Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness Through an Ageing, Science, and Technology Lens

Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness Through an Ageing, Science, and Technology Lens K. Joyce and M. Loe ( eds ). . Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell , 2010 . £19.99 (pbk ) 175 pp . ISBN 978-1-4443-3380-0 Technogenarians is a timely volume about the devices, spaces, and medicines, which ‘technogenarians’ use as they negotiate health and illness in everyday life. The book’s 11 chapters, plus the editors’ introduction, bring together science, technology and society studies (STS), critical sociology (health and illness, feminism, risk, the body, phenomenology) and ageing and anti-ageing cultural research. A key theme is that technology in later life both promotes independence and raises issues of biomedicalisation and surveillance. The five chapters on anti-ageing (AA) medicine devoted to exploring this ambivalence are unequal in their analytical depth and research is geared to ageing bodies to the general neglect of ageing minds (and brains). Courtney Everts Mykytyn interviews AA advocates whose futuristic vision of ‘biological emancipation’ intersects product marketing and biotech capitalism. Similarly, Jennifer R. Fishman and co-authors link the development of AA medicine to American healthcare models of direct-to-consumer marketing, preventive health, and patient-centred care. Absent in both chapters is a deeper connection between the AA movement and the history of rejuvenation medicine both within and outside of gerontology. Readers may also wonder what actual kinds of AA technologies and advice (outside of cosmetic surgery) are offered and adapted by would-be technogenarians. A better balance is achieved in Barbara Marshall’s chapter on the ‘pharmaceutical imagination’, a term to capture the complex relationships between pharmaceutical products (particularly Viagra), marketing, sexual expertise, and lay understanding. The chapter is a blueprint for critical thought about ageing, biomedicine, embodiment, sexuality, and subjectivity. While Marshall argues that the sexualisation of seniors feeds into typical images of ageing decline and dysfunction, she also stresses the evidence showing that technogenarians resist ‘the decline/anti-decline narratives offered by the pharma-script’. The chapters by Abigail T. Brooks and Taina Kinnunen concentrate on cosmetic surgery. Brooks’ analysis of a group of white, mostly middle-aged and middle-class women emphasises the contradictory messages of empowerment and pathology inherent in AA procedures, yet her chapter lacks the technogenarian theme of ‘negotiation’ (accented by the editors) and appears slanted by Brooks’ moralistic stance against AA technologies. Kinnunen’s cross-cultural account of Finnish women who underwent cosmetic surgery explains the cultural positioning of Finnish female bodies as unattractive and prone to premature ageing. In so doing Kinnunen provides an expansive chapter about the globalisation of Americanized bodies and cosmetic procedures in relation to women’s ageing identities. The remaining six chapters more sharply focus on older technogenarians themselves, with four of these on technogenarian spaces and environments. Sharon R. Kaufman’s outstanding chapter on life-extending medicine discusses the consequences of procedures offered to older and near-death patients for the meaning of the ‘natural’ lifespan. In raising the question of how to measure the time left, near life’s end, against the risks that come with it, Kaufman envisions longevity-making as both an issue of privileged access to medical treatments and an ethical practice of ‘reflexive longevity’ involving choice, obligation, and hope. The chapter which I find to be the weakest is by Katherine Brittain and her co-authors, who use focus-group research with people with dementia (and their carers) to learn about the constraints and freedoms of walking outside. At the outset, the theoretical and fieldwork sections do not seem to fit together conceptually or in terms of application to the research issues. Furthermore, the writing oddly suggests that guidance aids such as familiar road signs (landmarks) can be considered as technologies, while neglecting to elaborate the importance of devices such as cellphones to outdoor mobility. The three chapters by Johanna M. Wigg, Denise A. Copelton, and Meika Loe examine how technology and environment intersect in creative and adaptable ways. For Wigg, the environments are two residences for wandering residents with dementia. In a locked-door environment the residents’ anxiety mounts against the real and symbolic barriers of confinement, while in a more benevolent (and more expensive) environment, wandering residents freely move about tracked by staff and motion detectors. Copelton looks at a hospital-sponsored group of older walkers and their rejection of pedometers because the devices are alienating and divisive. Her study underscores the important point that the health benefits of exercise technologies, such as pedometers, have to be measured against their social benefits for older people. Meika Loe, in her wonderfully written chapter, observes how technogenarian women 90 years and older mediate and coordinate assistive, connecting, and mobility devices in their homes to form enabling routines. Loe also recommends that health policy agencies focus on the life-long ageing-gender-technology relationships and self-care skills in women’s lives, as they influence late-life independence. This kind of political advice would be a welcome addition to the book’s other chapters as well. The final chapter by Louis Neven is the story of iRo, a Dutch robot developed as a techno-companion for older people living on their own. Neven discovers that, despite the robot’s beneficial functions, the participants (aged 62-79) with whom it was tested roundly rejected it precisely because it was designed to support dependent, feeble, and housebound residents. The mismatch between the images of ageing built into iRo and those of the older testers reiterates the book’s collective message that, embedded in the wondrous machines, pills, devices, spaces, and interventions of our culture lay its enduring ambivalence about ageing and old age. Along with a more attractive cover, Technogenarians could do with a conclusion or concluding chapter to strengthen its themes, summarize its many explorations, smooth over uneven chapters, and pose critical questions about the technogenarian future to guide the interdisciplinary, academic, and professional readers to whom this book will appeal.

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