James W. McNally

Apparently the internet’s “heart was broken” again by an elderly man photographed eating a lonely meal after his grandchildren failed to appear for a dinner he planned. A granddaughter took the picture and posted it on twitter and it was retweeted over 200,000 times. Ultimately this photo and the story it was picked up by news services such as People Magazine and the Huffington post.

Needless to say, the comments made be people in response to the picture and the post vary across the expected spectrum of sympathy for the elder to condemnation of the granddaughter for looking for publicity. None of these issues are important; what matters is the act itself.

In truth, we know nothing at all about this person and his circumstances are unique to him. As individuals, the elders can and do vary from wonderful people, to those who fail to maintain the strong intergenerational relationships that insure ongoing family support networks, to those who have selfish families, and to those are just not nice people. Broadly, however, issues of health, quality of life, depression, autonomy and self management are all intertwined with loneliness and the costs of a failed system of family support. This family network can be either filial or fictive, its genetic linkages to the elder are largely immaterial, what matters is the quality of its presence, and how it helps the elder maintain emotional autonomy.

What is interesting about the picture and the posting is that it is a form of social shaming resulting from the violation of perceived social norms. This is not the generic “[insert label here] shaming” phenomena applied to recent hipster trends, but more of an example of old school anthropological normative behavior violation. Treating elders in a particular way was once considered a “norm”, specific rules that are enforced by members of a community. In recent years we have seen this expectation of how we treat the elderly steadily degrade to a set of general guidelines or mores and to what are essentially just folkways, nostalgic thinking about how the elderly could be treated if we only had the time.

And time we no longer seem to have. The literature is filled with academic excuses about how the elderly want to maintain autonomy and independence, and while this is true, it is rarely the independence the writer is thinking about. The elderly do not want to be dependent; who does? More to the point however, the elderly do not want to be alone. Increasingly, those who are not elders seem to equate independence with the right to be alone. This proves to be rather convenient for family members, children and others who find normative behaviors towards elders to be time consuming and something to be put off until later. I speak to altogether too many people who lack closure in their lives because later became too late. I have little sympathy for them.

As village gossip and social pressure are impractical in the context of a larger and much faster moving society. The concept of not doing selfish things to your family because your community frowns upon nonnormative behaviors is not a major consideration in the calculus of care. In this case however we see how twitter has become a village and one person’s disapproval of the behavior of her kin set to her grandfather resulted in a fascinating example of shaming as social tool to enforce normative behavior.

I doubt if we will know if the posting resulted in a more positive outcome for the elder in the twitter feed, but it is interesting that it was used as tool to express social disappointment. We need more social disappointment of the way the elderly are treated. We do not need robots, or pets or monitoring devices, but people. Elderly, like all humans need interpersonal contact and not just with other elders. Interacting with society and being part of a broad social mix is essential for fulfillment.  It is too easily to forget our obligation to social norms and sad grandpa is the result of this behavior.

Source: Boundless. “Folkways and Mores.” Boundless Sociology. Boundless, 21 Jul. 2015. Retrieved 18 Mar. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-textbook/culture-3/the-symbolic-nature-of-culture-30/folkways-and-mores-198-4919/