The Routledge Handbook of Media and Technology Domestication [1 ed.] 9781003265931, 9781032184142, 9781032209180

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY DOMESTICATION

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of media domestication – the process of appropriating new media and technology – and delves into the theoretical, conceptual and social implications of the field’s advancement. Combining the work of the long-established experts in the field with that of emerging scholars, the chapters explore both the domestication concept itself and domestication processes in a wide range of fields, from smartphones used to monitor drug use to the question of time in the domestication of energy buildings. The international team of authors provide an accessible and thorough assessment of key issues, themes and problems with and within domestication research, and showcase the most important developments over the years. This truly interdisciplinary collection will be an important resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and academic scholars in media, communication and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, design studies and social studies of technology. Maren Hartmann is a Professor of Communication and Media Sociology at Berlin University for the Arts, Germany.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY DOMESTICATION

Edited by Maren Hartmann

Designed cover image: © SolStock / Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Maren Hartmann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maren Hartmann to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-18414-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-20918-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26593-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of contributors

ix

“One Life Is Not Enough” – Another kind of introduction Maren Hartmann PART I

1

(Re-)thinking domestication

7

(Re-)thinking domestication: introduction

9

Sonia Livingstone

1 Domestication and personhood Eric Hirsch

15

2 Domestication as user-led infrastructuring Thomas Berker

29

3 Conceptualizing re-domestication: theoretical reflections and empirical findings to a neglected concept Corinna Peil and Jutta Röser

42

4 Making domestication research policy relevant Carolina Martínez and Tobias Olsson

55

5 A dialogue on domestication David Morley and Maren Hartmann

70

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Contents

15 A journey from domestication approaches to practice-based theories Mika Pantzar

219

16 The mutual domestication of users and algorithms: the case of Netflix Ignacio Siles

235

PART IV

(Counter-)domesticating media and technologies

249

(Counter-)domesticating media and technologies: introduction

251

17 Domesticating the domesticators: where have all the agents gone? Maria Bakardjieva

253

Shangwei Wu

18 Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion: user empowerment in digital platforms Jo Pierson 19 Rooflessness running wild? Taming technologies, taming our fears Maren Hartmann

266 280

20 Configuring the “Cuban Internet”: a networked domestication approach 296 Lorian Leong 21 Feeling good, feeling safe: domesticating phones and drugs in clubbing Kristian Møller PART V

313

Contextualising domestication?

327

Contextualising domestication? Introduction

329

22 Understanding and resolving the “content-context conundrum” in ICT domestication research Yang Wang

331

Niklas Strüver

23 Situational domestication: personal technology and public places Ida Marie Henriksen

347

24 The digital detox camp: practices and motivations for reverse domestication 361 Faltin Karlsen

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tem Frank Andersen is an Associate Professor at Aalborg University in the Department of Communication and Psychology. Andersen’s research interests include digital leisure, user studies and popular culture. Kristine Ask  is an Associate Professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research explores how new media technologies are made part of everyday life, and how this process can lead to new, unexpected forms of use and meaning. With a particular interest for technologies and topics dismissed as frivolous or trivial, Ask’s research highlights emergent user practices and – communities of gamers and fans. Maria Bakardjieva  is a Professor and the current Chair in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Calgary. Her research examines the social construction of the Internet and the use of digital media in various cultural and practical contexts with a focus on user agency, critical reflexivity and emancipation. Will Balmford is a Learning Innovation Leader at Edrolo. Thomas Berker is a Professor in Science and Technology Studies at NTNU’s Centre for Technology and Society. Originally trained as a sociologist, his career started with studies of Internet use in the 1990s. Since the early 2000s, he has first contributed to and later led interdisciplinary research projects on technology use, design and participation – often in the context of sustainability and the built environment. Johanna L.H. Birkland  is a Scholar and Consultant. She holds a PhD in Information Studies (Syracuse University), an MS in Instructional Design (Syracuse University), an MS in Organizational Communication (Ithaca College), and a BS in Biological Sciences (Cornell University). Her research interests include studying the domestication of technologies, older adults, and intergenerational communication.

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Alex Borkowski  is a PhD student in Communication & Culture at York University, Toronto, where her research examines histories and politics of female-coded interfaces, as well as sound and new media art practices. She holds an MA in Aural and Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and her writing has appeared in various academic and arts publications. ORCID: 0000-0002-8309-3032. Deborah Chambers  is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Newcastle University. Her research centres on the role of media technologies in the home; mobile media; social media; and mediated intimacies. She has taught and researched in the UK and Australia and her most recent books include Cultural Ideals of Home (Routledge, 2020) and Changing Media, Homes and Households (Routledge, 2016). Hugh Davies is a Curator and Researcher in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Tricia Marjorie Fernandez is currently a Research Associate at the Singapore Management University. She has worked in a variety of research settings which include market research firms and academia. Her research interests range from cognitive neuroscience to the societal impact of technology. Leslie Haddon is a Senior Researcher and Part-time Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. His diverse research over the course of more than 30 years has focused on the social shaping and consumption of ICTs, especially looking at studies of domestication. For the last 15 years, his main focus has been on children’s digital experience, including co-coordinating the EU Kids Online project. He has published numerous journal publications, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and books. Hans Peter Hahn  is a Professor of Ethnology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/ Main. His research interests include material culture, crafts, consumption and globalisation. In addition to international museum cooperation projects, he has conducted ethnographic research on migration in West Africa as well as on the appropriation of consumer goods such as mobile phones. During 2010–2019, he was the spokesperson of a DFG-funded research training group on “Value and Equivalence of Material Objects.” Maren Hartmann  is a Professor in Media and Communication Sociology at Berlin University of the Arts. Recent publications include The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities (Routledge, co-edited with Annette Hill and Magnus Andersson) and a special issue of Space and Culture on “Gentrification and the right to the geomediatized city,” co-edited with André Jansson. In 2019, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney; in 2023, she is a visiting scholar at the University of Denver. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5140-6620. Jo Helle-Valle  is a Social Anthropologist and Professor in the Development Studies Department at Oslo Metropolitan University. Fieldworks include Botswana, Uganda, Ethiopia and Norway. His main research areas include media practices, gender, local politics and economy, and theoretical issues related to the social sciences. Helle-Valle has served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Oxford, Simon Fraser University, University of Botswana and Makerere University. He has – together with Ardis Storm-Mathisen – recently published an anthology on media and development in Africa. x

List of contributors

Ida Marie Henriksen  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She has been engaged in social-interaction, personal technology and public places since 2012, and from 2018, she has been working on digitalization of the electric grid and everyday life. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9906-1713. Eric Hirsch  is a Professor of Anthropology at Brunel University London. He has a long-standing interest in the ethnography and history of Melanesia and is the author most recently of Ancestral Presence: Cosmology and Historical Experience in the Papuan Highlands, Routledge, 2021. His earlier research examined the relations between information and communication technologies and the domestic sphere, resulting in the co-edited volume with Roger Silverstone, Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, Routledge 1992. ORCID: 0000-0002-1690-9871. Larissa Hjorth  is a Distinguished Professor, Digital Ethnographer and Socially Engaged Artist in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Indigo Holcombe-James  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC’s Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society, RMIT. Indigo examines digital transformation in cultural institutions, collaborating with over 100 sites to date. Lars Bajlum Holmgaard Christensen  holds a PhD from 2006 in Digital Media, Communication & Culture from the University of Aalborg. The primary focus of his research was the domestication of the interactive smart-TV. During his PhD, he was a Marie Curie fellow at Dublin City University under the supervision of Pascal Preston. The fellowship allowed him to participate in parts of the EMTEL research project. As the Head of Research for New Media at the Danish School of Media and Journalism from 2008 to 2013, Holmgaard Christensen has also worked directly with media professionals and from a media ethnographic approach he has explored the impact of social media on journalism practice. Today, he is an external lecturer in strategic media communication and management at Copenhagen Business School and University of Southern Denmark. Faltin Karlsen (PhD) is a Professor of Media Studies at Kristiania University College in Oslo. His research interests concern media users, game culture, media discourses, intrusive media, digital detox, and media design. He has published in high-ranked international media and communication journals and co-edited the book Transgression in Games and Play ( Jørgensen & Karlsen, MIT Press, 2018). He is currently part of the project Digitox, in which he explores intrusive media design, media users, and the media industry. Jenny Kennedy  is a Senior Research Fellow in Media and Communication at RMIT University and an ARC DECRA Fellow. She is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Her research examines shifts in digital technology practices against the context of rapid evolutions in digital infrastructures impacting digital inclusion, smart devices and automated decision-making in the home. Vera Klocke wrote her dissertation on the role of television in households with a scholarship from the Institute Villigst. Until recently, she was working as a Research Associate xi

List of contributors

on the topic of homelessness and digital media at the Berlin University of the Arts; now she works as a freelance researcher, cultural producer and journalist. Leah Jerop Komen  is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Communication at Daystar University, Kenya. Dr. Komen has researched and published on mobile telephony and development in rural contexts in rural Kenya. Her research area is mobile communication and development. She is keen on examining how mobile telephony is domesticated by users to meet their everyday life, but also examines how development is contextualized in these regions. Lorian Leong  is a Senior Product Leader with over a decade of experience in the tech industry. Her work has taken her across Europe and Asia helping to build digital and hardware products and evangelise user perspectives. In addition to industry work, she also engages in media scholarship. Her current research focus explores technology in everyday life, examining the cultures and publics engaged with information and communication technologies with particular focus on the Internet, mobile phones, and smartphone apps. ORCID: 0000-0001-7275-503X. Sun Sun Lim is Vice President, Partnerships & Engagement and Professor of Communication and Technology at Singapore Management University. She has researched and published extensively on the social impact of technology including  Transcendent Parenting - Raising Children in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2020). She frequently offers her expert commentary in international outlets including  Wall Street Journal, Scientific American  and ChannelNewsAsia and writes a monthly TechTalk column in  The Straits Times. She was a Nominated Member of the 13th Parliament of Singapore and an honoree of the inaugural Singapore 100 Women in Tech 2020 list. See www.sunsunlim.com. Rich Ling (PhD, 1984, University of Colorado, Sociology) recently retired from the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has also worked at Telenor, the Norwegian Telecommunication Operator. For more than three decades, Ling has studied the social consequences of mobile communication. He has studied its use in microcoordination, emergencies, its adoption by teens, and its use by women and small-scale entrepreneurs in places such as Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Myanmar. His focus has been on how mobile telephony illuminates fundamental social forces such as strong-tie bonds and triadic interaction. Ling has written or edited 11 books and over 100 peer-reviewed papers/book chapters. He is the former head of the ICA Mobile Communication Interest Group. He is an ICA Fellow, and a member of Det Norske Vitenskaps Akademi (The Norwegian Academy of Science and Arts) and Academia Europaea. Sonia Livingstone FBA, OBE  is a  Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Media and Communications  at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  Taking a comparative, critical and contextualised approach, her research examines how changing conditions of mediation reshape everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books including Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives. She directs the projects ‘Global Kids Online’ (with UNICEF) and the ‘Digital Futures Commission’ (with 5Rights Foundation). Since

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founding the 33 country EU Kids Online network, Sonia has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, OECD and UNICEF, among others. See www.sonialivingstone.net. Justine Lloyd  is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University. Recent publications include ‘The Non-Sexist City: Then and Now’ in the edited collection Contentious Cities (Routledge). In 2019, she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5822-315X. Carolina Martínez  is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. Her research interests concern children and digital media and issues related to media literacy and media education. Kristian Møller works as an Assistant Professor at Roskilde University. He researches how LGBTQ intimacies are mediated, platformed and infrastructured, drawing mainly on queer theory, affect, and assemblage. He has published on dating/hook-up apps, the mediated negotiation of non-monogamous relationships, sexualized drug use on video conferencing services like Zoom, the algorithmic production of porn genres and sexual publics, as well as digital mobile ethnography and ethics. Twitter @kristianmj. David Morley is the Emeritus Professor of Communications in the Department of Media Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, London. His early work in audience studies included Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, Routledge 1992. His more recent work in cultural geography has included Communications and Mobility, Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Stephen J. Neville is a Research Associate at the Infoscape Lab and a SSHRC-funded PhD student in the joint-program of Communication and Culture at York and Toronto Metropolitan Universities in Toronto, Canada. His master’s research on privacy and surveillance issues of smart speaker technology was awarded the 2019 Beaverbrook Prize by the Canadian Communication Association. Working at the intersection of media, sound, and surveillance studies, his research has been published in various journals. ORCID: 0000-0001-7731-7418. Iohanna Nicenboim  is an Interaction Designer and Researcher, originally from the Global South and now working across Europe. With a background in new media and industrial design, Iohanna’s research investigates human-technology relationships in everyday life through design. Within a posthumanist design orientation, she creates poetical design provocations that both problematize traditional frameworks and materialize alternatives. Before starting her PhD in human-AI relations at Delft University of Technology, Iohanna had worked as a curator and design researcher on various projects in the areas of critical design, digital fabrication, city making, and participatory design. Website: http://iohanna.com/. James Odhiambo Ogone is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Languages, Literary, and Communication Studies at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology ( JOOUST), Kenya. He obtained his PhD in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2015. Ogone has research interests in the discipline of Literary and Cultural Studies with several publications on the contextual domestication of technologies in African societies.

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List of contributors

Tobias Olsson is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies. He made his first contributions to domestication research in the late 1990s, and he has ever since made continuous returns to the field. He currently serves as the Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University. Mika Pantzar (PhD)  is a Professor (Consumer citizenship) in Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki. His academic work has focused on various different themes, e.g. domestication of technology, rhythm analysis and evolutionary economics His current research interests focus on data economy and the ways big data and large data sets of various forms (human physiology, netnography, social media, etc.) are used in consumer research. Mika Pantzar has published articles widely within consumer research, design and technology studies, rhetoric of economic policy, food and future studies and systems research. Corinna Peil (PhD)  is a Media and Communication Scholar at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg in Austria. In her research, she is interested in the mediatization and digitalization of everyday life and related processes of social change. Jo Pierson (PhD)  is full professor of responsible digitalisation and head of the School of Social Sciences at Hasselt University in Belgium (research group R4D - Research for Digitalisation, Diversity & Democracy). He is also professor of media and communication studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences & Solvay Business School at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium (research group imec-SMIT). Ingrid Richardson  is a Professor and Digital Ethnographer in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Jutta Röser  is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Münster. Her research interests include the mediatization of everyday life, audience and reception research, media sociology, and domestication. In a long-term research project, she dealt with “The Mediatized Home in Transition” in Germany. Marianne Ryghaug is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology where she leads the research group on Energy, Climate and Environment. Her research interest is in the interface between public participation and engagement, innovation and technology development and energy and climate policy. Ignacio Siles is Professor of Media and Technology Studies in the School of Communication at Universidad de Costa Rica. He is the author of Living with Algorithms. Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica  (MIT Press, 2023),  A Transnational History of the Internet in Central America: Networks, Integration, and Development  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and  Networked Selves: Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France (Peter Lang, 2017). Knut H. Sørensen is Professor Emeritus of Science and Technology Studies (STS), a ffiliated with the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has published extensively in social studies of technology, including information and communication technologies, sustainable energy, and public xiv

List of contributors

engagement of technology. His current research focuses on universities, including gender issues and interdisciplinarity. Ardis Storm-Mathisen is a Sociologist and Professor at the Faculty of Education, Department of Early childhood Education and former Research Professor at Consumption Research Norway (SIFO), Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research has focused on everyday life of families and children, uses of digital global media and infrastructures (digital consumption) and on developmental and educational issues relating to identity, inequality, risks and vulnerabilities. She conducted research in ‘The New Media Practices in Africa’ project (from Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo and as a visiting researcher at the University of Botswana 2015–2019). She has directed three larger projects funded by the Research Council of Norway about household’s media consumption, digital vulnerabilities and risks management strategies. Niklas Strüver is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Siegen, Germany. His research concerns itself with the socio-technical construction processes of voice assistants. In general, his interests are the impacts digital devices have on the different involved parties and how the process of technology development is, in turn, shaped by the concerned entities, their background and relationships. Peter Vistisen  is an Associate Professor at Aalborg University in the Department of Communication and Psychology. In his research, Peter studies the use of digital media used to facilitate better communication of complex information, as well as a design material on its own premises. His passion is to help and support the further development of the intersection between media and design research by doing research which promotes more critical audiences and users across sectors. David Waldecker is a Sociologist and Post-doc at the Cooperative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. His current research deals with the domestication of intelligent personal assistants and smart speakers and the concurrent surveillance and data practices. He has also published on music making in the recording studio, Theodor W. Adorno, methods of qualitative research, and digital surveillance. Yang Wang  is a Research Fellow in Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (NUS). She received her PhD in Communications and New Media from NUS. Her research interests include ICT domestication, transnational communication and digital transformation in the workplace. She has published in leading international journals. Shangwei Wu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. His current research considers the use of media technologies in social relationships, and he has published several peer-reviewed journal articles on mobile dating applications. Shangwei completed a PhD in Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Renmin University of China.

