Performing healthy ageing through images: From broadcasting to silence

Author:

Duque Marília1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. ESPM, Brazil; University College London, UK

Abstract

This article addresses the centrality of images in the definition of a new paradigm for ageing, when health (measured by autonomy) becomes a condition for freedom (associated with youth). Based on a 16-month ethnography conducted with older people (aged 50–80) in a middle-class district in São Paulo, Brazil, I found that smartphones empower older people to craft a health identity by engaging and producing content that highlights the positive aspects of ageing. In this community, health is a concept deeply associated with productivity, and social media becomes a space for participants to present themselves as busy, giving visibility to all of the activities they engage with. On WhatsApp groups, participants can also work as curators, sharing content that is in the public interest, which improves their collective experience of ageing and restores their sense of utility and dignity. I found that smartphones also allow participants to manipulate the mechanism of social comparison used to classify who is healthy and who is old. Often, when they have a condition or frailty, they confine themselves to online interactions, hiding from view the ageing body that could compromise their performance. By doing that, their declines are kept on the backstage of their social interactions, allowing participants to extend their presence within the third age, which is associated with freedom and autonomy, while the decline related to the fourth age is kept in the shadows.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Communication,Cultural Studies

Reference14 articles.

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