Ageing with Smartphones in Japan: Care in a Visual Digital Age - Paperback

by Laura Haapio-Kirk (Author)

How smartphones are shifting the daily lives of older adults post-retirement in Kyoto and Kochi Prefecture, Japan.

Ageing with Smartphones in Japan examines sixteen months of ethnographic research following older adults, age fifty and up, in urban Kyoto and rural Kochi Prefecture, Japan as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement in the age of the smartphone. It attempts to answer what this transition means for friendship, gendered labor, multigenerational living, internal migration, health, as well as life purpose for older adults. This book closely investigates how the smartphone challenges gender-based norms and how older adults creatively navigate them. Using comics, drawings, and fieldwork sketches it also explores how they use digital visual communication to socialize with friends and family.

Author Biography

Laura Haapio-Kirk is a junior research fellow in anthropology at Christ Church, University of Oxford.