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“ONE LIFE IS NOT ENOUGH”1 – ANOTHER KIND OF INTRODUCTION Maren Hartmann

I am writing these words, having just learnt that I will not grow old or indeed that I might not live much longer (the length of time for my potential survival is yet undetermined). I was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, underwent a whole range of treatments and have now been told that the cancer has metastasized into various organs. This is possibly the worst possible outcome and I am currently struggling to come to terms with this news. Usually, this would not be the place to write about what is deemed to be a personal matter (and one that concerns my body). Nonetheless, I am writing about it here. This is partly an egocentric move: writing helps me to keep myself busy in times of uncertainty when thoughts are often rather negative; writing about the cancer helps me to find relief, i.e. to have an outlet for these as yet unsorted feelings. It might also be the last introduction I write, the last book I publish. And it would feel weird not to acknowledge this mixture of emotions accompanying this writing process. On top of this, I simply have difficulties concentrating on purely academic thoughts at the moment. There is, however, also a content-reason: my current emotional rollercoaster closely relates to the concept under scrutiny in this book: to the idea of domestication as a form of appropriation. I am currently trying to appropriate this cancer, the process of dying, to ‘make it my own.’ And much of this has to do with ontological insecurity but also with the question of home and processes of homing. It is indeed a domestication turned upside down (but not reverse domestication): I am trying to tame something that I am not only afraid of, but despise (hate even?), that I want to get rid of as soon as possible and as much as possible. I am trying to tame an enemy inside myself – an enemy that will – in one form or another – accompany me for the rest of my life. All I can do is try to keep the wild beast at bay as long as I can. I am sure that there are approaches around somewhere that ask you to accept your illness, to learn to not see it as a problem, but as a natural part of life. Maybe I will eventually turn to these. At the moment, they are not mine. Hence, my current processes of appropriation feel rather like a constant battle – a battle that I will ultimately loose. Battle, however, is also a difficult metaphor when one can never win. Maybe labelling this as a process of domestication is a bit far-fetched. Maybe I am trying to create links that do not really exist – maybe it is an attempt at making sense of something that is ultimately senseless. Maybe some of you will find this inappropriate in an academic setting, overly dramatic. But in times like these (by which I mean not only my personal DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-1

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Maren Hartmann

trials, but also the state of the world), being dramatic might turn into a new quality. I feel as if we (including myself ) have grown to become complacent all too easily, clinging on to a somewhat bearable (and often comfortable or even luxurious) status quo. And again, ontological security comes to mind. I have repeated this maybe once too often, but I do think that Andrew Feenberg’s early critique of the question of security within the domestication framework (albeit mentioned only in passing) manages to capture the core quality of the idea of ontological security as well as its main problem (see Feenberg, 1999). The word security already implies that something is known, is comforting, not threatening or new. And this appeals to a core human need: to have a reliable world around one in order to live. While temporary disturbances of reliability are not problematic (or even desired – see, for example, the desire for adventure holidays), longer-term disturbances (in the form of war, displacement, but also unemployment, homelessness, etc.) tend to leave negative traces in people’s mental health and affect their lives. Living through a time where all my unspoken expectations of life (that I would grow old, see my children grow up, write another book, teach more seminars, etc.) are turned upside down, where all of these things might still happen to some extent or maybe not at all – the question of ontological (in)security is suddenly central. As Giddens (1984: 50) underlines: ordinary day-to-day life - in greater or less degree according to context and the vagaries of individual personality - involves an ontological security expressing an autonomy of bodily control within predictable routines. The psychological origins of ontological security are to be found in basic anxiety-controlling mechanisms. But Giddens also outlines critical situations, where the usual protection mechanisms are simply not enough anymore. His examples are definitely of a more extreme kind than what I am currently encountering. They cannot be compared to an illness since they concern imprisonment, life in concentration camps, war situations and other such extreme examples. Nonetheless, when he writes that the “swamping of habitual modes of activity by anxiety which cannot be adequately contained by the basic security system is specifically a feature of critical situations” (Giddens, 1984: 64), this rings incredibly true for my current situation (at least in the first few days after the initial diagnosis). Anxiety swamped my habitual modes of activity; it was extremely hard to uphold these. At the same time, they were one of the few elements of calm in the sea of storm of the initial crisis. Preparing the kids’ lunch boxes in the morning was soothing. I did not have to use my brain very much but could rely on my body’s memory in performing this task. I had a purpose. The routines kicked in – major crisis or not. And yes, one part of the emotions of the last few days has been the anticipation of the loss of such routines in the upcoming months/years. There is an anxiety that I will not be able to perform just such tasks anymore (and be it for particular periods of time only). The reliability of these routines has been soothing, but it has also been attacked. This causes further fear. The darkest moments, however, have been not so much caused by the anticipation of loss of this kind. This massive anxiety (mixed with a diffuse anger and major regret of sorts) is caused not so much by the anxiety of missing out on routines to come, but on missing out on all the (sometimes tiny) new things that are meant to take place in the future. My ontological insecurity is less based in the now than in a future that will not happen. The routine expectation of gradual change is disturbed. Usually, it is precisely the (boring) ability to fill the kids’ lunch boxes every morning, which is related to their growth and their ability to bring home news of their small steps in the discovery of the world when they return with the empty boxes. 2

“One Life Is Not Enough”

The reliability of the known allows a slow entry into the unknown – or, as Giddens states, “the generation of feelings of trust in others, as the deepest lying element of the basic security system, depends substantially upon predictable and caring routines established by parental figures” (1984: 50). Suddenly, however, there is too much change with too little expectation of a future. Or, in Giddens’ words: “Ontological security is protected by such devices but maintained in a more fundamental way by the very predictability of routine, something which is radically disrupted in critical situations” (ibid.). To work against the ensuing insecurity, I need to concentrate on the here and now. This is a particular form of ontological insecurity but nonetheless it has a similar effect to those mentioned above. In a moment like this, one does not need a reminder about non-media-centric approaches to the social world – the media immediately disappear from sight. But slowly, they do return, find their niche, offering their services. My particular (and then again not very individual) approach was the use of my mobile phone to call people closest to me, to tell them ‘my news.’ Another aspect of media use was information searches about metastasized cancer performed rather frantically after the initial diagnosis. I also wrote and received many messages on diverse channels – plus I began using social media erratically (and sparsely) to communicate about this weird state of being (and stopped doing so very soon after). Podcasts in particular have been soothing and liberating. Nonetheless, while cancer and its treatment have become as mediatized as other aspects of the social world, they, too, are under the spell of the popular. The consequences of this popularization can only be understood if a wider net is drawn and regarded. One example thereof: I only now discovered a divide in the breast cancer community – between the so-called survivors (and all those aspiring to become one) and those ‘on the other side.’ Hence, the popular media depiction tends to be of survivors – or those who tragically died. It leaves out those who struggle over months or years, in major treatment, knowing that they will die. Those who know that they will not survive, but nonetheless live an everyday life, albeit one that has all the characteristics of a chronical (and ultimately terminal) illness. These tend to be ignored. This can easily be explained through ontological security since this kind of depiction would not necessarily aid those who are trying to overcome their fears and turn into survivors. This leads to misrepresentations of the illness – as well as to attempts to overcome these. Both, however, are not media-phenomena – they are only played out most visibly (and therefore observably) in the media. Their origin and the emotional relations though, are played out elsewhere, lived in the quotidian lives of chronically ill patients.

The book I wrote these words above shortly after I first heard my diagnosis. A few weeks have passed since; time that I spent to adjust to the news, time with the family, with friends, on holiday (yet another interesting concept), receiving treatment, losing my hair. The soothing (and threatening) nature of the everyday, of domestic routines, which was indicated above, has indeed helped to reduce the anxiety a bit. After all, I was in a position of ontological security when the news struck and I have since managed to rebuild some of it. This is, I know, only a temporary relief. The monster is still lurking in the corner (or shall I say inside myself ?). One strategy to keep it at bay at least a bit is to keep starting new things, i.e. to not let the idea of closure cover up everything. Which is why I have gone parachuting and started to sing in a choir. Which is also why I am hoping to continue to work at least to some extent. 3

Maren Hartmann

This is the point that brings me back to the book. The idea of it was actually born in my initial phase of cancer in 2020. At some point, I was trying to find new domestication material for teaching. This in itself was fairly easy – many journal articles with diverse foci provided an impression of a lively research culture around the concept, ranging from toys to finances (Brause & Blank, 2020; Brito, Dias & Oliveira, 2019; Fox, 2019; Lehtonen, 2017; Leong, 2020; Lim & Wang, 2021). What was missing, however, was an edited collection on the topic (or books in general).2 It seemed that nothing much in this format had appeared since we published the book on Domestication of Media and Technology in 2006 (Berker et al., 2006).3 This seemed a pity, given all the interesting new material out there and the liveliness of the debates. Ultimately, it appeared as if the concept was still very useful, wherefore I started a call for papers inside and outside the networks I assumed had an interest in the topic. The response was extremely delightful. I am grateful to all those who responded positively – including those who could not fit it in at the time but still found words of encouragement for the endeavour. I am also grateful for the patience of all those who contributed – first, the pandemic slowed the process down; then, my illness struck again shortly before the submission date. More than that, though, I am grateful for the content. While I leave the summaries of the contributions to the introductions to each section (an additional thanks is due to these six authors), I would briefly like to highlight a few points. Many of the here collected contributions underline what I stated above in relation to my personal story: there seems to be a clear need for routines and conventions but this need has an ambivalent relationship to conservation and newness. Additionally, digital media also tend to play an ambivalent role therein, opening avenues while also reinforcing or sometimes threatening the existing. The role for the social within individual media use is a battle field galore. Quite a few contributions additionally underline the need to draw the net wider, to critically reflect on the role of the content producers and those that claim to ‘only’ provide the underlying networks. These networks have grown exponentially in recent years – and so has the need for an inclusion of the infrastructure and production side in user studies. It has become increasingly difficult to concentrate on users’ appropriation, when any kind of appropriation (apart from radical non-use) is also feeding the larger structures of exploitation. Plus, thanks to mediatization processes everywhere, it has increasingly become difficult not to use ‘media.’ Many ideas of emancipation have therefore become problematic or at least highly more complex. This is in stark contrast to the early days of the Internet, when new forms of public spheres were hoped for, where the emphasis was on the possibilities of individual expression. They, too, have become a reality and form our media uses. But the exponential growth of possibilities has been accompanied by an equally large growth of exploitation and risk. That is why I am very fond of one of the contributions’ title: the dark side of domestication. Nonetheless, the book addresses these just as much as it shows that individual appropriation processes do still take place – in often unexpected ways, in many places and in diverse social formations. These underline, once again, that ‘the media’ does neither exist nor simply dominate. But just as much as the media landscape has changed since the domestication concept was first developed, some of the conceptual aspects remain in need of constant checking and adaptation. Maybe even the idea of ontological security cannot easily be upheld anymore? Let me add one final thought here. While searching for new work on domestication, I could not help but notice that the particular notion of ontological security was used extensively in the field of international relations, where it is applied to larger social constructs such as nations. While I cannot do justice to this debate here, I found their emphasis on processes 4

“One Life Is Not Enough”

of securitization quite helpful, seen as reactions to more or less recent developments. Underlying this is the perception that “ontological insecurity has become part of the norm of living in the Global North, often designated as a zone of security” (Wright, Haastrup & Guerrina, 2021: 2). In times like the current, this is not necessarily limited to certain parts of the world. This type of insecurity is “fundamentally destabilising and challenging established worldviews, routines and core conceptions of self hood” as Christopher Browning outlines (2018: 337). The international relations studies literature adds one core element to the existing media studies debate, i.e. “notions of societal trust” (Browning, 2018: 337). Worldviews, routines and conceptions of self hood (ibid.) are all part of ontological security (and have thus been reflected upon in the domestication literature). The question of societal trust, however, features much less often. Browning has studied this in relation to Brexit, interviewing those people who had voted to remain. If “such background anxieties” are indeed declared to be “a fundamental part of the human condition,” (Browning, 2018: 3378) the question is how these anxieties are generally pushed away in everyday life (Browning calls it ‘bracketed out’), letting us live our lives, i.e. continue the everyday. This is something I currently ask myself every day but it could also be asked about media use: what is its role when ontological insecurity on a societal level is rising. How much can we still appropriate when we are actually caught between the possibility (and responsibility?) to produce content (and contact) and the feeling of being exploited by larger systems? What role does ‘society’ play in this, when it is not clear what society consists of? I think the concept of domestication is helpful in answering these questions, as long as it is regarded as a process, a construct that needs to be questioned and adapted. I hope that the contributions to this book deliver some building blocks with which this construct can be rebuilt. And I wish us all that we can still bracket out some of our anxieties for some time yet to come.

Notes 1 This is the translation of a German book title – Ein Leben ist nicht genug – by Maxie Wander, who died of breast cancer (Wander, 2007). 2 It is interesting to note that a couple of recent books develop their own concept of media domestication, which each takes the metaphor of animals, feeding as well as agricultural selective breeding quite literal (Kempt, 2020; Stanfill, 2019). 3 One possible exception is Vincent and Haddon (2018).

References Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K. (eds.) (2006) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Brause, S.R. and Blank, G. (2020) ‘Externalized domestication: Smart speaker assistants, networks and domestication theory,’ Information, Communication & Society, 23 (5), 751–763. https://doi.org/10.10 80/1369118X.2020.1713845. Brito, R., Dias, P. and Oliveira, G. (2019) ‘The domestication of smart toys: Perceptions and practices of young children and their parents,’ in G. Mascheroni and D. Holloway (eds.) The Internet of Toys - Practices, Affordances and the Political Economy of Children’s Smart Play, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 111–133. Browning, C.S. (2018) ‘“Brexit.” Existential anxiety and ontological (in)security,’ European Security, 27 (3), 336–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2018.1497982. Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology, London & New York: Routledge. Fox, S. (2019) ‘Trying times: Domestication of healthcare technologies amidst challenging dynamic contexts,’ Social Theory & Health, 17, 291–306. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-019-00107-y

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Maren Hartmann Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kempt, H. (2020) Chatbots and the Domestication of AI - A Relational Approach, Cham: Palgrave/Springer Nature. Lehtonen, T.-K. (2017) ‘Domesticating insurance, financializing family lives: The case of private health insurance for children in Finland,’ Cultural Studies, 31 (5), 685–711. https://doi.org/10.1080 /09502386.2017.1328516. Leong, L. (2020) ‘Domesticating algorithms: An exploratory study of Facebook users in Myanmar,’ The Information Society, 36 (2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2019.1709930. Lim, S.S. and Wang, Y. (2021) ‘Lessons from our living rooms: Illuminating lockdowns with technology domestication insights,’ Journal of Children and Media, 15 (1), 17–20. https://doi.org/10. 1080/17482798.2020.1858909. Stanfill, M. (2019) Exploiting Fandom. How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Vincent, J. and Haddon, L. (2018) Smartphone Cultures, London: Routledge. Wander, M. (2007) Ein Leben ist nicht genug, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Wright, K.A.M., Haastrup, T. and Guerrina, R. (2021) ‘Ontological (in)security and Covid-19: Reimagining crisis leadership in UK higher education,’ Critical Studies on Security. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/21624887.2021.1978648

6

PART I

(Re-)thinking domestication

(Re-)thinking domestication Introduction Sonia Livingstone

Over three decades ago, Roger Silverstone, David Morley, Andrea Dahlberg and I wrote: It is in the notion (and the practices) of domestication that we think the two debates (about the future of the family and the future/impact of technology) meet: in the sphere of domestic consumption about which we know so very little. (1989: 4) The intersection of family, technology and future remains a preoccupation in academic, policy and public debates. The nature of both ‘the family’ and ‘technology’ has evolved through the vicissitudes of late modernity, and certainly, now we know much more about them. Over this period, domestication research has broadened to encompass spheres beyond the moral economy of the family and home, in some respects merging with other fields – media and communication studies, cultural studies, consumption studies, science and technology studies, digital anthropology and more. Common across these fields is a concern to recognise the actions of the everyday public within larger processes of power – not to celebrate or exaggerate their effects but, as an intellectual and critical commitment, to acknowledge and document the nature and creative or resistant potential of these actions while simultaneously uncovering how they are socially shaped, given political-economic interests and constraints. Domestication refers to a set of processes positioned between the past and the future, for the very meaning of change is articulated by looking back to how things were (for, at least, the past is known, insofar as it is remembered) and forward to what they might become (which, the future being unknown and unknowable, attract often-impossible hopes and fears). Decades after the original formulation, I heard again from families I interviewed for ‘Parenting for a Digital Future’ (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020) how society’s heightened attention to digital technologies tends to channel and crystallise popular understanding of change itself. Whether through nostalgia for lost traditions or sci-fi imaginaries of things to come or in other ways, people mobilise symbolic, emotional and material resources about the past and future to face the ever-changing demands of their present circumstances. In so doing, they make and remake the meaning of ‘family’ and ‘technology,’ as the six chapters in

