a window on the entanglement of digital technologies with everyday life. Moreover, affective ripples emerging from such irritations also expose underlying assumptions about how ethnographic encounters should ideally proceed and what constitutes rapport and “good” ethnographic relationships, seemingly a prerequisite for successful ethnographies. Hence, affective entanglements and irritations that arise in this context are not disturbances to be discarded or smoothed over in the ethnographic narratives. While the smartphone appears to impair the ethnographic encounter at first, its designed porosity allows the researcher to develop a particular sensitivity to issues of rapport, consent, and privacy, and to negotiate the space of potentiality of ambiguous, door-like situations, thus becoming a methodological blessing rather than a curse.

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“…It follows from the way smartphones have developed into what in our comparative book (Miller et al . 2021) we call ‘The Transportal Home’. The term implies that a smartphone is as much a place we live within as a device we use.…”

Section: Smartphones and The Extended Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

Grandparenting as the resolution of kinship as experience

Miller

Garvey

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article argues that a population of relatively affluent retired people in a small Irish town have employed the possibilities of grandparenting to resolve many of the tensions of contemporary kinship. This includes the tension between the obligations of prescriptive relationships as against the voluntarism of friendship. This is considered against a background shift in kinship studies towards a distinction between kinship as a category and kinship as experience. Kinship as experience often now comprises a series of deep fluctuations during the life course. Experience is also extended by the growth in life expectancy. This makes it still more important that the legacy of an individual's prior experiences of kinship may be partially resolved through the experience of grandparenting. The profound consequences of grandparenting lie not in the relationship to the grandchildren but in the possibilities that grandparenting offers to recalibrate all other kinship relations. These include the relationship with one's own children, the relationship with partners, the legacy of one's prior experience of being a parent, and even the memory of the way one was parented when a child.

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Book notes: The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

The Affective Triad: Smartphone in the Ethnographic Encounter

Grandparenting as the resolution of kinship as experience

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