Older People and Smartphone Practices in Everyday Life: An Inquire on Digital Sociality of Italian Older Users

This paper investigates the use of smartphone in older people everyday life and it is based on an empirical research involving 30 Italian smartphone users aged 62–76. The research drawn on the analysis of 75,089 log data, 3 collective and 20 face-to-face interviews. The paper describes the digital practices through which older users use smartphone to construct social relations within their everyday life as well as elaborate their own media ideologies. The article’s findings show that participants use smartphone for a limited amount of time and mainly to access WhatsApp. The smartphone is mainly used as an organizational device for activating momentary social connections to accomplish practical tasks. The ludic use of smartphone is rarely carried out. Specifically, we observed that through the smartphone, participants put into existence three kinds of “social spaces”: 1) a working space (with peers); 2) a space of augmented co-presences (with children); 3) a space of mutual digital education (grandchildren). In conclusion we argue that the forms of sociality participants put into existence through smartphone are marked by degrees of network privatism. While the media ideology they articulate around their everyday use of smartphone can be conceived as social media phobic.