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this section explore, while also taking domestication theory in new directions, as befits our fractured and challenging times. Acknowledging the traditional definition of domestication as the transformative process whereby information and communication technologies gain meaning and value by being appropriated within the moral economy of the household, Hirsch attends to the complementary process by which people are transformed through the relations they form with technologies. The nexus of relationships we are all embedded in now includes relationships with and, I suggest, through technologies. Recalling the history of the domestication of plants and livestock, Hirsch reminds us of the dynamic that holds people meaningfully within their domestic contexts: not only do we try to ‘tame’ our environment to suit our needs and interests but we also dance to its (animate or inanimate) tune. In domesticating technology, we too are domesticated; thus, our personhood – our social, relational, embedded self – is transformed. He illustrates his argument by noting how text messaging was initially feared by parents for embedding their children in unknown relationships yet, later, encouraged by parents to ensure that their children adapt and fit in with the social group: “it was not that the technology needed domesticating, rather the children needed to be ‘domesticated’ in relation to using the technology” – and thus their personhood is rendered normative. Once technologies are domesticated and taken for granted in everyday life, Berker argues, collectively, they become or contribute to infrastructures – in our homes and in society. The past three or four decades have witnessed the transition from domesticating wild technologies entering our homes to living with (or, as Deuze (2012) would say, in) media. Today’s digital infrastructures are not only taken for granted but they blur home and work (as highlighted in remote working practices during the COVID-19 pandemic); they are increasingly personalised (now mediated by the actions of algorithms in response to dynamically produced micro-segmentations of the population); they have become ubiquitous (to the point where the public has had to give up on its beloved panic about screen time, and where researchers can no longer count hours of digital activity as indicative of anything). Infrastructures necessitate a new kind of ‘work,’ Berker argues. From their users, this work involves maintaining, repairing and micro-managing the socio-technological infrastructures that underpin our lives. For domestication researchers, too, the work is not over, for we must make these infrastructures visible, re-wilding them to recognise and critique their ‘imagined’ or ‘inscribed users’ and trace their social consequences for actual users. Berker here highlights a tension in the analysis of domestication in everyday life (or, in Habermas’ terms, the lifeworld) between Marx’s productive and estranged forms of labour, the latter being exploited by the system world. This raises questions about other parts of the circuit of culture – the domination of digital platforms in the most valuable global companies, for example, or the through-going mediation (and platformisation) not only of everyday life but also of democracy, commerce and international relations. The value of the concept of infrastructure is that it encompasses all of this and more, crucially recognising that behind the devices, networks and apps that the public engages with as end-user is a complex global ecosystem of cables, cloud services, data brokers, standards bodies, digital business-to-business services and so forth. I am reminded of the parallel debate in audience studies over whether to recognise the audience’s work in making media meaningful as agency (Katz, 1996) or alienated (Andrejevic, 2002). There is no neat answer to be had: as Silverstone et al. (1989: 96) concluded in that original statement about domestication, written by way of preparation for the empirical work on ‘The Household Uses of Information and Communication Technologies’ project, consumption is inherently 10

(Re-)thinking domestication: introduction

political, for “the commodity, its circulation and its consumption, is the focus for a struggle over its meaning, a struggle which is the expression of the different interests of those who are engaged in the consumption process.” But the outcome of the struggle varies according to the context and its defining influences. Moreover, we need to grasp the wider circuit of culture to understand, for instance, Hirsch’s argument that technologies “are person-like in many ways: they summon interaction and communication.” How can technologies ‘summon’ responses from their users, domesticating them to suit the technology, using rather than being used by them? To answer this, we need to examine not only user practices and the cultural contexts in which they are embedded but also technological affordances and the economic contexts that shape the work of businesses, designers, developers, marketers, regulators and more (Mansell & Silverstone, 1996). Consider the example of notifications. For users, these generate a form of sociality that embeds them in a network of obligations. Yet, for businesses, they contribute to a marketing strategy that deploys dark patterns to monetise user attention. Such considerations lead Morley to critique the concept of consumer choice, which, he contends, explicitly or implicitly leads some empirical research on domestication to overstate an individualised notion of user agency. Here, it is helpful to recall Bakardjieva’s (2005) nuanced framing of user agency within critical and cultural theories of power. Andersen and Vistisen pursue the question of domestication theory’s relation to power in exploring what they call the ‘dark side’ of domestication, referring to people’s hyperfocus on technology and fear of missing out. Returning our attention to users’ everyday experiences, they highlight the existence of a liminal space between the public and private spheres, which they describe as an emergent space of reflexivity regarding the very process of domesticating technology. This is driven by the tensions within the household that impede any consensus in ‘household’ domestication, often centred on generational differences or even conflicts, though gendered tensions have long mattered too. In what Andersen and Vistisen see as a historical reversal, social media initially developed to promote social belonging have come to undermine it, resulting in a degree of everyday discomfort which drives ‘reflexive domestication’ towards, for example, digital detox strategies, or a heightened awareness of the risks of social media visibility. The result, they argue, is not only caution and anxiety but also a reflexive awareness that the moral economy of the household has its limits. The notion of re-domestication is helpful here, as set out by Peil and Röser, who observe that technology may first be domesticated in one way (or at one time or context) and then differently. We could think of re-domestication as a process driven by biographical developments – think of a student taking the TV set from their bedroom in the family home to their student residence and then, later perhaps, to a house shared with friends: at each point, the TV set changes its meaning, and is (re)positioned within different social practices. Peil and Röser explore the transition to parenthood – an interesting moment not only in the family’s life but in the re-domestication of domestic technologies to suit new times and enable new possibilities. Looking beyond individual or family biographies to the history of technologies, one can imagine other forms of re-domestication. Consider the example of text messaging. This was first appropriated by early adopter adults, proud possessors of expensive mobile technology. It was then taken up by (Western) youth en masse for peer-to-peer chat. Then, it was reappropriated by the world’s poor (in the West and the global South) for low-bandwidth communication. Now it is used primarily by companies for marketing and business-to-consumer messaging, while young and old have moved for their ’real’ communication to social media. Each of these moments of domestication has rightly been analysed for its distinctive motives, meanings and history. What the 11

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question of re-domestication adds, as I understand it, is the question of whether and how each moment bears a relation to the other, perhaps even incorporating and extending what went before. Again, it seems crucial to interrogate the relation between domestication and innovation in the circuit of culture. For instance, in their first case study, Peil and Röser document the domestic history of the internet from when it was first given a special place in the household – I recall interviewing children using a connected computer in the niche under the staircase. Then, they suggest, the internet was re-domesticated as not distinct from but now embedded in the household’s everyday life – perhaps on a laptop in the kitchen or the desktop perched at the end of the dining table. Most recently, the internet has once again been re-domesticated as mobile, personalised and omnipresent. This history certainly captures the feel of many domestication studies, inviting analysis of household tensions (recall when the computer was placed in the smallest room, newly dubbed ‘the office’ and coded ‘male’ or ‘adult’; Livingstone, 1992). How shall we determine whether socio-cultural shifts drive these processes of re-domestication or, rather, technological and business innovation (for example, in the development of wireless routers and laptop computers)? I am reminded of the days when, in the late twentieth century, television was talked of as a ‘push’ technology (sometimes called a ‘sit back’ technology by marketers), while the internet was a ‘pull’ (or ‘sit forward’) technology, heralded for its potential to activate users to make choices about what to see or who to reach out to. Today, of course, the situation is reversed, as television viewers face many choices among broadcast, catch-up and streaming services, while internet users – so it is said – scroll mindlessly through social media feeds algorithmically tailored to sustain their attention. However, domestication (and re-domestication) research complicates this historical shift, reminding us that even the audiences of old engaged with television’s then-limited content offer in myriad ways, according to their diverse needs and interests. Furthermore, while today’s television audience are indeed offered a cornucopia of content enabling a highly personalised experience, many nonetheless seek a common experience by accepting what is ‘pushed’ towards them (such as ‘what’s trending’). My point is that a critical analysis of the power dynamics between the technological offer and use cultures is vital to understanding the meanings and practices that shape our everyday lives. Regarding this larger project, Martìnez and Olsson usefully argue that domestication research has taken unto itself the task of providing a critical corrective to the technological determinism endemic not only to theory but also to policy. For example, domestication research generally shows socio-technical change to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It excels at countering the hyperbole of techno-panics with solid evidence of moderate rather than catastrophic effects on everyday life, these also being diverse rather than monolithic precisely because they are significantly shaped by both user agency and the different structures and practices of everyday life. In short, domestication research has inserted a vital pause between innovation and intervention. When it comes to policymaking, the focus of their chapter, it must be acknowledged that, if we don’t know what an innovation means till we have researched how it is domesticated in context, policymakers must wait for the research findings (fund them, even!) before intervening. They share three case studies of domestication research that found a policy audience, and it is interesting to consider what they have in common. Each sought to represent ‘voices from below’ to those in power – explaining to policymakers how encouragement to get connected was experienced as pressure by working-class families, explaining to school administration the missed opportunities of locking up students’ mobile phones during class, explaining to government how grandchildren can indeed help their grandparents to gain digital skills 12

(Re-)thinking domestication: introduction

but making this policy perpetuates inequalities also, as not all elderly people have willing grandchildren living nearby with time to commit. Since domestication research generally focuses on the quotidian, private practices in domestic spaces, and since it seeks out ‘ordinary’ populations for study, attending to their diversity and differences, it is surely well-positioned to speak truth to power on behalf of those whose voices often go unheard. From my policyrelevant research with children, I have learned from the world of child rights that such work brings its ethical obligations: to co-design research with those being represented, to find ways to include their voices and their recommendations in policy briefings, and to feedback to them the response from policymakers, including news of beneficial (or other) outcomes. It will be apparent that because domestication unfolds over years, even decades, there is welcome attention to history and theory in the chapters in this section. They insist on recognising the complex co-evolution of technologies and socio-economic forces shaping everyday life, mapping these in interesting ways onto the biographies and generational shifts of those we research. Concerned that much media research has become ahistorical, obsessed with the present and content to wave a hand at ‘the past’ without serious examination of either continuities or historical complexities, Morley welcomes domestication research’s attention to history. In interrogating the different histories we tell, he explores how we find ourselves – as we must – also adopting a non-media-centric approach to domestication. Although researchers focus their immediate gaze on domestic practices around technologies, both the explanations and the social consequences of such practices often lie elsewhere, in the tensions and struggles in the wider culture. Morley’s conversation with Hartmann encompasses a range of social consequences of domestication, spanning the home (including the design of sofas for shared viewing, the loss of privacy from ubiquitous surveillance, and the impact of home working during the pandemic) and the globe (where globalisation demands our attention not only to satellite networks but also to the flows of container shipping vital to long-distance supply chains). Their discussion also troubles domestication theory’s somewhat ‘cosy’ focus on the domestic by drawing attention to those who have no home – Hartmann has researched the homeless (or the ‘roofless’ as she terms them, for some can find a ‘home’ in places that lack a conventional roof ) and Morley discusses immigrants who live between homes or divorced from their home of origin or making efforts to establish a new home. In short, people create opportunities for ontological security in both likely and unlikely places while facing its limits, often due to circumstances not of their making. Once again, we find ourselves debating the extent to which people’s actions (whether at home, outside the home or without a home) alter or disrupt established power at key points of articulation (representation, consumption, identity) in the circuit of culture.

References Andrejevic, M. (2002) ‘The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of selfdisclosure’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19 (2): 230–248. doi:10.1080/07393180216561. Bakardjieva, M. (2005) ‘Conceptualising user agency’, in Bakardjieva, M. (ed.) Internet society: The internet in everyday life, London: Sage, pp. 9–36. Deuze, M. (2012) Media life, Cambridge: Polity Press. Katz, E. (1996) ‘Viewers’ work’, in Hay, J., Grossberg, L. and Wartella, E. (eds.) The audience and its landscape, New York: Routledge, pp. 9–22. Livingstone, S. (1992) ‘The meaning of domestic technologies: A personal construct analysis of familial gender relations’, in Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (eds.) Consuming technologies, London: Routledge. Available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61632/.

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Sonia Livingstone Livingstone, S., and Blum-Ross, A. (2020) Parenting for a digital future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mansell, R. and Silverstone, R. (Eds.) (1996) Communication by design: The politics of information and communication technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silverstone, R., Morley, D., Dahlberg, A. and Livingstone, S. (1989) Families, technologies and consumption: The household and information and communication technologies. CRICT Discussion Paper, Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology, Brunel University. Available at http:// eprints.lse.ac.uk/46657/.

14

1 DOMESTICATION AND PERSONHOOD Eric Hirsch

Introduction In what ways are technologies such as computers and mobile phones1 similar to persons? A relation with a person involves some kind of interaction, some form of communication. In fact, such a personal relation implies interaction and communication. The same holds true in unique ways with technology. Once a computer or a mobile phone is possessed and one begins to use it after it is activated (switching on its circuits), one can feel compelled to communicate with it. It is only through their activation that the devices exist as technology. In this way, technology can never be completely domesticated – subdued or controlled – because it can only exist through the activated use of it by persons. The persistent presence of the activated technology summons a response, not unlike that of relations with persons (Strathern, 1992: xi). What is now known as social media is a most recent illustration of the presence of an activated technology calling for a reply. In a similar manner, persons and their social relations can never be completely restrained or controlled by the technology because as a condition of the technology’s existence, there is the active relationship persons have with their devices. Although the technologies seem to increase the experiences and choices of people, they do so in relation to the people themselves. In short, “it is those very autonomous, self-circuiting, social realities of … [modern] person as an active individual agent that makes consumers most mirror the technology with which they ‘interact’” (Strathern, 1992: xii). It is sometimes the case, though, that the passionate relations people have with technology, such as computers and mobile phones, is pathologised – viewed as unhealthy (see Sutton, 2020). Such a view of social media use is the outcome of a more general view of information and communication technology (ICT) and especially digital technology as a form of social relations or sociality that is less “authentic” than social life prior to ICTs (cf. Turkle, 2011, 2015). Miller and Horst (2012: 13) suggest that this view of ICTs is the result of a particular “cultural value”. The point they stress is that people are no less social when they interact and communicate online (Sutton, 2020: 17). Rather, they are social in different ways and with different effects.2

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Conceptualising personhood The attention to authenticity – being true to one’s self – is associated with a particular view of personhood.3 Marilyn Strathern (2020: 9) reminds us that it was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 188–204) who differentiated the “individual” as a non-social entity from the “person” that was a node in a network of social relations. In Radcliffe-Brown’s view, every human being was both a “biological organism” and a “complex of social relationships”. It is the latter that he designated as the person. Two years before Radcliffe-Brown’s general statement concerning personhood (published in an article about “social structure”), Marcel Mauss (1985) examined a range of historical and ethnographic material on conceptions of the person found in different societies across time and space. While Mauss highlighted the uniqueness of the Western idea of the person, Radcliffe-Brown suggested that personhood in whatever its forms involved the centrality of social relations. Mauss’ (1985: 3) intention was to show how recent is the word “self ”, as used philosophically. In a similar manner, how recent was the “category of ‘self ’” as well as the “cult of the ‘self ’”. All languages have some recognition of the self as in the terms for “I” and “me”. Mauss’ interest was to document the emergence of a notion of the person that is bound up with explicit categories of the self. He turns to ethnography to show that many peoples are not individuated in terms of a unique self. Rather, the person’s standing, as among Australian Aborigines, for instance, is bound up with a name that assigns a locus of duties and rights within the clan (Mauss, 1985: 11). It is only with Christianity, Mauss argues, that a legal and political personality (deriving from ancient Rome) is wedded with an internal life in the form of a morality and a universality through the relation conceived between each person and God.4 One of Mauss’ foremost students, Louis Dumont (1985), elaborated on the scholarship in Mauss’ essay, conveying what he called the Christian beginnings of modern individualism. Dumont argued that in Western societies, the individual has a paramount value. “Modern consciousness”, Dumont (1986: 236) states, “attaches value predominantly to the individual”. Dumont is using the notion of individual differently from Radcliffe-Brown. This is because Radcliffe-Brown did not acknowledge that in Western societies, “the distinction between the individual and person is hard to make” (La Fontaine, 1985: 125). The idea of the individual predominates in Western ideology (cf. Ouroussoff, 1993). At the same time, “‘society’ is seen to be what connects individuals to one another, the relationship between them” (Strathern, 1988: 12). In a wide-ranging critique of anthropological practice, Strathern (1988) argues that the relation between the individual and society – of central significance in Western conceptions – has either explicitly or implicitly informed the analysis of Melanesian ethnographic material. She argues that this is inappropriate, given the Western origins of these ideas. Instead, she proposes a different vocabulary to talk about Melanesian persons and their relations. “Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived” (Strathern, 1988: 13; cf. Marriott, 1976: 111). Strathern (1988: 273) suggests that the person in Melanesia is “construed from the vantage points of the relations that constitute him or her; she or he objectifies and is thus revealed in those relations”. In other words, there is no encompassing notion of society in this context. Rather, persons are part of other persons (persons are “divided” between persons [as dividuals]) and the cause of a person’s actions is other persons. The reconceptualisation of personhood in Melanesia undertaken by Strathern has been influential. In fact, some have argued that Strathern’s analysis of the Melanesian “dividual” 16

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person is not restricted to Melanesia and that in all societies there exist dividual as well as individual modalities of personhood (LiPuma, 1998: 56). Whether this is the case depends on how this is interpreted ethnographically, given the differences in historical transformation between societies. Nonetheless, the notion of dividual personhood has been applied to contexts beyond that of Melanesia. This is the case in anthropological studies of Facebook. Dalsgaard (2008) in particular has drawn on Strathern’s model of Melanesian personhood for his own explorations of this social media. He suggests that the technologies that are the basis of social networking sites are designed according to the ideas of Western individuality but in practice exhibit forms of social relations and personhood that are more akin to dividuality. The digital collection of “friends” on Facebook reveals how persons are composed of relations. This is done by displaying the digital images that friends provide and putting them on the “friends list”. It is this process that is seen as analogous to the dividuals theorised by Strathern (McKay, 2010: 486). The research of Dalsgaard (2008) and McKay (2010) contests the idea that social networking sites largely foster networked individualism (see Wellman et al., 2003). McKay (2010) worked with people of Northern Philippines and with their migrant families in the UK. She describes how photographs of various kinds are used on social networking sites by those who remain in the Philippines (e.g. photographs of local persons are juxtaposed with iconic old buildings from their town). This is done, McKay found, because when a family member from the diaspora enters the site, the site needs to represent not just an independent person but a connection in an extended family ancestry. This is very different from the individualism assumed by Wellman. Implicated in the social relations of the person nowadays and for some decades are the ICTs that are increasingly part of the social lives of people in diverse social and cultural contexts, as the above examples show. How are we to understand the part played by ICTs in these social relations? The use of ethnographic techniques deriving from anthropology has been influential here. In parallel with the use of ethnography has been the use of domestication theory, to which I now turn.

