Digital Futures in an Ageing Society: Frontline Perspectives on Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Swedish Eldercare

This article investigates how care professionals working with older adults in Sweden encounter, reproduce, and challenge sociotechnical imaginaries of a digitalised health and social care system. Drawing on interviews with 20 care professionals, we explore how promissory discourses that frame digitalisation as a solution to demographic and economic crises are taken up at the frontline of care. Despite regular experiences of technological malfunction and implementation challenges, care professionals maintain a persistent techno-optimism and techno-determinism in their narratives. We introduce the analytical concepts tech love goggles and the magic leap to explain how faith in digital futures is preserved amid present digital shortcomings and failures. Tech love goggles describes a tendency to idealise technology and deflect blame for its failures onto external factors, whereas the magic leap captures a future-oriented logic in which present obstacles are expected to dissolve over time. Our findings highlight the performative power of sociotechnical imaginaries and suggest that optimism towards digital technologies can obscure the immediate needs and constraints of both workers and older care recipients. We argue for greater attention to the ethical and practical implications of deferring care solutions to an idealised digital future, especially for those whose time horizons are limited by age.