Entangled with technology: Engagement with Facebook among the young old

Abstract

This article frames the concepts of use and non-use in terms of Ingold’s understanding of life as on-going movement along multiple lines, or meshwork, and tangles of relationships to people, places, and things. In addition, I draw on practice theory and the turn to ontology, which argues that any one technology is enacted as multiple technologies via different practices. Based on a study of engagement with Facebook among the young old (age 60 to 70), I argue that use and non-use can be understood in terms of the different versions of a technology enacted or envisioned. A person’s engagement with a technology is a knot in the tangle of lines that are the trajectories of technologies and of people’s lives.