Domestication theory “Domestication theory”, the “domestication approach” or “domestication framework” (Haddon, 2006) first emerged in the early 1990s when ICT became a single object of study. This model has been used to examine how the social dynamics and spatial arrangements of the household “domesticate” ICTs as well as how ICTs reconfigure the dynamics and arrangements of domestic spaces. The approach has been prominent (see Kennedy et al., 2020: 59–64). As originally formulated (Silverstone et al., 1992), domestication is understood as a transformational process where ICTs acquire a specific value in the moral relations of householders and families. What are foregrounded are the object or media and their movement and transformation across the threshold of the home and into the social and moral lives of its inhabitants. Four elements of this process are distinguished. Appropriation identifies the shift of things as commodities to those of possessions, an alteration from the formal economy to the moral economy. Objectification recognises the display of possessions and how they fit into the symbolic system and aesthetic structure of the home. Incorporation concerns the everyday use of objects, texts and media, while the notion of conversion highlights the complete appropriation of ICTs into the moral economy of the household. 17

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In her study of home computing, Lally (2002: 101) utilises the domestication framework to understand the complex associations the computer has in the domestic context – a source of entertainment and leisure as well as educational and work-related uses. However, for the computer to be effectively “domesticated”, that is, “to become an established part of the household it must find its place within the pre-existing structures of value and activity with the home”. Although Lally does not refer to ethnography, her research adopts a seemingly ethnographic approach. While her account highlights the domestication of computers, the detailed material of her study simultaneously signals, but more implicitly, an analogous kind of domestication occurring in the domestic context, that is, the domestication of persons. What is implied but not a focal point of the domestication framework is that the transformations suggested by the model are effected by persons (e.g. family members) and their myriad social relations. Although the domestication approach argues that it was ICTs that were domesticated, I want to suggest something different. It is true that ICTs find a place in the social and moral lives of people, but I want to propose that it is persons that are transformed – domesticated – through their relations with ICTs. This is because the relations persons form with ICTs are analogous to that formed with persons; ICTs are comparable to persons in the way they summon interaction and communication.

Domestication: another view By proposing this different view of the domestication framework, I am also suggesting that it is important to view the very idea of domestication itself in a different light from the way it is usually perceived (cf. Berker et al., 2006). Consider the following example, the source of which derives from an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.5 In 1866, George Eliot published Felix Holt, The Radical, a novel set during the time of the Reform Act of 1832. This is the political context in which the story is set. However, a major subplot involves a female character, known as Esther Lyon, who is the object of affection of the novel’s two male protagonists, Harold Transome and Felix Holt. In the course of the narrative, Esther’s relation with the Transome family is described and Eliot uses the concept of domestication to characterise this connection: “Her domestication with this family had brought them into the foreground of her imagination” (Eliot, 2000 [1866]: 460). This is the first time in English published writing that domestication is used to refer to a person. The noun in this context conveys something similar to the verb domesticate – Esther has been made to feel or to be at home with this family. She had become enmeshed in the relations of the Transome family and those relations have become a part of her person. The relations with the Transomes summon a response in Esther – they are brought into the foreground of her imagination. It is this transformation of Esther through her relations with the Transome family that Eliot glosses as domestication. The use of the term in this context has an analogy with the way domestication is used in connection with domestic pets, for example. The pet and owner summon responses from one another based on their established mutual relations. Domestication is this quality or capacity for reciprocal relations with human persons. One does not have such a relation with a wild animal unless it is subject to some form of domestication. Until the time of Eliot’s novel, domestication had only been applied to animals or vegetation. The first use of the noun in this way is by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Lord Kames (Henry Home) in his book Sketches of the History of Man (1774). Darwin used it in a comparable way some 60 years later upon the publication of his Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s ships Adventure and Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836 (1839). 18

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We know that agriculture as it is generally practised would not be possible without the domestication of plants just as livestock farming could not exist without the domestication of animals. In both cases, it is a matter of bringing these entities under human control. Domestication in this sense is perceived as intrinsic to a “civilised” existence. Although domestication is conventionally applied to plants and animals, others see domestication as a “primary organising principle” of capitalism more generally. Domestication is first and foremost a mode of inhabiting the world by occupying it. Occupation here is meant in the settler-colonial sense. Indeed, from an inter-species perspective, every human occupation is an act of settler colonialism since one occupies a space that is always already occupied by other domesticators, whether insects, animals, plants or trees. Each of these inhabits the world with some degree of instrumentalization too: a tree spreads itself above and below the ground in its struggle to extract nutrition, sun, and so on. Ants also organize and transform their surroundings in a specific way. What defines human generalized domestication is the act of occupying a space by declaring one’s own interest as its primary organizing principle. As such it relates to prior occupiers of the same space according to how their being can be harnessed to the advancement of our own being. What comes in the way is excluded or exterminated. (Hage, 2017: 94–95; quoted in Carnerio de Cunha, 2019: 183, who added the emphasis) However, domestication does not necessarily have the single occupying and controlling connotations suggested by the above view. Although numerous scientists concerned with plant and animal domestication argue that “proper domestication is that state of affairs that demands that the very life and reproduction of a species be strictly dependent on human care”, not all domestication involves the “absolute subjection of the domesticated to the domesticator” (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 177). This is especially the case among South American Lowland Indigenous people. On the one hand, it is generally recognised that the Amazon is an important centre of plant domestication (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 175). On the other hand, Lowland Indigenous peoples do not view themselves as domesticators. Rather, in Lowland Indigenous peoples’ ideologies, plants have volition, demands and even initiatives. These ideas are connected to how they view the forest. In Western ideologies, agriculture is inimical to the forest. Many South American Lowland Indigenous peoples perceive the forest as cultivated, not by humans currently living, but by “people” of a different kind: “animals, spirits, masters, even planted and cared for by other plants” (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 172). There is abundant worldwide evidence of cultivated plants as ‘people’ requiring special attention and coaxing. Anne-Christine Taylor (2007) and Philippe Descola have described Achuar women’s extreme maternal dedication to their plants (Descola 1994 [1986]). Rio Negro women endeavor to make their manioc children happy in the gardens by providing to them companion species who should play music and comb their hair (Emperaire, van Velthem, and Oliveira 2012). (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 176) Nonetheless, as Hugh-Jones (2020) stresses, depending on circumstance and location, similar outlooks are present in people who have very different worldviews from those of South American Lowland Indigenous peoples. Carneiro da Cunha (2020: 176, n.10) mentions such 19

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a brief example: “I recall this old Portuguese lady who pitied her cabbages: ‘my cabbages are sad, poor things’” (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 176, n.10). To someone who is not an expert, the Amazonian forest appears “pristine”. However, it has been documented that the forest is to some degree anthropogenic. “In short, one could say that [Amazonian peoples] do not submit the forest to human generalized domestication. They no doubt made the forest more favourable to human life but did not colonize the forest” (Carneiro da Cunha, 2020: 184, emphasis added). The forest is analogous to a sentient being – comparable to a person – with its own agency; it is a person-like and people have a relationship with it.

Persons and things, things as persons Does our (Western) everyday relation with things (including technological things) resemble more the worldview of these indigenous peoples than the idea of capitalist domestication suggested by Hage? Consider the argument of Gell in his book Art and agency: an anthropological theory (1988). He cites the example of a person and their car. From one perspective, the car is just a possession and means of transport and is not a centre of agency belonging to the owner or the car. However, Gell suggests that car owners often consider their car as a bodypart, a prosthesis. It has this quality because it is endowed with the social agency of the car owner in relation to other social agents. “Not only is the car a locus of the owner’s agency, and a conduit through which the agency of others (bad drivers, vandals) may affect him – it is also the locus of an ‘autonomous’ agency of its own” (Gell, 1998: 18). Gell provides a personal example. Not only does the car reflect the owner’s personhood, but the car has its own personhood. He mentions the Toyota he possesses, which is cherished. It has its own personal name, Toyolly or “Olly” for short. He speaks of the car as being “reliable” and “considerate”. Because it has these personal qualities, Gell indicates that the car “knows” it will only break down when it will cause only minor bother. If, however, the car were to break down far from home or late at night, he would hold the car “personally and morally culpable”. From Gell’s perspective, the conduct of the car in this way would be an act of “gross treachery” (Gell, 1998: 18–19). Here is a clear example of a thing as a person where the relationship is conceptualised as involving qualities associated with living persons, for example, reliability and consideration. Relations with ICTs may have similar traits. The more general point I want to make, though, is that it is important analytically to be able to conceptualise relations with things having person-like characteristics. There is then the issue of domestication. Cars, as with ICTs, cannot be used until they are activated. Is it these things that are brought under control (domesticated) or are persons domesticated to the properties of the thing? I want to propose that persons have to become different sorts of persons in order to use and engage with these things that have person-like qualities. In a way, they have to be under the “control” of the technology to use it, master it and make it part of themselves and their social relations. In so doing, they acquire new capacities and their agency is transformed. Driving a car, learning how to use a computer or a mobile phone, these capacities become part of our personhood, not as explicit knowledge (although they can be explicitly articulated) but more as a habitus as suggested by Bourdieu (1977) or what Bloch (1992) refers to as “what goes without saying”. Various theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand these processes. Some speak of technology as skilled practice (Harvey, 1997). Ingold (2000) refers to enskillment and a more recent refinement of these ideas is suggested by 20

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Grasseni and Gieser (2019) as skilled mediations. The source for most of these ideas derives from the situated learning model developed by Lave and Wenger (1991). Consider a recent ethnographic study from Australia (Kennedy et al., 2020). One of the historical examples the authors provide concerns MSN messaging and the concerns parents had about their children’s use of this technology and the foreign forms of social relating it enabled. The parents did not see how it was possible for their children to use the technology – to create a relation with the technology – which they deemed acceptable. The problem was not the technology itself but the kind of social relations the use of the messaging might foster. At the time, this was a new form of creating relations and the problem was that unknown persons or persons deemed unacceptable may enter the personal realm of the children. It was this unknown that the parents feared. The children, by contrast, welcomed this adjunct to their personhood and the network of their social relations (Kennedy et al., 2020: 35). However, some years after MSN was introduced, the attitude of parents had radically altered. Parents were encouraging their children to use MSN where this was now perceived as an acceptable technology and as an acceptable way of conducting social relations. If anything, the parents were concerned if their children did not use MSN. From their perspective, it was important that the children “fit in” socially. It was not that the technology needed domesticating; rather, the children needed to be “domesticated” in relation to using the technology; they needed to have a relation with MSN so as to facilitate the networks of relations their parents saw as necessary. Initially, this was a skilled practice the parents did not want their children to acquire and engaged with. However, over time, parents realised that having the technical skills of MSN was important for their children to become persons with a network of relations, a form of fitting in with peers that was seen as desirable. Without this capacity, the children, it was feared, would lack the agency needed to sustain a network of friends. The authors also point to a generally well-known fact in many Western societies and this has to do with age-appropriate forms of conduct connected with the personhood of the child. There are marked changes associated with life-cycle stages of the person, such as when the child is old enough or independent enough to sleep over at a friend’s house; to acquire their own front door key; or to be allowed to drive the family car. Each of these transitions is connected with increasing autonomy but also potentially with growing webs of social relations that constitute the person. Part and parcel of these transitions is a range of ICTs that are simultaneously implicated in the composition of the child as a person: the mobile phone, the social media account, the computer and iPad (Kennedy et al., 2020: 179). Understanding technology as rooted in social relations repudiates the split between technology and society that many scholars call for. Tim Ingold (1997: 107) argues that “technical relations are embedded in social relations, and can only be understood within this relational matrix, as one aspect of human sociality”. However, as Michael Jackson (2002: 334) observes, Ingold “says little about how this embeddedness is experienced”. Jackson (2002: 336) provides an example from his son: My 9-year-old son, Joshua, is playing a ‘hard version’ of a game on his Gameboy. The game is not going well for him. He flings down the machine, and walks away, tears of frustration in his eyes. ‘It’s not fair!’, he exclaims. ‘What’s not fair?’ I ask. ‘It isn’t fair. If you miss just one thing the game ends. It should give you another chance to get something. But it keeps on making me lose.’ What this example captures is how the boy speaks about the machine as if it were a person. His relation with the machine parallels how people more generally speak of their relations 21

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with people they engage with. When the relationship with technology, such as ICT, is good and “works”, then it is felt as a kind of balanced exchange, much as one would have with another person. But when the machine does not conform to what is expected or a sense of fair play is missing as in the example above, then people become irritated in a way similar to a person who treated one dishonestly or did not reciprocate a present one gave ( Jackson, 2002: 336). What this brief example again highlights is that persons are domesticated by ICTs in the sense that they need to acquire capacities to engage with the technology just as one acquires a new role when engaging with a new person. What I now turn to are two cases that further elaborate the perspective on domestication I have so far discussed. The examples serve two purposes. One is to include non-Western cases to show that what I am suggesting is not just a parochial phenomenon. The second is to indicate that persons are constituted by social relations and the domestication of persons may also entail the domestication of social relations depending on the context and the ICTs concerned. The first case is a study of internet use among one family in China. The second is a study of mobile use among peri-urban people in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Aligning family relations Red Mountain Town is the name given to a county-town in south-west China where the anthropologist Tom McDonald conducted fieldwork. At the time of his research, internet cafés were frequented by young men playing games. Many of these young men made the internet cafes their effective home, given the amount of time spent there. During McDonald’s time in the town, he lived with one family, a family he refers to as Li. They had two sons; the younger one spent considerable time in an internet café to the dismay of his parents, especially his mother. In order to overcome this problem, the parents decided to install internet in the home so that their son would now spend more time in the household. McDonald studied the result of this domestic transformation. In China, the family unit defines itself through the practice of sharing food from a common stove. When children neglect family meals, they are missing this convention of shared relations associated with eating together from a common source (McDonald, 2015: 22). Due to the widespread influence of internet cafés, this is not an isolated problem and parents seek to overcome this issue by installing a home internet connection. In so doing, the hope is to lure the offspring back to the home. McDonald reports that various Chinese operators were able to provide such home internet services. After the internet was installed in the Li home, the computer was located in the boys’ bedroom. This had the effect of significantly altering the Li family’s domestic practices. A key feature of this daily routine was what the mother referred to as “eat dinner, watch TV”. McDonald (2015: 23) tells us that she recited this expression with joy after each meal. This meant that the family habitually retired to what they referred to as the “guest hall” following dinner. There, they watched television together, viewing programmes such as soap operas and game shows. Watching television together was analogous to eating food together that came from the domestic stove. However, the introduction of home internet did not resolve the problem of the family dining and family television viewing. Although the younger son was now in the home and not based in the internet café, his engagement with the family meal was minimal and he did not watch television together with his parents after the meal. Instead, he would have to be repeatedly called to the family meal, usually arriving last. He would then quickly eat his food and instantly return to the bedroom to continue gaming. His lack of interest 22

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in properly eating with the family greatly troubled his mother. He was not observing the conventions expected of him both in response to his mother and to the creation of family unity (McDonald, 2015: 23). In order to obviate this problem, the parents performed a further transformation in their home. They redecorated a small “entrance hall” room and moved the computer there. Together with the computer, the parents placed several extra chairs enabling more people to gather around the computer. This had the effect of placing the son in a more visible place when playing computer games and he was often observed by his parents. By relocating the computer in this way, the family was able to be together more often not only around the computer, but also when watching television. In fact, McDonald (2015: 25) records that all the family played games of doudizhu 6 or majiang 7 on the internet. The outcome of this spatial transformation was that the computer had now become analogous to television as a place where the family could gather and express its unity. What this case illustrates is that a specific morality informs family relations in the home and that in order to sustain this morality, persons need to align themselves with technologies in a specific manner. From one perspective, it might appear as if the technology – the computer – is being domesticated in this context. However, what the case illustrates is the domestication of the person – the son – in his relations with the technology, and his relations with his family. McDonald (2015: 25) draws on Deirdre Hynes’ research who “expresses preference for the domestication of the technology model, owing to its capacity, as she notes, ‘to analyse the discrete phases of the process through which technologies become a part of everyday life’” (Hynes, 2009, p. 26). What I am suggesting, though, is that it is persons and their relations with technologies that are “domesticated” – that the network of relations in which both are imbued must take a particular form, given the morality that informs any domestic context. In fact, McDonald (2015: 18, emphasis added) comes to a similar conclusion, emphasising “that rather than individuals being motivated by getting ICTs to ‘fit in’ to the household, individuals instead seem preoccupied with how to align other family members to these technologies in a particular way”. In this case, the son had already been domesticated, so to speak, by the computer and internet in the internet café where he spent large amounts of time. Computer use eventually entered the home. The issue that pre-occupied his parents was getting him to abide by the moral conventions of the family. This meant gathering together for meals, for television and eventually for games on the internet. In this, the relations of the family were domesticated by engagement with the internet through the computer.

