Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

This work focuses on the technological gap that can result in social exclusion for older people in Brazil as we understand digital skills are becoming essential to citizenship in the country. On the one hand, governmental services are digitalized and so is the access to healthcare, being both mediated by platforms and apps. On the other, barriers to technological adoption by older people have been largely documented and associated with lack of digital literacy and poor-designed interfaces which tend to ignore specific needs of this age groups. Based on 16-months ethnography conducted with older adults and older people in São Paulo, we mapped these constraints and how they drive participants to use WhatsApp, instead of other bespoke app, to access information and healthcare provision. WhatsApp is the app participants feel more comfortable with, even as basic users, as the app now mediated their daily communication with family and friends. This work presents the advantages of choosing WhatsApp for governmental and non-governmental initiatives in Brazil and shows successful examples in both sectors. We also highlight how the apps developed to manage the Covid-19 pandemic might fail when addressing the population that was most victimized by the virus. As ethnography showed, downloading new apps is the most relevant constraint for participants, who are more likely to ask friends and family to do this, something they were not able to do while in social isolation. Our aim is to show how WhatsApp bypasses this constraint and enhances social inclusion among this age group.