Open AccessAgeing, embodiment and datafication: Dynamics of power in digital health and care technologies
Author(s) -
Nicole K. Dalmer,
Kirsten Ellison,
Stephen Katz,
Barbara Marshall
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
international journal of ageing and later life
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.341
H-Index - 15
ISSN - 1652-8670
DOI - 10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.3499
Subject(s) - precarity , technoscience , power (physics) , sociology , gerontechnology , dynamics (music) , health care , technological change , gender studies , inequality , social science , economic growth , economics , mathematical analysis , pedagogy , physics , demography , mathematics , quantum mechanics , macroeconomics
As a growing body of work has documented, digital technologies are central to the imagining of aging futures. In this study, we offer a critical, theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics of power related to the technological tracking, measuring, and managing of aging bodies at the heart of these imaginaries. Drawing on critical gerontology, feminist technoscience, sociology of the body, and socio-gerontechnology, we identify three dimensions of power relations where the designs, operations, scripts, and materialities of technological innovation implicate asymmetrical relationships of control and intervention: (1) aging bodies and the power of numbers, (2) aging spaces and the power of surveillance, and (3) age care economies and gendered power relations. While technological care for older individuals has been promoted as a cost-effective way to enhance independence, security, and health, we argue that such optimistic perspectives may obscure the realities of social inequality, agist bias, and exploitative gendered care labour.