Sustaining moral persons and relations The second example concerns mobile phones in PNG, a country lacking much of the telecommunications infrastructure one finds in North America, Europe and even China. Nonetheless, mobile phones have become common in urban, peri-urban and even in some rural settings. Having said this, the digital communications infrastructure is still limited with many regions lacking access. The anthropologist David Lipset studied mobile phone use among low-income Papua New Guineans, specifically Murik people of whom many now reside in Wewak, a market town and provincial capital of East Sepik Province. His previous research focused on Murik people in their village-based, rural homes. In general, he found that Murik people have enthusiastically adopted mobile phones. At the same time, their uses of mobile phones are inserted in the “kinship-based networks they hold dear” (Lipset, 2013: 341).8 Because kinship relations are perceived as the core relations of the person in this social 23

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context (as they are in different ways in the Chinese context described above), mobile phones are implicated in sustaining these relations. Lipset provides several examples. He describes an occasion when he was sitting with some men and one of them noticed a missed call from a village kinsman. This caused the man worry as he wondered whether the kinsman was alright or whether he was in trouble. He called back straightaway. It transpired that the kinsman was requesting that he transfer telephonically some prepaid units which the man immediately got up to do. Kinship relations entail obligations of one sort or another and the mobile phone is deployed to facilitate those relations. Lipset records similar examples, such as a man receiving a call from his brother in Port Moresby (the national capital) several hundred miles away asking him to send betelnuts without delay; or a grandfather who called his granddaughter to know whether her son was at home and whether he could buy something from a street vendor for him as he was too tired. The examples provided by Lipset all illustrate the way Murik people seek to micro-coordinate their everyday life and the effect mobile phones have in this process (Lipset, 2013: 341). Relations between kin also involve friction and disparagement. Two classificatory brothers through their fathers were also rival siblings. One was a villager named Jakai who was temporarily living in town. The other, Sandar, was an educated peri-urbanite who was raised in the village but now retired. He worked for Air Nuigini in the late 1970s where he was based in Melbourne, Australia (Lipset, 2013: 342–343). When they encountered each other, there was often tension and anger. Lipset describes how Sandar called Jakai’s sister Maggie at the settlement camp where he was staying and asked her to put Jakai on the phone. Lipset (2013: 343) was present when Jakai was handed the line. In a loud, clearly audible voice, Jakai kept asking, ‘Who is calling? Who are you? Speak louder! I can’t hear you! What do you want?’ Sandar yelled out his name repeatedly. Soon enough, Jakai handed the phone back to Maggie. ‘Jakai doesn’t know how to speak on a mobile’, Sandar explained to her exasperated. ‘Ask him what he wants to do about sending petrol to the village’. Later, Sandar told Lipset that people like Jakai do not know how to communicate on a mobile phone. Because they are not speaking face-to-face, they do not understand how one speaks on a mobile. Sandar spoke of Jakai as “backward”. However, Jakai later revealed that he intentionally did not recognise Sandar because he did not want to speak with him on this occasion. In Murik social life, the mother’s brother and sister’s son have what is referred to as a joking relationship and are understood to be joking partners. For example, a mother’s brother teased his unemployed sister’s son for always talking on the phone. Lipset (2013: 346) records the observation made by the uncle regarding his nephew: “If a woman rings, he runs off. Upon return, I ask him, ‘Who called? Was it a man or a woman?’ What work does he have to do? Sex, sex, that’s all! Hey! Hey!” As Lipset (2013: 346) notes: “This expression of gossipy caricature, which is of a piece with ordinary ribald mockery in Murik joking repartee, has now absorbed the new communications technology”. It may be asked, though, whether the new communication technology has absorbed such joking conduct or whether, more accurately, joking relations are now arranged in concert with the technology. Mobile phones are also implicated in sexual liaisons. Before the advent of mobile phones, illicit sexual encounters occurred in both the peri-urban and village settings. What this technology has done, if anything, is potentially increase forms of illicit relating. Lipset (2013: 345) describes the observations of Murik people who tell him of a couple arguing due to a 24

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mobile phone call or a provincial administrator being chased by his wife for the same reason. Village life also has such illicit meetings and domestic violence provoked by sexual jealousy occurs in both contexts. What is distinctive of the mobile phone is that the traces of betrayal are more easily identified. The examples of mobile phone use among Murik people that I have provided above are in many ways comparable to what we might find in other social and cultural contexts (cf. Ling & Campbell, 2009). Nonetheless, the differences matter. One area where the use of mobiles summons a response that is perceived as appropriate and conventional with this technology is personal or collective greetings. When Murik people meet face-to-face on village footpaths or on a town street, the conventional greeting is “where are you going” or the person or persons might indicate where they are going or where they have come from, if asked. However, greetings on mobiles do not take that form. Rather, the greeting is “are you ok” when first speaking to someone on a mobile phone. Lipset (2013: 347) suggests that this is evidence of a “modern” subjectivity being elicited by the use of the technology. In general, the use of this new technology enables the extension of social relations in both space and time but what is paramount in these interactions is the maintenance of a particular moral personhood that mobile phones both sustain and potentially transgress (Lipset, 2013: 351). As in the Chinese case described above, the technology is implicated in the creation of a form of personhood and the social relations it supports. It is not so much that the technology is domesticated as much as people are aligned with the technology to sustain a distinctive moral personhood and social relations.

Conclusion I have suggested an alternative view of domestication and ICTs. Instead of ICTs being domesticated by, for example, the dynamics of family life and household rituals, I have proposed that it is ICT that domesticates people. In order to use and engage with various forms of ICTs, one must become skilled in some way that enables persons to have capacities and an agency that they did not possess before. The reason ICTs have this effect is because they are person-like in many ways: they summon interaction and communication. And because they do so, people must align their personhood and social relations with ICTs in order to sustain certain ideas of moral conduct. The view of domestication I am proposing is not necessarily opposed to the original framework developed by Silverstone et al. (1992). If anything, they are most likely complementary. However, what domestication theory originally underplayed, I think, was not only the significance of personhood and social relations, but also the person-like agency exhibited by ICT and its effects on persons and their relations. By focusing more centrally on ideas of personhood, including the relations that constitute a person, the analyst is able to more clearly appreciate the transformative effects of ICTs. It is clear that families and households provide “homes” for ICTs and in that sense domesticate the technology. But ICT simultaneously domesticates its users, given its person-like qualities and the need of living persons to acquire the skilled practice that all people must possess in dealing with others.

Acknowledgements I want to thank Maren Hartmann for inviting me to contribute to this volume and for providing very helpful feedback on a draft of my chapter. For any errors in fact or form that remain I only have myself to thank. 25

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Notes 1 Here, I am selecting two from a range of information and communication technologies. 2 This is not to suggest that some people do find the use of social media as less authentic. Sutton (2020) studied a group of “digital detoxers” in northern California who attend an annual camp over a period of several days where the participants remove technology from their person. In doing so, they are in a position to get closer to “nature” by camping in the woods and participating in various therapeutic exercises. The detox camp attempts to recreate living arrangements associated with more small-scale societies where campers live in villages with “nature” names (e.g. Bobcat) and assemble by tipis and campfires when they practice remaining in silence for hours at a time. What is created in this setting is a vision of an authentic human existence that is more in touch with nature and less mediated by technology. 3 Humphrey (2009) studied Russian chat rooms and her research highlights a particular modality of authenticity. The avatar enables the Russian player to fully communicate their true being, which is highly constrained in the offline world. The avatar is meant to express the inner state of the person. While ordinary life is a suppression of the true “self ” (often represented as such in Russian literature), the avatars are closer to the soul and the powerful emotions the soul can express. In this way, online activity is not something entirely foreign but accords with what is typically Russian (see Miller & Horst, 2012: 15). 4 In this regard, Mauss (1985: 21) places great emphasis on sectarian movements of the 17th and 18th centuries. It was then that much debate focused on individual conscience, the right to be one’s own priest in communicating with God, and by having an inner God. It is these movements (e.g. the Puritans) that established the idea that the person equals the self and that the self equals consciousness. As Mauss (1985: 22) notes, “[t]he one who finally gave the answer that every act of consciousness was an act of the ‘self ’…, the one who founded all science and all action on the ‘self ’…, was Fichte”, creating the condition for the emergence of modern scientific psychology in mid-19th-century Germany (cf. Rose, 1999 [1989]: 221–222). 5 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56670?redirectedFrom=domestication#eid (visited on 9/2/22). 6 Literally translated as “fighting the landlord”, a popular card game played by three or four players. 7 A tile-based game developed in 19th-century China. 8 The kinship-based networks referred to can also be conceptualised as dividual relations theorised by Strathern (1988), as discussed above.

References Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y., and Ward, K. (eds.) (2006) Domestication of media and technology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Bloch, M. (1992) ‘What goes without saying: the conceptualisation of Zafiminary society,’ in A. Kuper (ed.) Conceptualising society, London: Routledge, 127–146. Bourdieu, P. (1977) [1972] Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carnerio da Cunha, M. (2019) ‘Antidomestication in the Amazon: swidden and its foe,’ in G. Lloyd and A. Vilaça (eds.) Science in the forest, science in the past, Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 171–190. Dalsgaard, S. (2008) ‘Facework on Facebook: the presentation of self in virtual life and its role in the US elections,’ Anthropology Today, 24 (6): 8–12. Descola, P. (1994) [1986] In the society of nature: a native ecology in Amazonia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont, L. (1986) Essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, L. (1985) ‘A modified view of our origins: the Christian beginnings of modern individualism,’ in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds.) The category of the person: anthropology, ­philosophy, history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–122. Eliot, G. (2000) [1866] Felix Holt, the radical, Ontario: Broadview Press. Emperaire, L., van Velthem, L. and Gita de Oliveira, A. (2012) ‘Patrimônio cultural imaterial e sistema agrícola no médio Rio Negro: Amazonas,’ Ciência e Ambiente, 44: 141–154. Gell, A. (1998) Art and agency: an anthropological theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grasseni, C. and Gieser, T. (2019) ‘Introduction: skilled mediations,’ Social Anthropology, 27: 6–16.

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Domestication and personhood Haddon, L. (2006) ‘The contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption,’ The Information Society, 22: 195–203. Hage, G. (2017) Is racism an environmental threat? Cambridge: Polity. Harvey, P. (1997) ‘Introduction: technology as skilled practice: approaches from anthropology, history and psychology,’ Social Analysis, 41: 3–14. Hugh-Jones, S. (2020) ‘Rhetorical antinomies and radical othering: recent reflections on responses to an old paper concerning human-animal relations in Amazonia,’ in G. Lloyd and A. Vilaça (eds.) Science in the forest, science in the past, Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 237–254. Humphrey, C. (2009) ‘The mask and the face: imagination and social life in Russian chat rooms and beyond,’ Ethnos, 74: 31–50. Hynes, D. (2009) ‘Users as designers: the internet in everyday life in Irish households,’ Anthropology in Action, 16: 18–29. Ingold, T. (2000) The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (1997) ‘Eight themes in the anthropology of technology,’ Social Analysis, 41: 106–138. Jackson, M. (2002) ‘Familiar and foreign bodies: a phenomenological exploration of the humantechnology interface,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 333–346. Kennedy, J., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B., and Wilken, R. (2020) Digital domesticity: media, materiality, and home life, New York: Oxford University Press. La Fontaine, J. (1985) ‘Person and individual: some anthropological reflections,’ in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds.) The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123–140. Lally, E. (2002) At home with computers, Oxford: Berg. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipset, D. (2013) ‘Mobile: moral ambivalence and domestication of mobile telephones in peri-urban Papua New Guinea,’ Culture, Theory and Critique, 54: 335–354. LiPuma, E. (1998) ‘Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia,’ in M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds.) Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53–79. Ling, R. and Campbell, S. (2009) The reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices, New Brunswick: Transaction. Marriott, M. (1976) ‘Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism,’ in B. Kapferer (ed.) Transaction and meaning, Philadelphia, PA: ISHI Publications, 109–142. Mauss, M. (1985) ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self,’ in M.  Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes (eds.) The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, ­history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–25. McDonald, T. (2015) ‘Affecting relations: domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town,’ Information, Communication and Society, 18: 17–31. McKay, D. (2010) ‘On the face of Facebook: historical images and personhood in Filipino social networking,’ History and Anthropology, 21 (4): 483–502. Miller, D. and Horst, H. (2012) ‘The digital and the human: a prospectus for digital anthropology,’ in H. Horst and D. Miller (eds.) Digital anthropology, London: Berg, 3–35. Ouroussoff, A. (1993) ‘Illusions of rationality: false premises of the liberal tradition,’ Man, 28: 281–298. Radcliffe-Brown, A. (1952) Structure and function in primitive society, London: Cohen & West Ltd. Rose, N. (1999) Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self, London: Free Association Books. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E., and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, 15–31. Strathern, M. (2020) Relations: an anthropological account, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strathern, M. (1992) ’Forward: the mirror of technology,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, vii–xiii. Strathern, M. (1988) The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, T. (2020) ‘Digital harm and addiction: an anthropological view,’ Anthropology Today, 36 (1): 17–22.

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Eric Hirsch Taylor, A.-C. (2007) ‘Sick of history: contrasting regimes of historicity in the Amazon,’ in C. Fausto and M. Heckenberger (eds.) Time and memory in indigenous Amazonia: anthropological perspectives, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 133–168. Turkle, S. (2015) Reclaiming conversation: the power of talk in a digital age, New York: Penguin. Turkle, S. (2011) Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other, New York: Basic Books. Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Boase, J., Chen, W., Hampton, K., Diaz, I., and Miyata, K. (2003) ‘The social affordances of the internet for networked individualism,’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8 (3): JCMC834.

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2 DOMESTICATION AS USER-LED INFRASTRUCTURING Thomas Berker

Introduction Domestication was born in a specific stage of the development of domestic technologies and it has since travelled through time and space and was continuously adapted to new contexts (Hartmann, 2020). At the current moment, after two years of home office for those who are lucky enough to make a living through screens, microphones and cameras, it is increasingly difficult to revive the fears of the 1980s in which ‘wild’ technology threatened to invade the sanctity of the home. It is now clear that living large parts of everyday life more or less completely within socio-technical networks is quite possible. Despite or maybe rather because of this domestic intimacy with all kinds of technologies, the question raised by domestication studies of what is at stake when the home – be it defined as a physical space or as a set of distinct practices – and technology meet is as relevant as ever, but has to be updated to stay relevant. Our introduction to the domestication concept from 2005 ended with reflections on its future mission: Domestication research suggests that only when the novelty of new technologies has worn off; when they are taken for granted by users in their everyday-life context that the real potential for change is visible. Documenting and understanding these changes in modern societies that increasingly become dependent on information and communication technologies constitutes one of the most important challenges for domestication research in the future. (Berker et al., 2006: 14f) In this chapter, pursuing this mission further, the main inspiration comes from a shift in perspective which has been called ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Bowker, 1994), i.e. the foregrounding of the vast socio-technical networks that enable technologies to function and that stay hidden as long as they do so. This shift in perspective, I will argue, is necessary to tackle challenges posed to the domestication concept by an everyday life, which is always already inside socio-technological networks instead of being located at least in parts at their outside. This challenge threatens the core of classic domestication studies, which – based on DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-5

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the metaphor of ‘taming’ – assumed the existence of a fundamental tension between new technology and everyday life, which had to be resolved. In what follows, I take infrastructural inversion, both as an analytic approach and as an observable aspect of technology use ‘in the wild’ as a starting point, to ask what an infrastructural lens has to contribute to an update of domestication and what we learn about infrastructures, their change and their transition, based on insights gained from domestication studies. To do so, conceptual work will be necessary, both on the side of how to conceive domestication and with regard to infrastructures. This work will be made easier by developments of infrastructure studies that approach infrastructures as fluid and relational entities and by domestication studies that have broadened the focus from the introduction of individual devices into households to the role of technologies in everyday life. I will start this chapter with explicating how I read the classics of domestication studies. I, then, describe changes in everyday technology use since the 1990s that, as I will argue, have made the ‘taming’ of ‘wild’ devices less important than the daily work of maintaining, articulating and incrementally changing of ‘micro-infrastructures of everyday life.’ I then introduce the literature on ‘fluid and relational infrastructures,’ and based on this background, I will discuss what the specific mutual contributions of domestication studies and infrastructure studies can be. A section on new stakes of domestication as user-led infrastructuring leads to the concluding chapter, which will return to the question of what classic domestication studies can teach us today.

