Aging in e-place: reflections on online communities for the aged in India

In this short piece, I offer a reconfiguration of the term “aging in place” by analyzing media content of web-based senior-focused portals while demonstrating how these online consumer-driven spaces unwittingly re-create new social relations and imagined communities. Building on the sparse body of scholarship on extra-familial, kin-like networks, I reflect on the cultural possibility of internet spaces as surrogate “places” for later life non-kin sociality. In this exploration, I privilege the possibility of enriched selfhood of older Indians by moving away from the conventional gerontological trope of the (Indian) elderly as indivisible familial subjects, as a deliberate process of decolonizing the field of gerontology.