The relational, emotional and infrastructural work of older people in pandemic digital interventions

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the dynamics of peer support and companionship among older adults on a social networking site during the COVID-19 lockdown. Drawing from the authors’ five-month experience as volunteer facilitators and a qualitative study involving users, social workers, and managers, the paper examines two modes of online peer support and companionship: one based on voice messages, the other on visual messages. Guided by critical media and data studies, and incorporating concepts from cultural studies of mobile media and information infrastructure studies, the analysis highlights the interplay of relational/emotional and infrastructural work and uncovers intricate gendered and age-related configurations. Our conclusion emphasises, first, the need to comprehend how socio-technical systems shape emotional, relational, and infrastructural work during emergency digital interventions, and second, the importance of examining how specific notions of support and older people’s agency and response-ability are embedded in the socio-technical organisation of these digital interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational and emotional work
• infrastructural work
• older people
• COVID-19
• peer support
• social networking sites

Acknowledgements

We thank the managers, social workers, and participants of VinclesBCN for their valuable support. Special thanks to Victoria Andelsman Alvarez for insightful comments and recommendations from feminist media studies, to Alex Wilkie for manuscript feedback and to Laurel Lyon for the proofreading. We are indebted to Roser Beneito Montagut, our co-researcher in the VINCLES-COVID project, for invaluable discussions on the paper's themes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This paper is part of the VINCLES-COVID project, carried out by Daniel López Gómez, Roser Beneito Montagut and Israel Rodríguez Giralt under a commission contract with the City Council of Barcelona in 2020. Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. All names have been duly anonymized, and confidentiality has been assured for all participants and interviewees. The name of the service has been disclosed by explicit consent of its managers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the City Council of Barcelona.

Notes on contributors

Daniel López-Gómez

Daniel López-Gómez is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and Education and co-director of CareNet Research Group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). He works at the intersection of STS and Age Studies on the impact of technological and social innovations in aging societies specially in relation to the socio-material transformation of care and old age. His latest research explores the emergence of senior cohousing initiatives in Spain and the consequences of the pandemics in the transformation of long-term care institutions as well as the digitalisation of social support.

Israel Rodríguez-Giralt

Israel Rodríguez-Giralt is a Senior Researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), where he co-directs the CareNet Research Group. His work revolves around the forms of activism, social experimentation and political mobilisation of citizens and concerned groups in environmental crisis, disasters and public technoscientific controversies. His current research examines alternative conceptualisations of disasters and pandemics from an ethics of care.