Old stakes Before attempting to describe the new realities of an everyday life that is increasingly lived within continuously and rapidly innovating socio-technical networks, and what they might mean for domestication studies, it is necessary to look back. The following little history of domestication and its underpinnings is situated in Norway and in the discipline of science and technology studies (STS). As such, it is closely related to the realisation that modern technology operates in networks connecting humans with humans, devices with devices, and humans with devices, which is approximately as old as STS and predates the classic publications on domestication by a little less than one decade. Within STS, domestication was in the 1990s introduced as an important correction of simplistic ideas about how technologies ‘diffuse’ along the threads of these ‘seamless webs’. The question answered here is what exactly happens when a new thing – and with it new practices – travels from non-use to wide-spread use. Careful empirical observation produced the realisation that between ‘not using’ and ‘taking the use for granted,’ considerable work has to be done by users: acquiring the technology, finding a suitable space for the device, identifying practical use cases and developing routines enabled by the new technology. That this work is done by users means two things. First, users work on the technology and change it, and second, the user’s everyday life is changed. This mutual influence is performed within a more or less limited space, which is bounded by the rigidity of the ‘user scripts’ (Akrich, 1992) embedded in the technology. The observation of mutual change has been used as support for the basic notion that there is creative appropriation, i.e. agency on the side of the users, but also as heuristic, guiding studies of the incorporation of technology into everyday life. In the Norwegian context, particularly Sørensen’s (2005) dimensions of practical, cognitive and symbolic appropriation have helped many generations of students to describe how all kinds of new technologies have moved from non-existence into the heart of everyday life. 30

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With its introduction into STS, domestication’s moral economy of the household was replaced with the more open term everyday life: “what we do over and over again, today the same as yesterday, thus signifying stability and the reproduction of social patterns” (Lie & Sørensen, 1996: 3). Right after this quote, Lie and Sørensen (1996) add that while technological artefacts entering everyday life appear as a disruptive force, they are by far less revolutionary as sometimes assumed because they are also changed (‘tamed’) in the process of domestication (ibid.). This conceptual innovation introduced a subtle but consequential shift in how processes of domestication were approached. The extension from the moral economy of the household to everyday life has made domestication applicable in many more settings, but it has also changed the stakes. Concerns about the meaning of a fundamental transformation of the home and consequences for ontological security were replaced with a more general discussion of technology’s role in society. But where is the boundary of everyday life that is crossed by something coming from the outside, in need of ‘taming’? The home as a safe haven provided such an understanding for Silverstone et al. (1990). To understand how everyday life could take this place, it is important to situate the shift both in the Norwegian context and in the broader discipline of STS. In Norway, as Gullestad (1991) has noted, in the 1980s, the term ‘everyday life’ has transformed from being part of the dualism ‘everyday vs. festival’ to ‘everyday vs. system,’ which incorporated aspects of authenticity and ontological security, without replacing the original meanings: The fact that the notion’s old connotations (drudgery and plainness) coexist to some extent with its new ones (closeness, wholeness, and integration) makes everyday life a rich and potent political symbol. (Gullestad, 1991: 480) The notion of plainness and work as ‘authentic’ and ‘whole’ as opposed to the alienating sphere of ‘the system’ carries with it both elements from protestant ethics (Weber, 2001) and the Marxist distinction between productive labour, where humans interact productively with nature, and its counterpart of ‘estranged labour’ in a capitalist society (Marx & Engels, 2009 [1844]). STS, which has one of its central roots in 1970s technology-critical activism, added to this the distinction between instrumental, technological rationality and everyday end-use, which comprises a larger set of rationalities. The message here was that the ‘colonisation of the life-world,’ to use Habermas’ (1989) terms, in which technologies enter work and leisure as the system agents, has to be resisted. The contribution of domestication studies in this context was one of cautious hopes: technologies are ‘under-determined and not undetermined’ (Sørensen, 2006: 57), which opens space for what is known in STS as ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). Successful domestication allows domesticators to feel at home within socio-technical systems, as long as they are allowed to ‘make them their own’ (Lie & Sørensen, 1996). If this is not respected by engineers and designers, if they base their designs on a naive understanding of their power to determine use, they will meet resistance in the form of small acts of sabotage or be punished by non-use. In both the media studies and STS version of domestication, a dualism is at the heart of the core argument: where the media studies version posits a difference between capitalist markets and the moral economy of the household, the STS approach opposes everyday life with socio-technical systems. To be meaningful, these approaches need a boundary between two spheres which the ‘domesticatee’ crosses, producing the need for reconciliation. Well aware of the pitfalls of such a simplification, the proponents of both versions stress that 31

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already the fact that domestication takes place is an argument against essentialising the two sides of a strict dichotomy. However, the moral struggles within and among users that were observed empirically as part of the incorporation of new technologies in the home or everyday life (Silverstone, 2006: 236) were a strong argument for the existence of tensions that go beyond practical questions of adaptation and adoption.

New tensions: using technology today During the decades since domestication’s first publications, we have seen three related transformations that have made the alleged tensions on which domestication depends increasingly less obvious: the continued blurring of home and work, the advent of mass-customisation in everyday technology use and a simple increase of technological engagement in everyday life. Starting with the latter, the mobile phone – a small, always-on, networked computer that is constantly in reach – is probably the most striking example for how much more homes and daily lives are embedded in socio-technological networks today than in the 1990s. Classic domestication studies were very much aware of the fact that the homes and everyday lives they were studying always already were part of socio-technical networks. So the change here is first and foremost a quantitative one regarding the number of devices and the number of hours spent immersed in practices that depend on large-scale technological infrastructures. But arguably, this qualitative change has also brought qualitative ones. As Keilbach and Stauff (2013) show, discussing television, the assumption of temporally bounded innovations – like the move from old to new media – becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Instead, ‘old media never stopped being new.’ They argue that even the good old television has transformed to become a space of constant experimentation with new configurations, which entail new uses. In the case of material consumption, spearheaded by PCs and mobile phones, rapid product cycles have also crept into new domains such as clothing and cars, meaning a multiplication of choices and accelerated cycles of adoption and disposal. For users, this means continuous adoption and adaptation, which through sheer force of repetition loses its meaning as deliberate work, easing the tension between the old and the new. In addition to this habituation of the integration of new technologies in daily routines, the long-awaited advent of mass-customisation has profoundly changed the context of technology use. Originally observed as a trend changing industrial production in postFordist regimes, mass-customisation describes a shift from searching competitive advantage in economies of scale to exploiting new technologies to achieve cost-efficient production of smaller batches of customised products (Piore & Sabel, 1984). Today, the consumption of mass-customised products has become a wide-spread phenomenon, often unnoticed by their consumers. Most notably, it has become a routine phenomenon in the algorithmically produced, individualised environments provided by platforms like Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. But market research, which accompanies innovative activities, has also become more advanced, producing fine-grained consumer-segmentation. This is constantly updated, based on the registration of user behaviour in real time, creating completely new and very profitable business models (Zuboff, 2019). Here, the tensions that were so important for the domestication concept are resolved preemptively, constantly adapting the technology to the users’ choices, making its adoption as smooth as possible. Finally, and particularly relevant for the tension between the domestic sphere and capitalist markets, the external shock of a pandemic has finally realised the promises of ‘tele-work’ that – like many of the trends discussed here – has been around for several decades, albeit with less than optimal outcomes (Egido, 1988; for an overview of the first two decades, see 32

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Berker, 2002). The technological contribution to this transformation is obvious, with digital collaboration tools mushrooming since 2020. However, the pressure to extend work into all spheres of life with ‘work becoming home’ and ‘home becoming work’ has been observed for much longer (Hochschild, 1997). At the current historical moment, offices are becoming populated by their inhabitants again, but workers have domesticated their home offices, which accelerates the long-standing trends towards the increased spatial flexibility of at least certain types of work. The same applies to more and more social interactions – also outside work – depending on apps that are connected to data centres. Convergence, again an old acquaintance (Borés et al., 2003), has moved from being a question of standards to materialise on the average user’s screen, where the work meeting is one click away from the families’ messages and an ocean of entertainment. In this situation, adding one more connected screen or one more app becomes an activity, which requires very little cognitive, symbolic or practical effort – to use Sørensen’s (2006) dimensions of domestication. These three changes are connected and – at least compared to the 1990s – amount to a much stronger habitualisation of innovation, which is supported by mass-customisation and socio-technical convergence. However, they do not render the user a passive dupe. Friction is obviously still there, when the WiFi cuts out in the middle of a meeting, when dark design patterns leave the user dissatisfied with ‘wasted’ hours in front of screens (Gray et al., 2018), when games on in-car entertainment systems become part of a short public outcry, or when children’s screen time is negotiated. The question is now, in light of what was discussed as the old stakes of domestication approaches in the previous section, whether these tensions amount to more than just annoyances that can be solved by technological means. Is there an underlying tension that can serve as a starting point for a careful adaptation of domestication to new technological everyday lives? In what follows, I propose that the term ‘infrastructuring’ holds the key to a better understanding of tensions in everyday technology use dealt with today. Users are operating and incrementally extending micro-infrastructures that consist of a large number of connected devices both in their homes and more generally in their everyday lives. Tensions and the imperative of resolving them quickly is not any longer first and foremost related to big divides involving capitalist markets or technological rationality entering from the outside of the home or everyday life. Instead, I propose that the new realities of technology use are better described as the struggle to avoid and deal with disruptions of the fabric of daily life into which a large number of incrementally changing devices are already woven.

Infrastructuring The central starting point for connecting domestication and infrastructuring from an STS perspective is the catalogue of characteristics of all infrastructures, collected by Star and her colleagues during their work on information infrastructure (Star & Ruhleder, 1996): The first characteristic that distinguishes devices from infrastructures is their embeddedness. True to a relational approach, Star and Ruhleder (1996) describe this embeddedness as being technical and social at the same time. In terms of technology, infrastructures are interconnected devices that together are connected to other infrastructures. But they are also inextricably intertwined with social practices that are enabled by them. The process of embedding, which always happens in the context of an already installed base, consequently, is both technical and social, guided and supported by technical standards and conventions of social practice. According to Star and Ruhleder (1996), another characteristic of infrastructures is that they do not come with handbooks; instead, their use is learned by participating 33

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in a community of practice. Obviously, those that relate to infrastructures as devices, e.g. operators or maintainers, depend on documentation, but even there, tacit knowledge plays an important role as, for example, studies of building maintenance have shown (Muhle, 2014). The practical mode of learning about infrastructures is enabled by their conventional nature, their standardisation and what Star and Ruhleder (1996) call transparency, the characteristic that they do not have to be assembled or reinvented each time they are used. They are ‘always on,’ changing only slowly. This is, then, also connected to the last characteristic: while a device can be specifically created to cater for one specific practice, infrastructures have a reach or scope that goes beyond one practice and a specific way of performing a practice. This does not mean that they are completely neutral as to what can be done with them, but they are always more general than individual devices. Together, these characteristics produce a vexing problem for the study of technology use: while infrastructures do their work, they are invisible for their users. Only when they break down, they are badly aligned with practices or other technical structures, or when they change, they become visible. But then, strictly speaking, they end being infrastructures and become something else. This problem has been widely acknowledged and different solutions have been proposed to indirectly study infrastructures. Larkin (2013), for example, describes the tendency that ethnographies of infrastructures easily become studies of something else, e.g. of technology design. To deal with this, he proposes to study infrastructures where they become visible as infrastructures, e.g. as symbols of modernity, as a metapragmatic object that is supposed to achieve certain things or as having ambient sensual qualities. Thus, he questions the assumption of invisibility; and, indeed, these indispensable structures are not literally invisible. How could they then be used and made relevant for daily practices? His proposals, however, can easily fall into the trap that he wants to avoid by leading research away from infrastructures, and towards the study of e.g. discourses of modernity or ambient aesthetics. Star’s advice for scholars of infrastructures (Star, 1999) contains what she calls ‘tricks of the trade’ to work around invisibility, such as the identification of ‘master narratives’ about what the specific infrastructure is, can and should be good for. While this resonates strongly with Larkin’s (2013) proposals and may lead away from routine use, second and third ‘tricks’ are based on the observation of the specific work that is necessary to keep infrastructures invisible. The first is articulation work, a routinely enacted “process of assemblage, the delicate, complex weaving together of […] resources, organizational routines, running memory of complicated task queues […]” (Star, 1999: 386–387). In addition, she directs our attention to the kinds of invisible work done by maintainers, cleaners and managers, who practise infrastructural inversion as part of their daily work and are therefore deeply familiar with the infrastructures that are the object of their care. A related way of dealing with infrastructures’ invisibility in routine use has been described by Karasti and Blomberg (2018). They introduce the notion of studying infrastructuring instead of infrastructures, which presupposes a careful and reflexive ‘construction of the field of inquiry.’ Very much in line with Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) description of the embeddedness and relational nature of infrastructures, they call for making what belongs to the object under study and what not, part of the enquiry itself, as well as the roles of researchers themselves and of designers and users. Infrastructuring in this sense may happen during the establishment of new infrastructures – which then includes their use. More often, however, infrastructures only change incrementally, demanding small acts of adjustment. Finally, infrastructuring includes articulation work, as it was described by Star, and care and maintenance. 34

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In the previous section, I have argued that technology use at home and in everyday life is increasingly characterised by a constant influx of new technologies and changes in existing ones, which shifts the attention from the incorporation of specific ‘wild’ devices to a focus on how environments are operated that are suffused with and depend on a large number of networked, converging and mass-customised devices. With the term infrastructuring, we now can describe this work as the management of incremental change, articulation and maintenance.

From devices to infrastructures: continuities If we now return to domestication, as it was conceived in the 1990s, particularly its device-centred aspects seem to fit badly with a focus on infrastructuring. However, as I will show in this section, when we move from devices to infrastructure, there are a number of continuities. Classic domestication studies describe the dimensions of ‘objectification,’ which is the deliberate and significant display of the ‘domesticatee’ within the home (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992: 20), and ‘conversion,’ which marks the end point of domestication. On both dimensions, users are displaying the device as an expression of their identity, e.g. when they “display a household’s (or a household member’s) criteria of judgment and taste, as well as the strength of his or her material resources” (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992: 23). Read through an infrastructural lens, these episodes are meaningful as display of (non-)participation in certain infrastructures. An example for this is the display of one’s own computer equipment on the first personal homepages in the 1990s, which expressed first and foremost that the user was an Internet user (Berker, 2001). More recently, we have observed an increase in similar conspicuous participation in environmentally friendly infrastructuring. In fact, the conspicuous consumption of sustainable domestic infrastructure has for a long time been a well-known phenomenon driving infrastructural change – or preventing it (Wilk & Wilhite, 1985). As Pierson (2021) argues, using the example of messaging apps, infrastructural inversion is a necessary corollary of this perspective on domestication, not only on the side of the analyst, but more importantly on the side of the users. Studying infrastructures in this way follows both Larkin’s and Star’s recommendations to look at infrastructures through what they symbolise and which master narratives they embody, but it also includes efforts to understand the inner workings of infrastructures to be able to assess their impacts. In these cases, small changes in vocabulary transform domestication studies to studies of infrastructuring. These changes add new areas to the study of domestication activities, above its applicability in relation to desirable infrastructural change. In this context, when users display their (non-)participation and engage in infrastructural inversion, objectification and conversion still shed light on the role of end-users in technological change. In the case studied by Wilk and Wilhite (1985), for example, being environmentally friendly was displayed by installing solar panels on the home, instead of investing in more efficient wall insulation. In domestication terms, the specific objectification, thus, had very real consequences for sustainability. Today, in fact, good and evil are evoked by users in relation to what previously were the most mundane acts of technology use made normal by their infrastructural quality. Daily and domestic practices become questionable in moral terms in relation to sustainable living, which connects the household in addition to markets to concerns about energy systems and the global climate (Marres, 2012). A way of studying this domestication of infrastructural transitions is taking its inspiration from experiments with infrastructural change conducted by users themselves. Sutcliffe 35

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(2022), for instance, co-designed together with households time-limited experiments in green living, to explore meanings, practical barriers and knowledge needs connected to these infrastructural changes. Similarly, the living labs established within the Norwegian Research Centre on Zero Emission Neighbourhoods focused less on the testing of specific technologies in ‘real life settings,’ but rather sought to identify the conditions that enable or make impossible fundamental infrastructural changes (Woods & Berker, 2019, 2021; Berker & Woods, 2020). The intended outcome of these experiments was mutual learning, where users were encouraged to reflect on the infrastructures they depend on, and researchers learn from both their successes and failures.

From devices to infrastructures: new stakes As opposed to ‘objectification’ and ‘conversion,’ the dimension of ‘incorporation’ from classic domestication studies resonates strongly with infrastructuring as work which aims at keeping infrastructures invisible. For Silverstone and Hirsch (1992: 21), incorporation describes the embedding of the new devices in existing routines of everyday life. Seen through the infrastructural lens, the more networked devices are encountered in a home or everyday life, with other words, the more developed the infrastructural ‘built base’ will be, the more demanding the work of incrementally changing, articulating and maintaining will become. In this context, particularly three characteristics of infrastructures introduce new stakes for domestication: that they are ‘embodiment of standards and have strong links to conventions of practice,’ that they have a ‘reach and scope that transcends of a single practice use,’ and finally infrastructures’ ‘transparency.’

Standards Just a little reminder: infrastructures are according to Star and Ruhleder (1996) suffused with technological standards and their socio-cultural equivalent, conventions of practice. Attention to this aspect, particularly the focus on the invisible world of standards and classifications that fundamentally form our world, has been one of the most productive parts of studies of relational infrastructures (Bowker & Star, 1999). This characteristic explains why infrastructures interoperate and why they can be learned by doing – we have met similar light switches or ‘file open-dialogues’ before – and why they transcend single-site and single-user practices. In light of this characteristic, we can reformulate domestication’s mutual adaptation between technology and household/everyday life as the performance of standardisation activities. On the one hand, we see further standardisation of everyday technology use and introduction of new conventions of practice when a new technology is taken into use. The users learn about what is expected from them to successfully participate in new technological networks. This requires active work, practical, cognitive and symbolic at once. The standardising aspect of this is sometimes glaringly obvious, for example, during the previous decades, in which one individual after another started to flick their fingers over the same kind of small screen, which is of course only the visible outcome of their inclusion into massive platform economies that come with their own technical standards and conventions of practice. But, on the other hand, domestication also means that users create their own standards and conventions, either by choosing between given alternatives, by refusing to use, or by using it in the idiosyncratic ways of their communities of practice. In this context, infrastructuring also reminds us that the most idiosyncratic development of standards and conventions is always performed by building on ‘a built base,’ both inside and 36

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outside the users’ control. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that infrastructures are never uniform and all-encompassing but rather multiple and heterogeneous (Muhle, 2014; Karasti & Blomberg, 2018). Domestication sharpens our attention to variations in how infrastructures are performed, or, in the words of Karasti and Blomberg (2018: 256), forces us to “abandon assumptions about infrastructural stability, boundedness and coherence.” With a nod to Sørensen’s (1994) ‘micro-networks of domestication,’ the outcome of this infrastructuring can be called ‘micro-infrastructures,’ which are installed by the users on the base of existing networks.

