To Go Digital or Not to Go Digital: Learning from Senior Citizens’ Shanghai Lockdown Experience

Photo “Standing Guard” by Zhang Cheng

by Li Jiasheng

An old lady cut in line when I was about to pay the medical fee to treat my stomach ache. I glared at her but curbed my fury for the sake of her age. She took some red bills from her wallet after the cashier told her how much she should pay. It took me a few seconds to finally recognize these red bills as cash. I was shocked. Living in Shanghai where digitalization is highly promoted, I am so accustomed to digital payment platforms like Alipay that payments in cash have become eccentric to me. However, senior citizens who are not familiar with online services seem to still need non-digital options in the time of digitalization. This experience with the old lady in March of 2023 reminded me of how my grandfather struggled with digital technology during the “zero-Covid” Shanghai lockdown of 2022. He could not use the WeChat group-buying services and other smartphone mini-programs or apps to buy food or medicine because of his near blindness.¹ It was not until a few weeks into the lockdown period that the community workers told him that he could call them to help him get the supplies he needed. He told me afterward that he thought that senior citizens like him were casualties of digitalization and the inability to use digital services gave him a sense of being left out.

What does the need for offline alternatives to smartphone digital services and support for senior citizens in Shanghai during the pandemic, a time when almost everything was online, tell us about non-digital options? In their 2022 study of COVID-19 and smartphone use among urban Chinese seniors in 2020, Anqi Chen et al. note that in 2020 an estimated population of elderly people over 60 reached 260 million while only 110 million of them had access to the Internet at that time creating a large “digital divide” (1). During the pandemic, China developed a health code system with apps and mini-programs that varied from city to city to restrict people’s movement based on their health condition, travel history, and contact with infected patients all around the country (Chen et al. 1). This pushed the country to go almost entirely digital, especially during Shanghai’s 2022 lockdown, which NYU Shanghai professor and global public health expert Brian J. Hall called “the largest known city-wide lockdown in the world”:

The entire population of Shanghai was issued stay-at-home orders, and most of the gates to residential compounds in the city were sealed, restricting mobility. [Because of] the rapid implementation of the lockdown and the length of the lockdown period, the city was not prepared to manage the logistic challenges … residents were unable to leave their homes to purchase food in person, and few food deliveries were available. (Hall et. al 284)

Specifically in Shanghai, there was guidance and instructions for the seniors in advance to help them follow the trend of digitalization, but they still ended up needing assistance from offline options and alternatives (Chen et al. 1)—a powerful reminder that in an age of successive waves of technology optimism, from cryptocurrency to the metaverse and ChatGPT, it is crucial not to rely on everything going digital and to provide offline alternatives and non-digital options, which we can learn from experience of senior citizens who struggled to use digital technology in Shanghai during the pandemic.

The “digital divide” among senior citizens and other age groups had already been noticed before the pandemic based on the promotion and even imposition of digital tools in China. Even before the pandemic, many elderly people seemed “to be separated from society by an invisible wall” due to the significant inequality of access to digital technology between the elderly and younger age groups (Chen et al. 2). When studying digital disconnection among older citizens, Rutong Jiao noticed that China had released several policies related to seniors and the Internet, such as the “Internet + Pension” in the 2010s (2). In other words, China had attached the importance of dealing with obstacles to senior citizens’ use and accessibility of digital services and had taken action to try to bridge the gap, though with mixed results.

Incentives for the elderly to get access to and use digital services directly can be classified in two basic ways: age-appropriate versions and instruction tutorials. Many companies have been developing to offer seniors quality Internet services with enlarged words and a simplified user interface (Han). In addition, the instruction tutorials include family support and community service (Chen et al. 6). Children of the seniors are often willing to teach the general functions of apps on mobile phones, and community volunteers set up classes for the elderly to learn how to use smartphones (Chen et al. 6). Ideally, such initiatives could pave the way for seniors to go digital from basic daily social media apps like WeChat.

However, elderly people still often struggle in the complex digital world for both physical and psychological reasons. Physiologically speaking, as people get older, their learning ability declines due to weakened neuron control and a decrease in brain activities (Jiao 1). This can lead to psychological escapism, diminishing the willingness of seniors to directly operate digital services (Chen et al. 6). Many are afraid of trying new things, of potential privacy leakages, and of being an outsider in the Internet community (Jiao 1). For these reasons and many others, the elderly continue to find it challenging to learn how to use apps even with age-appropriate versions tailored to their situations and assistance from younger generations.

