About this event

Central to modern social and long-term care provision, information and communication technologies have shaped how care workers and families attend to people under their care from the social alarms of the latter half of the 20th century to contemporary generations of telecare and activity monitoring systems exploiting digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

Previous research on these technologies have often highlighted the spatial dimensions of these products that influence ‘care at a distance’ and the capacity to remain close through technologically mediated interactions (Oudshoorn 2012; Pols 2012).

Drawing on ethnographic research with people with dementia using assistive technology and telecare (NIHR, 2015-17) and care technology providers designing and deploying digital technology in adult social care (ESRC, 2018-2021), this paper adds a temporal dimension to explore how the implementation and uptake of information and communication technologies specifies particular forms of caring and its consequences.

Despite an individual’s sense of ‘closeness’ mediated by technologies, diverse spatial distances still influence the characteristics of caring interactions. Distant interactions place an increased emphasis on monitoring and surveillance as the ubiquity of telecommunication devices allows for care workers and families to monitor people instantaneously, potentially reducing response times during times of crisis.

However, other forms of care – practices dependent on physical proximity, touch and shared environment – and unable to be managed and performed with digital technology may become delayed and disrupted. This paper explores sensibilities and temporalities of care to define principles for sustainable and just technological innovation in care services and systems.

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About the speaker

Matthew Lariviere, Lecturer in Social Policy - School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol

Dr Matthew Lariviere is Lecturer in Social Policy in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. Matthew is a social anthropologist whose teaching, research and scholarship examines the sociomateriality of digital technology and AI within futurities of care and ageing.