Cover of the book Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland - When Life Becomes Craft

CULTURE

In the ever-evolving landscape where digital complexities meet human culture, few scholars navigate with the insight and skill of Professor Danny Miller. As the director of the Centre for Digital Anthropology at University College London, Miller's work delves deep into the profound implications of technology on society. With meticulous attention to detail and a dedication to immersive fieldwork, his research uncovers the nuanced realities of everyday life in the digital age. In this exclusive conversation, we explore Miller's pioneering investigations, from the shifting dynamics of age and smartphones to the grassroots innovations shaping the future of mHealth technologies.

You are the director of the Centre for Digital Anthropology at UCL. Could you please explain the thinking behind digital anthropology?

Anthropology is quite a strange discipline. On the one hand it involves the broad and diverse study of the nature of humanity, and yet a main methodology within the discipline, known as ethnography or participant observation, may consist of living within, and observing a small community for a significant amount of time; interacting with just a few hundred people in a number of communities to generate comparative data and information on cultures and societies. Both arms of the discipline are equally important when it comes to understanding the nature and consequence of digital technologies in our world. Every day there are claims made about how social media and artificial intelligence are adversely affecting us. The preponderance of these claims, and the negativity around digital devices, such as smartphone addiction, have largely come about through promotion by the media, who sell their publications by creating anxiety.

In today’s climate we need scholarly studies that are completely focused on getting an accurate impression of what is really going on. A major hindrance to this is the large discrepancy between what people say and what they do. Ask someone about the problem with smartphones and they will often give you the standard criticisms, and yet at the same time they are using their phone more and more, and seem to appreciate the benefits. For example, while they might talk about addiction to social media, they become quite positive when telling detailed stories about how WhatsApp has brought the extended family closer together. It is therefore important that we have studies that patiently document the use of digital devices in everyday life rather than just asking for people’s opinions.

At the same time, anthropology is a discipline that should question the big picture of what we even mean by terms such as ‘the digital world’. Currently, I’m editing a book, with a colleague, about digital anthropology in China. You soon realise that, although we think the way we talk about ‘all things digital’ is in a neutral language and concerns technology, the digital world is actually quite culturally different across the globe. New technology and platforms, such as drones, social media and AI, are based on language learning and thereby discriminate in favour of English. In the west, we first saw online activities as a bifurcation between the virtual and the real. While, in China, the concern has been more about rival claims between the state and commercial companies, with regard to historical responsibilities related to the idea of community well-being and harmony. Here, such ‘claims’ are simply more readily accepted as real. This is consistent with differences in the way technology itself has been understood for millennia.

Hopefully these two examples explain why we felt it was important to have a specifically anthropological approach to studying the use and consequences of digital technologies. In fact, we were the first department at University College London to really engage with this and, as far as I know, we are still the only department in the
world that has a specific programme devoted to digital anthropology.

During your smartphone and ageing global project, a team of anthropologists lived in various cities across the globe for 16 months to conduct comprehensive research examining the role of the smartphone in shaping the ageing experience. Could you explain how you chose the cities and what were the most interesting differences between the countries?

You can’t really do a sample of the world. We chose field sites to reflect sufficient diversity to represent behaviour around the world; but we also had to ensure there were qualified anthropologists available to carry out the research in each country. So, with respect to age, it was important that we have a field site such as Japan, which exemplifies one end of the ageing population. Our book opens with a Japanese woman in her 90s who can’t understand why younger people aren’t making as much use of a smartphone as she is. Whilst at the other end of the spectrum, low income areas of Kampala, Uganda, describe a population where people can start to feel elderly in their 40s.

Having a range of field sites allows us to question the presumptions that we may hold about the relationship between particular social media platforms, or devices such as smartphones, and ageing. In most regions we studied, it is simply taken for granted that technology has an almost intrinsic link with young people; as though technology naturally belongs to the young. While older people may (have to) learn to use technology, they themselves don’t identify with technology, and assume that such things must be more difficult to grasp for older people, than for younger people.

This contrasts with our findings in Shanghai. Older people here strongly identify with the mission of the Chinese state to become a vanguard in the global world, partly through leapfrogging other regions in their facility with new digital technologies. And because older people identify with this mission they see it as part of their duty as citizens to join this movement in the use of these technologies. We found in Shanghai, where young people might take their grandparents to the restaurant, they would complain because instead of talking with them, their grandparents seem to be intent on spending all their time on the phone. Such examples help you realise that our assumptions about the relationship between older people and technologies are just that, assumptions… but not necessarily reality.

The smartphone played a double role in your project: they were the object of research and also served as an important research documentation tool. Could you discuss this dual role?

Public discourse about the smartphone is relentlessly negative, so if you just ask people about them, that is what you hear. But interestingly, the relationship is not so much with a single object - the smartphone - but with the multitude of different apps and functions for which the smartphone merely acts as a vehicle. So, in our research we asked people to open up their phones and we went through every app and collected stories about how people use them, and their experiences. This helped because their responses tended to be more descriptive and less moralistic. But it also showed that merely counting the number of apps on a phone is not very helpful to understanding usage. Often older people had games on their phones put there by grandchildren, or they had apps that somebody had persuaded them to add but they never really used.

