ACT Scroll

On Wednesday June 26 ACT and  the Socio-gerontology Network hosted a panel discussion titled Mundane Media Moments: Ageing, the Ordinary and Everyday Life. Dr. Alexander Peine (chair of the Socio-gerontechnology Network) set the scene and moderated the discussion as a group of scholars shared their recent work and thoughts on how aging, the mundane, and technology are entangled. The question at the forefront of conversation was “How does the mundane matter?’. The audience and scholars were asked to consider how our daily practices are transformed by and with the technology in our lives. The panel moves past the assumption that technology is only worthwhile for its designed value and techno-optimist narratives about emerging designs.

Dr. Wendy Martin opened the panel discussion by highlighting just how much of what we do is “unremarkable”. Reframing the concept of mundane towards unremarkability, evaluates how human routine is interspersed with technology. Through a series of photos, Dr. Martin’s talk emphasized the tempo-spatial qualities of technology and their role within our daily routine. Martin highlighted how the pandemic puts into focus how the “mundane keeps us moving day by day” by helping us deal with challenging times and pointing to a relationship with technology when we think of what is missing.

Dr. Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol continued to explore the nature of the pandemic and the mundane by pointing to the insignificant ordinary questions we ask ourselves and others. Ordinary behaviours, like checking in with a friend, can quickly become remediated as our lives change. For her, the pandemic illuminates the mutability of mundane technologies where our communication goals change alongside our lives. Of course the pandemic was not the only focus, but rather it showed how some of our practices are typically rendered invisible until our lives begin to change. As our contexts change and we age, how we communicate and engage with technology does as well.

Providing tangible examples of this life-technology relationship, Dr. Galit Nimrod revisited their work on casual leisure with Grannies on the Net. Through rich focus group data, Nimrod pointed to casual leisure as a time filler commonly mediated by technology use. Unlike serious leisure that can quickly be tied to productive activities or “side-hustles”, a focus on casual leisure for older adults points to the various everyday life circumstances that they arise from. Time fillers are one example of a typically insignificant media moment that requires greater consideration.

Closing off the discussions, Dr. Daniel Lopez discussed ethnographic work on an app meant to counter older adult isolation. It explored how technology opens up new communication affordances for older adults, specifically focusing on memes. Memes, visual and textual images shared via a chat feature, completely altered the nature of communication on these devices and promoted specific behaviours through the app. Lopez’s work showed the paradoxes of technological affordances for altering communication. On the one hand, memes acted as an easy means to share and an inclusive form of communication. On the other hand, as more memes were posted the technology began to have storage issues and further isolated users by kicking them off the network. This relationship between everyday use and technology points to the need for research on the mundane forms of communication in our lives.

The panel ended with a series of questions posed by the audience which considered technological binaries, the nature of problematic technological actions (i.e., privacy), and how this exploration of the mundane directly feeds into policy and research directions. The panel proved fruitful in fostering dialogue between leading scholars whose work intersects age with socio-technology. ACT is so grateful to have co-hosted this lovely event and if you are interested the full video is available for view below.

When the pandemic rolled into Montreal in the early days of March, ACT decided to work with its local Montreal allies to support older adults in the Montreal community. We set up a grocery delivery project for older adults who were asked by government authorities to remain confined in their homes.

ACT partnered with Stephanie Dupont, a community organizer for the CIUSSS Centre-Ouest, as well as New Hope Seniors’ Centre, a community organization that works with isolated older adults. We launched our project in late March in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) neighbourhood of Montreal, where our Concordia University campus is based.

The local Meals on Wheels program had temporarily shut down because of COVID-19, and the NDG Grocery Response team looked to take over the client list and offer their services to other seniors in need. Creating a partnership with a local grocery store, the team set up a grocery ordering and delivery service that could get food to seniors within three days (sometimes even the same day). Recruiting volunteers from Concordia and from the community, the NDG Grocery Response project launched a phone service which older adults and isolated individuals could call. Callers would leave a message asking either for help with groceries or questions about the service. These messages would be dispatched to our team of volunteers who call back the clients and help them fill out an order.

As the project is now in its third month our client list has become relatively steady. Many of our volunteers have created strong relationships with our callers. While the project’s primary goal was to help food insecurity, combating isolation especially during a pandemic was almost as important. Volunteers were encouraged to have casual conversations with older adults, and many developed positive relationships that, for some, even extended beyond our program.

An important part of the project involved designing tools and promising practices for the implementation of similar projects across communities. A number of initiatives–beyond NDG–have drawn from the tools that were developed as part of this project, and ACT and its community partners have worked with other groups to help them start up their own grocery delivery service.

While the city starts to slowly re-open, the service is not going away anytime soon. Despite stores opening and people going back to work, programs like the local Meals on Wheels are still shut down, and many seniors prefer not venturing to the grocery store.. In fact, the project has brought to light the fact that seniors deal with food insecurity and difficulty accessing grocery store products in our neighbourhood for a number of reasons, not just because of a pandemic and physical distancing measures. With our partners, we are working to see how we can contribute to building lasting measures for a more food secure community.

Here is some early media coverage of the project:

1. http://www.thesuburban.com/life/community/pandemic-emergency-grocery-program-launched-for-seniors-70-in-ndg/article_52d9a384-8003-11ea-a58a-af4ce7b1f3a8.html
2. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1941294
3. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/covid-19-food-services-are-here-to-help-seniors-in-n-d-g-lachine/
4. https://globalnews.ca/news/6829391/coronavirus-ndg-seniors-grocery-delivery/
5. http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2020/04/16/concordias-act-project-facilitates-grocery-delivery-for-ndg-seniors-during-the-covid-19-pandemic.html