Temporalities of digital eldercare

This chapter explores how digital technologies in eldercare may change the temporality and spatiality of work and discusses the implications for care and care work. The chapter argues for a context-sensitive understanding of temporalities in order to understand the implications of digitalisation. Inspired by micro-sociological and socio-material approaches, the author conceives temporalities as resulting from complex negotiations in socio-material contexts. This conception is applied in an analysis of the use of virtual care and sensor floors in Danish eldercare based on a larger field study of digital care work. This study illuminates how policy goals on establishing withdrawn and time-saving care play an important role in shaping the use of these technologies. It does, however, also show how negotiating multiple and conflicting temporalities and ‘making time’ is a daily accomplishment, and points at the unintended and contradictory outcomes that often result. The linear temporal order is, however, still the dominant way of governing eldercare, and in the two cases analyses, time-making is paradoxically leading to further compression and fragmentation of time with wider ramifications for client relations.