No future for care without new digital media? Making time(s) for mediated informal care practices in later life

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using social media and digital platforms as allies to strengthen social support among the aged. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations of 21 people in their 80s, the article foregrounds the multiple and intersecting temporalities of informal mediated care practices in later life through an exploration of the wide range of infrastructures on which they rely, from social media platforms to housing and urban infrastructure. We identify four temporalities of mediated informal care to assert the need to problematize the future-oriented temporalities of new caring media. The article paves the way to consider infrastructures of informal care as making time in multiple forms, irrespective of their newness or oldness, or the futures that every new piece of technology and service may potentially bring to our present.