When it comes to messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, as a researcher you can spend hours coming to understand just how integral these types of apps have become to people’s lives. For example, the way WhatsApp groups have evolved, from being used to help coordinate care for people when they become frail for example, to how a WhatsApp group can reverse the historical trend from extended to nuclear families; instead of infrequent, extended family get-togethers (meeting up at Christmas say), the cousins may have an active WhatsApp group that continues communication throughout the year.

As you suggest, the smartphone itself also becomes a research tool, as formal interviews are likely to be recorded on such devices. The researchers also made short videos to help illustrate their findings, and these were usually filmed on smartphones. The use of smartphones in the research methodology often led to an individual telling us a bit about an app they have on their phone, but then when they click on it and see evidence about something that they had done, this prompts them to tell us a whole story that they may otherwise have forgotten. Once again this reveals how intricate and embedded the relationship is between people and their smartphones.

Pauline Garvey and I are currently editing a book discussing the anthropology of retirement. One of the key points we make came from the study we did in Ireland. We found that many people were retiring before they reached 61 years old; with life expectancy increasing to 90 years, people may conceivably spend more time in retirement than the time spent in their entire working life. Yet there are hundreds of books written about working life compared to the relatively few discussing retirement years. From this perspective, retirement is no longer an event, but a long period of life that changes over decades. Our subtitle - When Life Becomes Craft was not about people taking up craft. It was rather to suggest that in retirement, people’s main preoccupation is with crafting their own lives. In this Irish case study, most retired people remain very busy both in terms of their social lives, and activities that range from yoga to bridge to walking to book reading groups.

Increasingly the hub around which all of this is organised has become the smartphone. The smartphone is the vehicle for people to arrange meetings, ensure there is a room available when they get there, find the bus to get to the meeting or to follow
street directions, remember the date in their calendar, tell others about what happened through Zoom, pay a bill or to help find something they had forgotten on the bus. Equally, important to this ‘crafting of life over time’ is the focus that the smartphone offers to well-being and health. I recently wrote a paper about the impact of googling health information and how this exacerbates differences and inequalities of class. But it is hard to even think about health these days without including Dr Google. If we then extend this to the way artificial intelligence is now used in diagnosis, or the way we order prescriptions online or provide evidence for health insurance, it’s clear that health itself has become inextricably linked to digital technologies.

Given the increasing prevalence of smartphones among older adults, how do you perceive the role of technology in shaping perceptions of age and fostering a sense of youthfulness among older individuals?

I tend to shy away from trying to proclaim digital technologies as either good or bad but instead try to show how they almost always have simultaneously both good and bad consequences. There are many people for whom the main effect of technology is actually to exacerbate their sense of being elderly. In that they feel increasingly excluded from so much that is going on around them. As health and government services go online and alternative forms of communication become restricted, they find themselves discriminated against, and when they turn to the young for digital help, they may feel they are treated in a demeaning or humiliating manner. In all these ways smartphones can worsen some of the most negative feelings associated with ageing.

In the past, we used to assume that people over 40 would never use smartphones or social media, but through my research I have seen this assumption disappear as people in their 90s take up smartphones. Once older people have mastered the technology, then smartphones have quite the opposite effect. When people in their 70s start listening to the music of the ‘70s, try out dating apps like Plenty of Fish or play games on their phones, this reinforces the fact that our previous ideas of ageing need to change. ‘Senior citizens’ as such have disappeared, and it is possible to continue to feel youthful.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the future directions for research and policy initiatives aimed at leveraging smartphones and mHealth technologies to promote healthy ageing and social inclusion?

The final book from our project is about the development of mHealth technologies, in which each chapter examines a different example of smartphone use, from helping in a chemotherapy clinic in Santiago, Chile, to keeping in touch with isolated older people in rural Japan. I have also just produced a game, with a colleague, to help people to learn about the relationship between diet and hypertension in Trinidad. It is called Trini Food Quiz and can be downloaded onto a phone.

In my book The Comfort of People, published in 2017, I examined the work of the hospice and how new communication technologies can be valuable in helping older people, in this case with a terminal diagnosis, to retain their social connections when they become more immobile. A particularly important feature given the degree of loneliness and isolation amongst older people in the UK. The most important message of this book is to advance an attitude we call smart-from-below. In the past, policy, with regard to the use of new technologies, has tended to be dictated from above, with governments and corporations promoting the uses they imagine would be helpful. But in a world of smartphones, things have become just too diverse, and change too rapid. I believe this means that the source of genuine creativity and imagination as to how new technologies might improve the lives of older people has therefore shifted, and in the future the onus lies with older people themselves. It is we who constantly find new workarounds or create combinations of apps that suit our purposes. It is we who turned WhatsApp into a health app often preferring this to the bespoke apps created by health corporations, because we prefer to use the apps that are familiar and comfortable to us.

So we have reached the stage when policy needs to learn from us as much as the other way round. And that also gives a new role to anthropology, because we are the discipline that is embedded in community, and can be present and observe the creativity and ingenuity of older people as we craft our lives as we craft our smartphones.

Professor Daniel Miller is an anthropologist and founder of the digital anthropology programme at University College London. He has pioneered the study of digital anthropology and especially ethnographic research on the use and consequences of social media and smartphones as part of the everyday life of ordinary people around the world. This research has culminated in many books, including Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland - When Life Becomes Craft.