Reach and scope Another characteristic that makes devices to infrastructures is that they provide space for more than one practice that is performed in more than one way by more than one individual. This is – as is the case for the other characteristics – a question of degree: the more specific a technology becomes with regard to its uses, the less it can be called an infrastructure. Infrastructuring then becomes the activity increasing the reach and scope of a technology. The way this was discussed in the STS-inspired domestication literature is through ‘scripts’ that are ‘inscribed’ in technology containing assumptions about specific practices performed and that can be refused, followed or negotiated. If we look at domestication as infrastructuring, this work of ‘interpretation’ of given ‘scripts’ extends the infrastructure’s reach by adding new scopes, i.e. the users’ specific and more or less idiosyncratic use cases. Classic domestication ends here, the technology is presented as an expression of status and identity (conversion) and the next device is domesticated. If we, however, take the argument that users construct ‘micro-infrastructures’ themselves seriously, users not only ‘make the technology their own,’ but there are also technologies that are domesticated further to become indispensable infrastructures of a wide range of practices performed in everyday life. Thus, the extension of reach and scope – e.g. trying out a new device in different use contexts, getting more people in the household to use the infrastructure – continues and decides how important and indispensable the device will become.

Transparency Finally, the question of transparency, i.e. an infrastructure does not have to be assembled anew for each use, reintroduces the question of good and bad technologies into the study of the domestication of infrastructures. The starting point here is once more a quote from Star and Ruhleder (1996: 28): An infrastructure occurs when the tension between local and global is resolved. That is, an infrastructure occurs when local practices are afforded by a larger-scale technology, which can then be used in a natural, ready-to-hand fashion. It becomes transparent as local variations are folded into organizational changes, and becomes an unambiguous home – for somebody. This is not a physical location nor a permanent one, but a working relation – since no home is universal. (Star & Ruhleder, 1996: 28) Domestication studies are filled with descriptions of the ‘assembling’ of technologies and practices that then – after the work of domestication is done – are performed ‘in a natural, ready-to-hand fashion.’ Standards, which I have described as a central object of domestication 37

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as infrastructuring, enable large technical systems, but they also systematically exclude groups of people that do not have the ability to create ‘a home for somebody’ within these standards (Star, 1991). In other words, these groups are not able to engage in domestication. Domestication, as we have learned from studying it empirically, requires practical, cognitive and symbolic resources (Sørensen, 2006), which are unequally distributed in society. The idea present in domestication studies, that sometimes domestication can also imply not using a technology, becomes problematic under these circumstances. Whether a home opens the door to a TV or PC seemed like a moral choice in the 1990s. After all, when these studies were made, there were many households that did well without these devices. If we introduce ‘making a home’ in infrastructures as the stake of domestication, exclusion always comes with penalties connected to access to the goods distributed through infrastructures. The cost of refusing to participate in an infrastructure is well understood by those who are excluded, but also by those who exclude themselves. With whole infrastructures becoming questioned for their impacts – e.g. because of concerns about their sustainability – user-led infrastructuring has received the additional dimension of active, collective and deliberate infrastructure building on a scale that includes, but goes beyond the incremental change, articulation and maintenance that every user is forced to perform. They are prompted by users not being able to create a home in infrastructures any longer. This can have modest aims as, for example, the fight for the ‘right to repair’ (Perzanowski, 2020), which quite literally is about the right to perform user-led infrastructuring. More far-reaching examples are user-led infrastructure projects, such as ‘self-hosters’ who provide IT infrastructures to their households and friends through small servers running in their basements (Feigenbaum & Koenig, 2014), community initiatives investing in local renewable energy production (Seyfang et al., 2014), or small networks of food producers that connect with consumers in local distribution networks (O’Hara & Stagl, 2001). In these and similar cases, finding a home in infrastructures means to reconstruct infrastructures, to build, articulate and maintain niches within the larger systems (Schot & Geels, 2008), accepting the costs that this voluntary exclusion entails.

Concluding remarks To conceive domestication as infrastructuring does not mean to claim that tensions related to capitalist markets, homes, instrumental reason and the rationalities of everyday live do not exist any longer. But it directs our attention to a wide spectrum of technology-related user activities that are not directly related to these tensions. They all involve infrastructural inversion ‘in the wild’ – albeit to different degrees – and comprise mundane maintenance and articulation tasks as well as the management of constant incremental change. And in some cases, they can even aim at the establishment of alternative niches against existing infrastructures. Domestication, as it was presented here, covers a sub-set of infrastructuring – the userfacing side of infrastructure work – which in the literature on infrastructures so far existed in the shadow of the politics of large-scale infrastructure projects and the technological challenges of creating, standardising and maintaining infrastructures. However, if the attention is directed away from the use of devices to the use of infrastructures, users’ potential involvement in the whole ‘circuit of infrastructuring’ spanning its production, use, regulation and meaning (Hartmann, 2018) becomes visible. This does obviously not mean that all users based on extensive infrastructural inversion build their own infrastructures. However, the 38

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assumption that users are passively exposed to standardised and standardising infrastructures is not plausible either. The spectrum between these two extremes provides ample hunting ground for the study of domestication as user-led infrastructuring. The study of users’ agency in infrastructuring is driven by a similar motivation as classic domestication studies, which discovered user agency in technology use in ‘the wild’ as well as users being engaged in moral discussions of how and whether to use certain devices. Agency and moral negotiation related to individual devices obviously still exists and should still be studied. But to move domestication into a present, in which more and more constantly connected devices provide the critical infrastructure of more and more daily activities, the scope of domestication should move from devices to also include the users’ work to develop, articulate and maintain micro-infrastructures of everyday life.

References Akrich, M. (1992) ‘The De-Scription of Technological Objects,’ in W.E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.) Shaping Technology/Building Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, 205–224. Berker, T. (2001) Internetnutzung in den 90er Jahren. Wie ein junges Medium alltäglich wurde, Frankfurt/ New York: Campus Verlag. Berker, T. (2002) Perspectives on “Telework from Below,” Vol. 14/02, Trondheim: Senter for teknologi og samfunn, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet. Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K. (2006) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Berker, T. and Woods, R. (2020) ‘Identifying and Addressing Reverse Salients in Infrastructural Change. The Case of a Small Zero Emission Campus in Southern Norway,’ International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 21 (7): 1625–1640. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-12-2019-0354. Borés, C., Saurina, C. and Torres, R. (2003) ‘Technological Convergence: A Strategic Perspective,’ Technovation, 23 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4972(01)00094-3. Bowker, G.C. (1994) Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Cambridge: MIT Press. Egido, C. (1988) ‘Video Conferencing as a Technology to Support Group Work: A Review of Its Failures,’ in Proceedings of the 1988 ACM Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work, 13–24. Portland, OR: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/62266.62268. Feigenbaum, J. and Koenig, J. (2014) ‘On the Feasibility of a Technological Response to the Surveillance Morass,’ in B. Christianson et al. (eds.) Security Protocols XXII, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 239–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31912400-1_23. Gray, C.M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggath, J, Toombs, A. (2018) ‘The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design,’ in CHI 2018 (ed.) Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1–14. Gullestad, M. (1991) ‘The Transformation of the Norwegian Notion of Everyday Life,’ American Ethnologist, 18 (3): 480–499. Habermas, J. (1989) Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, New York: Beacon. Hartmann, M. (2018) ‘Circuit(s) of Affective Infrastructuring. Smartphones and Electricity,’ in J. Vincent and L. Haddon (eds.) Smartphone Cultures, London: Routledge, 11–24. Hartmann, M. (2020) ‘The Domestication of ) Nordic Domestication?’ Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2 (1): 47–57. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2020-0005. Hochschild, A.R. (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, New York: Metropolitan Books. Karasti, H. and Blomberg, J. (2018) ‘Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically,’ Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 27 (2): 233–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9296-7. Keilbach, J. and Stauff, M. (2013) ‘When Old Media Never Stopped Being New. Television’s History as an Ongoing Experiment,’ in M. de Valck and J. Teurlings (eds.) After the Break, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 79–98.

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Thomas Berker Larkin, B. (2013) ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (1): 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522. Lie, M. and Sørensen, K.H. (1996) Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Marres, N. (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2009 [1844]) The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, Amherst: Prometheus Books. Muhle, F. (2014) Problems and Problem-Solving Strategies in Remote Building Operation. A Case Study, Trondheim: Sintef Academic Press. O’Hara, S.U. and Stagl, S. (2001) ‘Global Food Markets and Their Local Alternatives: A SocioEcological Economic Perspective,’ Population and Environment, 22 (6): 533–554. https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1010795305097. Perzanowski, A. (2020) ‘Consumer Perceptions of the Right to Repair,’ Indiana Law Journal, 96: 361. Pierson, J. (2021) ‘Digital Platforms as Entangled Infrastructures: Addressing Public Values and Trust in Messaging Apps,’ European Journal of Communication, 36 (4): 349–361. https://doi. org/10.1177/02673231211028374. Pinch, T.J. and Bijker, W.E. (1984) ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,’ Social Studies of Science, 14 (3): 399–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631284014003004. Piore, M.J. and Sabel, C.F. (1984) The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, New York: Basic Books. Schot, J. and Geels, F.W. (2008) ‘Strategic Niche Management and Sustainable Innovation Journeys: Theory, Findings, Research Agenda, and Policy,’ Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 20 (5): 537–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320802292651. Seyfang, G., Hielscher, S., Hargreaves, T., Martiskainen, M. and Smith, A. (2014) ‘A Grassroots Sustainable Energy Niche? Reflections on Community Energy in the UK,’ Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 13: 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.04.004. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating Domestication. Reflections on the Life of a Concept,’ in Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K. (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and David, M. (1990) “Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household” in Sørensen, K. H. and Berg, A.-J. (eds.) Technology and Everyday Life: Trajectories and Transformations, Proceedings from a Workshop in Trondheim, Trondheim: STS, 13–46. Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (1992) Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge. Sørensen, K.H. (1994) Technology in Use. Two Essays on the Domestication of Artefacts, https://doi. org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27048.26881. Sørensen, K.H. (2005) ‘Domestication. The Enactment of Technology,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K. Ward (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 40–79. Star, S.L. (1991) ‘Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions,’ in J. Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London/ New York: Routledge, 26–56. Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure,’ American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3): 377–391. Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. (1996) ‘Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,’ Information Systems Research, 7 (1): 25. Sutcliffe, T.E. (2022) ‘Consumption Work in Household Circular Economy Activities: Findings from a Cultural Probe Experiment,’ Journal of Cultural Economy, ahead of print: 1–16. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17530350.2022.2066150. Weber, M. (2001) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Second ed., London: Routledge. Wilk, R.R. and Wilhite, H.L. (1985) ‘Why Don’t People Weatherize Their Homes? An Ethnographic Solution,’ Energy, 10 (5): 621–629, https://doi.org/10.1016/0360-5442(85)90093-3.

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Domestication as user-led infrastructuring Woods, R. and Berker, T. (2019) ‘Living Labs in a Zero Emission Neighbourhood Context,’ IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 352 (October): 012004. https://doi. org/10.1088/1755-1315/352/1/012004. Woods, R. and Berker, T. (2021) ‘Norwegian Pilots: Navigating the Technological Logic of Sustainable Architecture,’ in M. Stender, C. Bech-Danielson and A. Landsverk Hagen (eds.) Architectural Anthropology. Exploring Lived Space, London: Routledge, 237–249. Zuboff, S. (2019) ‘Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action,’ New Labor Forum, 28 (1): 10–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/1095796018819461.

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3 CONCEPTUALIZING RE-DOMESTICATION Theoretical reflections and empirical findings to a neglected concept Corinna Peil and Jutta Röser Introduction This chapter addresses processes of re-domestication, which are a common, important and intriguing part of the domestication of media and technologies, but so far underexposed in research. On the one hand, we seek to explain what re-domestication means and what role it plays in existing domestication studies. On the other hand, based on three case studies, we will show which causes and dynamics re-domestication processes can entail. In this way, this chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of the complexity and multidimensionality of the domestication process. One of the particular strengths of the domestication approach is its process orientation (Berker et al., 2006; Haddon, 2006; Peil & Röser, 2012; Röser & Müller, 2017). With its perspective on appropriation processes over time, it differs from a number of theoretical concepts that solely focus on individual segments of media adoption, such as the moment of deciding to acquire a particular media technology (e.g., diffusion of innovation theory), the motivation to use a certain medium (e.g., uses and gratifications approach) or the actual consequences of media use or non-use (e.g., digital divide concept). In contrast to these approaches, domestication directs its analytical attention to the entire process of media appropriation, starting with the first ideas about possible uses, through acquisition and placement of a new technology in the home as well as initial usage attempts, to daily modes of use and their change over time. Domestication is not a “one-time,” but an ongoing process, as Haddon (2003: 46) noted as early as 20 years ago. It even includes moments that go beyond actual use, such as product development and marketing or conversations about a newly acquired or already long-time used technology (Hartmann, 2009: 306–307).1 The process perspective results not least from the further features of the domestication approach, especially the importance of everyday life and the domestic sphere as a signifying context of media use as well as the continuing meaning-making practices of the users. Although this process perspective is repeatedly emphasized, it has rarely been empirically researched or theoretically differentiated. Similarly, the term “re-domestication,” which is sometimes applied, refers to the processuality of domestication, but has hardly been reflected in greater detail (Röser et al., 2019: 27–30). In the following sections, we will therefore take a more in-depth look at the nature of re-domestication processes and fill this void. 42

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-6

Conceptualizing re-domestication

For this purpose, we first theoretically address the process perspective of the domestication approach and discuss existing studies that have investigated re-domestication processes (Section “State of research: domestication as a discontinuous and non-linear process with phases of re-domestication”). We then propose our own definition of re-domestication (Section “Conceptualizing re-domestication”), which we elaborate on the basis of three case studies. The first case study illustrates how spatial arrangements with the Internet, everyday uses, and domestic communication cultures interact and – together with new technological affordances for mobile uses – have led to a re-domestication of the Internet (Section “Case study 1: Spatial arrangements and domestic communication cultures with the Internet in transition”). The second case study demonstrates the importance of stimuli emanating from life-world changes. It deals with re-domestication processes as a result of radical changes in everyday life such as moving house, parenthood or divorce (Section “Case study 2: Re-domestication processes as a result of radical changes in everyday life”). Empirically, these two cases build on the project “The Mediatized Home in Transition,” which explored the domestication of the Internet in a qualitative panel study (Röser et al., 2019). Twenty-five heterosexual couples of the broad middle class, proportioned by school education and age (25–63 years old in 2008), were interviewed and surveyed several times at home between 2008 and 2016. Since the first interview also looked back at the acquisition phase of the Internet, the project was able to analyze the first 20 years of Internet domestication in Germany (Müller & Röser, 2017; Röser & Peil, 2010, Röser et al., 2019: 37–70). Finally, the third case study is devoted to a historical example and shows how television was gradually re-inscribed in everyday domestic life as a consequence of the establishment of the dual broadcasting system in Germany (Section “Case study 3: The re-domestication of television in Germany in the aftermath of the implementation of the dual broadcasting system”). In a concluding section, we discuss the insights gained and argue for a stronger theoretical reflection of re-domestication processes within domestication research (Section “Conclusion”).