For such reasons, we should not push seniors to go entirely digital, as the pandemic made painfully clear. For example, during the lockdown, while it was frustrating for me and many of my friends when platforms became overloaded and unresponsive, such experiences were even more frustrating for older people. Factors like an unresponsive platform could exacerbate seniors’ frustrations with reliance on app-based services, especially when they had other types of trouble with health codes and group-buying (Chen et al. 3). Even if they were fully aware of how to use smartphones, food security and delivery were often still a problem (Hall et al. 284).

Of course, the sources that I have access to do not necessarily reflect the full extent of the senior citizens’ difficulties when it comes to digital access during the pandemic. During the pandemic, it was hard enough to gather direct support evidence due to political sensitivity, censorship in China, and the difficulties of authenticity validation of English-language sources, and in its wake, some previously available information has been removed. I chose news articles about offline services and support for seniors from SHINE, an English-language newspaper website under the Shanghai committee of the Chinese Communist Party, instead. The scenes mentioned did not apply to the whole picture of the situation during the pandemic in Shanghai, but they still contributed to easing a certain number of seniors to access digital services to some extent. Despite often poor-intensity information and censorship, we still can form a clear picture based on available sources of how vulnerable seniors were because of the overreliance on the virtual and a lack of non-digital alternatives and offline assistance. The overreliance on digitalization is the focus. The pandemic simply shows how such overreliance can fail in many cases, and we can learn many valuable lessons from the experience of seniors during the Shanghai lockdown.

Given that the experience shows the challenges faced by senior citizens when using online services during the lockdown, the solution to bridging the digital divide should not be limited to digital assistance alone. Offline alternatives and non-digital assistance and options should be implemented as a choice. Fortunately, Shanghai community workers also recognized the inefficiency of online services and began to find offline solutions during the lockdown. First, seniors should get access to a similar experience of natively digital services with offline passes. The Shanghai version of the health code was called suishenma (随申码, Shanghai Health QR Code). To enter public spaces and do PCR tests, people had to show the code to get access (Chen et al. 1). When it was first launched, teenagers and senior citizens who didn’t have smartphones could also use ID cards and hand write personal information to register their entrances and record their traces (Chen et al. 4). As the restriction got tighter during the lockdown, community service centers in Shanghai offered printed “offline suishenma” for senior citizens to apply by their digital code or their ID card. They could also use the machines there to replace or report the loss of paper versions (Yang et al.). The service made the lives of senior citizens easier, avoiding embarrassing and exhausting operation problems such as Internet disconnection. In the end, senior citizens could go out without smartphones to visit public places as long as they took the offline code with them.

The adaptation of Shanghai health workers to the non-digital needs of the elderly indicates that offline options remain necessary to help the elderly, especially offline alternatives for natively digital applications like health codes. “Natively digital applications” refers to digital services that have no offline prototype. The health code is special because it originated from the online context. The logic of other commonly used digital services like car-hailing is actually translating people’s daily lives without Internet access to an online platform. But there was no non-digital version of the health code before it was launched. Therefore, offline alternatives should be created for natively digital applications to bridge the gap. Then, seniors don’t have to use smartphones to directly use the native digital applications but use offline alternatives instead to have a similar experience.

In addition, we should preserve offline assistance for seniors to use digital services. One of the examples during the pandemic is the “informal agents” including younger relatives or community workers. Often such agents were simply neighbors, family members, local business people, and sometimes simply a stranger in a position to help. Besides the offline alternatives mentioned above, children could attach seniors’ information and apply for a “family health code” on their phones if their parents don’t have smartphones (Chen et al. 4). During the lockdown in 2022, community workers used their own smartphones to register the information of the seniors to generate the health code if their children didn’t live with them (Yang). Therefore, rather than letting younger generations tutor them on how to use the smartphone, elderly people could appoint others as “informal agents” to access and use a digital service.

To meet the seniors halfway in bridging the digital gap, they could have some third party to assist them with the operations. For the health code, such “informal agents” served as the third party to let the seniors get their PCR tests. As a result, the elderly were still engaged in the utilization of digital services with the support of others. At the same time, they did not go digital themselves.

Furthermore, we should conserve the non-digital options for the older generation to have a stable sense of life. During the lockdown, it would be much harder for the seniors to get the necessities like fresh food via apps and mini-programs and to join community group-buying so they severely needed volunteers to assist them (Hall et al. 284). In some communities, neighborhood community staff reached out to the nearby shops to bring food to the complex gate where the volunteers in COVID-19 protective suits assisted the shopping to relieve the pressure (Yang). Senior citizens who relied on community restaurants and delivery services could collect the food themselves at the gate (Yang). The group-buying at the gate and food delivery put some elderly people at ease for a few days. They did not need to trouble to figure out how to use group-buying apps to receive food. The restoration of patterns before digitalization went closer to the normal life of seniors, which liberated them from the transformation to online shopping.

