Domestication of smartphone on a senior community: A case study

Abstract

This study reports how senior citizens domesticate their personal mobile devices at the beginning of learning process in an adult education class. The aim of this study was to examine how seniors integrate their mobile devices into their personal education experience, what sort of processes were experienced to render the devices useful and meaningful, and how gender and information literacy influenced the learning process. Moreover, this study was to investigate, based on domestication theory, how the use of smartphone helps shape the everyday routines of seniors. Data collected through an innovative quantitative mixed-method approach. Results show there are factors of domestication that explain how the use of smartphone affects seniors' daily routines and successful domestication enables seniors to integrate mobile devices into their lifelong learning experience under an existing media environment. It is important that seniors have support available that suits their needs of mobile devices, especially applications that require interaction with others, such as social media - Facebook and Line. However, frequency of use and the time spent on a given type of smartphones application per day may affect the daily routines in different ways.