Read “To Go Digital or Not to Go Digital: Learning from Senior Citizens’ Shanghai Lockdown Experience”.

Li Jiasheng’s critique of the rapid migration of services necessary for everyday life to smartphone apps and miniprograms is not only thoughtful and measured in its analysis, but also passionate and compassionate in its motivation. The essay begins with a moment of “fury” at an elderly woman who cuts in line, fury that immediately resolves into empathy as Jiasheng, reflecting on an experience that all city dwellers know well, recognizes not only his grandfather’s plight in the face of the digitization of everyday life but that of countless elderly citizens. The woman can’t pay by smartphone app and must instead disrupt the efficient flow of data by counting out hard cash. And what if it were an emergency? What if she couldn’t cut in line in front of a college student but had to use multiple apps to get food, water, medicine? Jiasheng’s framing of his rigorous investigation with personal experience arises from his experience of the Spring 2022 zero-Covid Shanghai emergency lockdown when many seniors struggled with health codes, group buy apps for food, and confusing, overflowing chats.

In our “Walking as Inquiry” version of WAI, students explored the work of urban geographers, ethnographers, urbanists, great essayists like Eileen Chang, and above all the “slow journalism” of visiting writer Paul Salopek and his Out of Eden Walk. They were challenged to use Shanghai as a site of inquiry, and in walking and sharpening their attention by slowing down, observing, describing and reflecting on specific moments, they developed final research projects that arose from their direct engagement with the city.

Jiasheng’s essay is exemplary. It begins with a specific everyday problem that matters to the writer then moves into strong analysis that draws on quality scholarly sources to make the reader both care and think hard about our overreliance on emerging digital technologies, especially during times of crisis and with regard to those most vulnerable among us.

—David Perry, Clinical Professor in the Writing Program