The world was completely offline for centuries, and we should save some non-digital options when we transform everything digitally. Seniors had the chance to recreate the daily service partially. The group-buying system came to the real world as a market and the food delivery service stayed on track. Traditionally, we would advocate the digital transformation of the real economy. In these cases, however, we should do the reversed order, bringing back the real in-person interactions to bridge the digital divide.

Therefore, digital services should be just one of several means of doing business. Offline alternatives reduce seniors’ reliance on digital services with physical substitutes while non-digital options and assistance such as “informal agents” still let the seniors have an indirect attachment to digital services. What matters is not the form of the entrance to the service, but the products supplied. Seniors are here for what they can get from the digital service, not for the digital world itself.

Seniors should not be confined to going digital as the only method to narrow the digital divide between them and other age groups, and offline and non-digital alternatives should be offered. Admittedly, the deployment to encourage senior citizens to use smartphones is the easiest way to welcome them into the digital era. However, the world cannot be completely online for the accessibility and the capacity of digital services. From the senior citizen’s perspective, they should always have the opportunity to quit the Internet. From the supplements introduced above, we should question the feasibility of the entire digital transformation. In the trends of moving to a digital world, we should translate the natively digital service to some offline alternatives. The priority of experience would be then promoted, turning the blind craving for online platforms upside down. What’s more, we should keep in mind the importance of leaving some non-digital options behind when we boost products and services to embrace e-commerce. After all, complete reliance on digitalization will only cause side effects, neglecting the essential care for seniors. Seniors should also keep an open mind and ask for help if possible when they encounter difficulties employing digital services. The goal is to get the service and make life easier for everyone.

Total reliance on digital technology is not as feasible as imagined, and additional non-digital support should be provided for seniors during digitalization. The pandemic, policies, and restrictions in Shanghai composed a hypothesis of extreme digitalization. We should learn from our elders.

Group-buying during the lockdown went beyond traditional delivery services such as Meituan, one of China’s leading digital food delivery services. Community group-buying took off quickly through social media, mainly on WeChat, a platform that combines chat with many everyday functions, where “residents at the same address band[ed] together to bulk buy groceries or meals from suppliers or restaurants, placing single orders that could add up to thousands of dollars” and “once enough buyers sign[ed] up and [made] a payment, vendors [would] dispatch the order to the complex usually days later, and building security or volunteers [would] then drop off each order door-to-door” (Horwitz). ↩︎

Works Cited

Chen, Anqi, et al. “Interview-Based Study about the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Smartphone Use among the Seniors in China’s First Tier Cities.” SHS Web of Conferences, vol. 148, 2022, pp. 1–6. ProQuest, https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202214803001. Accessed 7 May 2023.

Hall, Brian J, et al. “Prevalence of Depression, Anxiety, and Suicidal Ideation during the Shanghai 2022 Lockdown: A Cross-Sectional Study.” Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 330, 2023, pp. 283–90.

Han, Jing. “‘Silver-haired surfers’ add momentum to China’s biggest shopping spree.” SHINE, 10 Nov. 2021, www.shine.cn/biz/tech/2111107993/. Accessed 27 April 2023.

Horwitz, Josh. “Shanghai jumps into group buying to stay fed during COVID lockdown.” Reuters, 8 Apr. 2022. www.reuters.com/world/china/shanghai-jumps-into-group-buying-stay-fed-during-covid-lockdown-2022-04-08/. Accessed 27 February 2024.

Jiao, Ruotong. “Is There a Barrier between Seniors and Smartphone Use in The Internet Age? A Study of Digital Disconnection among Older Adults.” SHS Web of Conferences, vol. 155, 2023, pp. 1–4. ProQuest, https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/202315503010. Accessed 7 May 2023.

Wan, Lixin. “Shall we meet the seniors half way in bridging the digital divide?” SHINE, 17 Oct. 2022, www.shine.cn/opinion/2210171579/. Accessed 27 April 2023.

Yang, Jian, et al. “Relief for seniors: Shanghai’s health QR code now available on paper.” SHINE, 12 Aug. 2022, www.shine.cn/news/metro/2108123491/. Accessed 14 April 2023.

Yang, Meiping. “Community volunteers pitch in to help elderly residents cope with lockdown.” SHINE, 17 Mar. 2022. www.shine.cn/news/metro/2203173211/. Accessed 27 April 2023.