State of research: domestication as a discontinuous and non-linear process with phases of re-domestication In their seminal article “Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,” Silverstone, Hirsch, and Morley (1992) have described in more detail the processual nature of domestication, consisting of four “non-discrete elements” (ibid.: 18) – or dimensions (Hartmann, 2013: 21) – which define the transactional relationship between the “moral economy of the household” and the world outside it: appropriation, respectively, commodification, as Silverstone (2006: 233) later specified, objectification, incorporation and conversion. These elements shape and influence each other, representing an open cycle rather than a linear sequence of phases. They concern both the dynamics within the household, such as the adaptation and customization of a new media technology, its integration into in-home settings and routines, and changes of domestic communication cultures (objectification and incorporation), and the household’s connection with external spheres, which is reflected in its acquisition or in the way the technology is presented to the outside world (commodification and conversion). Yet, significant shifts such as re-domestication or de-domestication are not mentioned in this basic account of domestication theory. Haddon (2016) points out in a later publication that early domestication studies from Norway added these concepts, meaning on the one hand 43

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“giving new roles and meanings to an existing ICT” and on the other hand “ceasing to find a place for a technology in one’s life” (ibid.: 21–22). The possibility of re- domestication is also taken up in the introductory article of the anthology “Domestication of Media and Technology” (Berker et al., 2006) which states: “Re- and de-domestication processes can take place – adapting and morphing to meet the changing needs of users, the constitution of households and workplaces” (ibid.: 3). However, one rarely finds more precise explanations and theoretical concretizations of these terms. It is striking that in the few studies in which reference is made to the concept, re- domestication is associated with the introduction of new technologies or the so-called “functional alternatives” (Haddon, 2011), even though Sørensen (1994) already noted in the 1990s that the causes of re-domestication processes can vary, for instance, because individual needs or social constellations change. Fibæk Bertel and Ling (2016), for example, show – based on a qualitative study with high school students from Denmark – that Short Message Service (SMS) has undergone a process of re-domestication: “the meanings and everyday use practices associated with the technology are changing, and the technology is finding new position in the media repertoires of youth” (ibid.: 1294). The authors understand re-domestication as a transformation in the meaning of a technology and its use resulting from changed circumstances. These circumstances they see as primarily influenced by a constantly changing media environment (ibid.: 1295). Their study confirms this view by highlighting how both the symbolic and functional dimensions of SMS have changed with the availability of newer technologies and applications for interpersonal communication, while SMS has remained meaningful as a medium for instrumental purposes and within strong ties (ibid.: 1305). In a similar sense, Mascheroni et al. (2008: 24) use the term re-domestication in their cross-media study to describe the “symbolic re-definition of the PC” from a multimedia platform to a user-centred network after Instant Messaging (IM) was introduced. Grošelj (2021) also bases her study on an understanding of re-domestication as a shift in meanings and uses of a media technology due to the adoption of a newer technology. In her qualitative interview study, one research question aimed at re-domestication processes in the use of the Internet through different access technologies. As a result, she identified three types of re-domestication processes: “Spotlighting,” where one device is the dominant way to get online; “distribution,” where access is across multiple devices and the choice of a particular device is contextual; and “making do,” where the focus is on being able to get online at all – albeit often with limited access (ibid.: 428–432). According to Grošelj, the different practices of re-domestication can be associated with different content-related emphases in use (entertainment-oriented vs. meaning-making). Re-domestication is used here to theorize how different ways of accessing the Internet relate to each other from the user’s perspective. The domestic context, social constellations or everyday requirements, however, are not taken into account. Yet, one strength of this approach is that it can be linked to questions of digital exclusion and choice (Grošelj, 2021: 435). Haddon also sees media change in particular as a driver for re-domestication processes because the addition of new media into the media ensemble makes users re-assess the role of old media (Haddon, 2011: 319). In this sense, he draws a parallel with the approach of remediation developed by Bolter and Grusin (2000), which signifies the representation of one medium in another and refers to the changeability and interplay of media. Remediation calls for media not to be regarded singularly, but always in relation to other media, whose functions they adapt, modify and reorganize (ibid.: 15). In this context, Haddon (2011: 319) refers to the social practice of listening to the radio, which changed significantly with the introduction of television, but was never replaced. 44

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A slightly different understanding is followed by Huang and Miao (2021), who comprehend re-domestication as a restructuring of the relationship between humans and technology after usage – at least in parts – has been temporarily interrupted: “[…] re-domestication is used here to highlight the continued use, disuse, and reuse of social media and distinguish it from its first use” (ibid.: 180). Based on their qualitative interview study with WeChat users in China, who had voluntarily disengaged with the social media feature Moments for a while, they “[…] argue that the re-domestication of Moments is a ‘reboot’ of the whole process of domestication through four key stages: re-appropriation, re-objectification, re-incorporation, and re-conversion” (ibid.: 177). In their findings, the authors elaborate that re-domestication phases are used by people to renegotiate their relationship with media, for example, by setting tighter spatial and temporal limits to their use and regain control and self-determination. Accordingly, their theoretical contribution to re-domestication is primarily to emphasize and contour human agency in the domestication process over the lifetime of a technology. From the studies discussed here, it appears that the application of the re-domestication concept is not uniform and that in some cases, different ideas circulate about how to model the processuality of domestication. In the following section, we will present our own perspective on this in more detail and explain which factors must come together in order to qualify as a process of re-domestication.

Conceptualizing re-domestication With our own conceptualization of re-domestication, we move quite close to Sørensen’s (1994) original contribution and place a special emphasis on the importance of everyday (domestic) life. Despite his rather casual mention of the terms re-domestication and dis-domestication, it is clear from his remarks that these are dynamics in the domestication process that can emanate from very different factors: “The truce expressed in practical routines of use may be broken, needs may change, relevant, external symbolic codes may be transformed, or the persons involved may shift. Children grow, and sometimes households split up” (Sørensen, 1994: 7). As is already indicated here, everyday life with all its obstinateness, unpredictability and contingencies is the key. In everyday domestic life, the domestication process is constantly exposed to new impulses through people’s actions, routines, and interactions, as well as through dynamically changing media ensembles or evolving life circumstances. Accordingly, the domestication of a new media technology does not proceed in a straightforward, orderly or rigid manner following specific phases, but is volatile, messy and often unpredictable. As an open and basically endless process, the domestication of media technologies is never completed. It is a development, which is characterized by constant movement and unforeseen turns (Röser et al., 2019: 28–29). “In one sense, people often acquire ICTs, go through an initial period of experimentation and fall into a routine usage pattern. Despite this routinization, consumption patterns also change as a result of social and technological change” (Haddon, 2003: 46). This means that the domestication process may well reach “saturation phases” in which the use of a technology or even the entire media repertoire becomes quite stable. However, the process can pick up speed again at any time, “if new circumstances, in whatever sense, mean that the role of an ICT has to be re-assessed” (Haddon, 2003: 46). Such new circumstances can lead to an intensification of domestication, or equally to a shift in meaning or decline in importance of a particular technology. In this sense, we understand re-domestication as the re-inscription of a medium into everyday domestic life, which is linked to a transformation of established domestic communication cultures. In other words, re-domestication 45

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is not about small-scale changes in media preferences or technologies, such as when a smartphone is replaced by a more powerful successor model. Rather, re-domestication refers to a change-intensive phase in which users renegotiate and reshape the way they integrate one or more media into their everyday lives at home. Central to this idea is the interplay between changes in media behaviour on the one hand and changes in the way everyday life is shaped on the other. Re-domestication processes can be triggered by a wide variety of factors, such as altered range of products and services on offer, technological advances, everyday life-related and societal changes or a combination of all of these factors. In fact, several factors usually come together, intertwined and mutually reinforcing. We therefore believe that it would be inadequate to view re-domestication processes merely as the consequence of technological change. In this respect, Röser et al. (2019: 27) draw a connection to the overarching metaprocess of mediatization, which is characterized by various mediatization thrusts (“Mediatisierungsschübe”) – change-intensive phases in which fundamental socio-political and cultural contexts are restructured and renegotiated. Yet, with regard to re-domestication, we are not concerned with major technological transformations over long periods of time (e.g., mechanization, electrification, digitalization; see Hepp, 2020: 5). Instead, we want to use the concept to analyze the transformation of media, communication, and society in narrower periods of time and in concrete fields. Re-domestication captures the momentous intertwining of technical, cultural and communication-related factors in the concrete field of the home, where the specific potentials of media technologies have to meet the requirements of everyday life in a meaningful way (Röser et al., 2019: 29).

Case study 1: spatial arrangements and domestic communication cultures with the Internet in transition Our first case study is about the re-domestication of the Internet during the 2010s. Röser and Peil (2014) as well as Röser et al. (2019: 95–117) have shed light on the process in which the Internet was initially used rather detached from other activities of daily life, then gradually became more integrated into domestic routines, and finally – in the sense of a redomestication process – flexibly filled every corner of the house. The authors focus on the spatial arrangements with the Internet in transition and at the same time show their connection to domestic communication cultures. The domestication approach specifies “objectification” as the second phase of the media domestication process where a new technology is assigned a place in the home (Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992: 20–26). But this designated place does not have to be longlasting. As domestication deepens, that is, when a medium becomes more fully integrated into everyday life, spatial arrangements may be questioned. Objectification (phase 2) and integration (phase 3) are thus in an ongoing reciprocal relationship. This becomes particularly clear when looking at the domestication of the Internet. For as the integration of the Internet into everyday life progressed, ways of using it changed, which, in turn, challenged and altered the original place settings. Related processes and decisions were closely linked to the communication cultures in the household, to the ways in which community and retreat were being shaped and negotiated with or without the help of media. Attention must therefore be paid to how practices of Internet use, spatial arrangements, and domestic modes of communication interact. The term “spatial arrangement” includes here the placement of a (new) medium in connection with its uses and its meanings in the domestic context (Peil & Röser, 2014; Röser et al., 2019: 95). 46

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In the project, three spatial arrangements with the Internet were elaborated over the entire study period with survey waves in 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2016 (Röser et al., 2019: 95–117; also see Röser & Peil, 2014): The first arrangement was the separation of the Internet in an extra room, where the Internet functioned as a kind of “appendage” of everyday domestic life: the technology was spatially detached from other domestic activities and specifically from common rooms such as the living room or kitchen. Often, the Internet, accessible from a stationary computer, had a fixed place in a study – especially when the computer had already been used as a work device in a separate room before the Internet was acquired. However, basements and guest rooms, closets and hallway niches were also used as Internet locations. In the first interviews in 2008, this room arrangement was chosen by most of the couples interviewed. Yet, from a strictly technical point of view, more flexible and mobile modes of use would have been possible even back then, as WIFI had been available since 2002. In fact, some households already had laptops, but these were mostly used as stationary devices and were hardly ever moved at home. The reason why many couples separated the Internet in the home was, first, its symbolic meaning: computer and Internet were coded as work and non-leisure and were therefore meant to be moved outside the leisure areas. Second, the physical separation indicated a limited integration of the Internet into everyday life and its little use in terms of time. It was suitable for couples who made occasional use of the Internet, but embedded it only moderately in everyday routines and tasks. As long as both partners were online only a few times a week for a short period of time, this arrangement worked well. Conflicts arose when one partner (usually the man) began to use the Internet far more extensively than the other (usually the woman). Then, there were disputes over the lack of time together, for example, during joint television viewing. But couples where both partners were interested in the Internet also had problems. As they used the Internet more frequently in the course of its domestication process, the separate extra room led to tendencies towards fragmentation. Couples who took turns using an Internet-enabled computer, for example, or who sat in separate rooms at their own computers, complained about the resulting reduction in time together. This was the beginning of a second phase characterized by search movements, in which the couples tried out new spatial arrangements. The second room arrangement involved integrating the Internet into living spaces such as the sitting room or kitchen. In some households, the computer with Internet connection was given a permanent place in the living room alongside the TV. One couple set up a shared work and dining room with computers standing next to each other. Some couples complemented the office location of the Internet with mobile uses of a laptop. The motivation to try out new spatial arrangements was rooted in the desire to establish situations of community and communication – not only with television, but also with the Internet. Respondents felt that it was fragmenting and a loss of couple time if everyone used media for themselves in another part of the home. As uses of the Internet became more deeply integrated into everyday life, the need for alternative spatial arrangements came up, ultimately leading to a re-domestication of the Internet. It was mainly those couples who were open to new, inclusive spatial arrangements where both partners used the Internet regularly and with pleasure. In the first series of interviews in 2008, there were a few couples who more or less pursued integrating arrangements of online use. Three years later, they already made up a slight majority. There was no best practice for implementing inclusive settings with the Internet, but rather a variety of spatial arrangements. In some cases, different options were tried and tested within a household. Here, we can already see that these arrangements had the character of a search movement and pointed to a transitional phase. For ultimately, a third spatial arrangement prevailed over all. 47

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The third spatial arrangement involved the mobilization of the Internet within the home, which resulted in more intensive uses of the Internet and its omnipresence in the domestic context. By “domestic mobilization” (Peil & Röser, 2014: 244–245), we refer to the process in which online services at home were increasingly accessed via small, portable devices which can potentially be used in any place of the home. In the longitudinal study, this flexible arrangement was only emerging in a number of the households during the 2011 interviews, it had then become widespread among the majority in 2013, and by 2016, it had become the couples’ go-to option (Röser et al. 2019, 95–117). The couples engaged in mobile online uses to a greater or lesser extent: some as their primary mode of use, others only as an occasional supplementary mode. Through mobile Internet use within the home, users created “provisional Internet spaces” (Peil & Röser, 2014: 244). As a result, the Internet became omnipresent in the domestic sphere, leading to a deeper mediatization of the home that is still characteristic today. These changing spatial arrangements with the Internet can be understood as a re-domestication process. After all, the modes of use have once again changed profoundly with the domestic mobilization of the Internet, and new patterns of use have emerged. Not only did bedrooms, bathrooms or balconies become online places, but second screening was established as a popular practice to combine the use of stationary television and mobile Internet (Peil & Röser, 2014: 244–245; Röser et al., 2019, 116–117, 142–146). By mobilizing the Internet in the home, couples were able to resolve the opposition between isolating and integrating spatial arrangements in favour of temporary Internet spaces that allowed for the realization of couple-related as well as individual interests and preferences. The driving force behind the processes described was the ever more intensive everyday integration of the Internet. This initially led to communication problems and tendencies towards fragmentation in the way couples lived together. The following search movements and trials with regard to spatial-communicative settings can be construed as an adaptation to changed patterns of everyday use. The domestication of smartphones and tablets was a facilitating factor for these processes and provided the necessary technological potential. However, the deeper cause of the re-domestication of the Internet did not come from the technology – mobile devices such as laptops existed years before – but from the users and their changed communicative needs and practices.

Case study 2: re-domestication processes as a result of radical changes in everyday life Our second case study is about the re-domestication of media triggered by upheavals in everyday life. The findings are part of the already described long-term study with heterosexual couples on the mediatized home in transition (Röser et al., 2019: 151–175). A central finding of the study was that it was above all drastic life changes among the couples that dynamically drove the change in domestic media practices. Everyday life upheavals, such as parenthood or separation of the couple, led to profound changes in media activities within the home. In contrast, technological factors, such as the domestication of new technological devices, initiated only gradual and slow transformations. Evidence of a connection between upheavals in everyday life and a change in everyday media behaviour can also be found in earlier studies (Gauntlett & Hill, 1999: 79–109; for an overview: Haddon, 2004). However, in the project by Röser et al. (2019), this connection was systematically analyzed for the first time and further systematized and theorized by Stephan Niemand (2020, 2021) in a more in-depth study. Changes in the lives of the couples 48

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that proved relevant in the study were, in particular, parenthood, moving house, children moving out, death of a partner, separation of the couple and a new partnership.2 The example of “parenthood” illustrates which factors lead to which new ways of using the Internet and for what reasons. Regarding content, new thematic interests emerged from the pre-birth period onwards, which were served in online forums and via informative websites. In terms of space, having a baby results in new forms of immobility that have been compensated for by increased use of online services and online shopping. Particularly, many effects were evident in relation to time,3 as time shortages arise due to new caregiving tasks. As a result, a variety of new forms of online use can become meaningful: through second screen uses, non-linear television, or combining caregiving practices with convenient smartphone use, couples tried to condense time and make everyday life more flexible. At the same time, the time resources spent on entertainment genres, especially via inflexible linear television, decreased. Overall, birth can lead to a re-domestication of the Internet in the domestic sphere, in that it is inscribed in everyday life in a more intensive way in order to meet the new needs arising from parenthood. In most cases, re-domestication processes through parenthood have affected mothers more than fathers. After all, a traditional gender-related division of labour prevailed among the couples studied, which interacted with a correspondingly specific use of the Internet. This clearly shows how societal structures can also have an influence on re-domestication processes. The effects of a gender-related division of labour with the Internet were also evident after a separation or after the death of the male partner. Some women in the sample had mostly delegated activities with the Internet to their partners and had themselves remained distanced from the medium. This was also because the male partners had partially claimed dominance over the Internet. After the end of their relationship, these women acquired online skills themselves and gradually integrated the medium in new ways into their everyday lives. In this case, the discontinuation of the gender-related division of labour due to separation or the death of their partner provided the impetus for a re-domestication of the Internet among women (Niemand, 2020: 151–184, 200–207; Röser et al., 2019: 161–166, 172). The findings presented on the connection between upheavals in everyday life and changes in Internet use illustrate that complementary to technological or societal impulses re- domestication processes can be triggered by life-world changes. For established media practices have to prove themselves in a new life situation and in some cases become obsolete.4 In the course of a radical change in everyday life, the couples in the panel study adapted their Internet use to their altered life situation which was usually accompanied by a more intensive mediatization and even a re-domestication of the Internet. This is because breaking out of established everyday structures and thus changing the everyday context can open up new opportunities for development, but also new constraints. As a result, needs and demands change and are met by new online practices (Niemand, 2020: 238–241).

Case study 3: the re-domestication of television in Germany in the aftermath of the implementation of the dual broadcasting system Our third example of media re-domestication processes focuses on television in the 1980s and 1990s in Germany. John Ellis (2002: 40) divides the history of television into three eras: the era of scarcity, “characterized by a few channels broadcasting for part of the day only,” the “era of availability,” in which various stations competed with each other for viewers’ 49

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attention, and the present “era of plenty,” marked by a constant availability of audiovisual content via multiple technologies. In the era of availability, following the licensing of commercial television stations under the introduction of the dual broadcasting system in 1984, a re-domestication process of television took place in Germany, as we demonstrate in our last case study. This did not happen as a direct result of the changed communication system, but in the course of the increasing integration of television into everyday life about ten years later. Only the new offerings and services that have emerged in this context have fully developed the potential of television as an everyday medium and thus ushered in this re-domestication process (Peil & Röser, 2007). In the scarcity era, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, television was domesticated. It moved into the home and was assigned a fixed place, quickly changing from an initially strange and unfamiliar consumer object to an integral part of the domestic sphere. During this period, the early fascination with live technology gave way to an interest in television as a medium for entertainment, regeneration and leisure (Hickethier, 1998; Peil & Röser, 2007). Programme makers recognized early on the close relationship of television with the daily lives of its viewers and scheduled shows around the anticipated rhythms of the household members (Ellis, 2002: 43–46; Modleski, 1983; O’Sullivan, 1991).5 These programme structures, tailored to domestic routines as well as cultural specifics and national interests, promoted the domestication of television. Yet, at this time, the further integration of television into everyday life was still subject to considerable restrictions in terms of time, content, and programming policy. Unlike in the U.S., where daytime TV had already been available since 1948, or in the U.K., where the public broadcaster BBC faced competition from a commercial station as early as the mid-1950s (Ellis, 2002), television in Germany had tight media policy limits until the early 1980s. Viewers could only watch television in the late afternoon and the evening, and it was not until 1963 that there was a small choice between at least two public service broadcasters. The legal framework for the establishment and reception of commercial broadcasters in the early 1980s set an important course for a deeper integration of television into everyday life. However, this did not occur immediately after implementation, nor inevitably. The process of re-domestication did not begin until the turn to television went beyond a mere curiosity about the innovative and unconventional content and formats of the new providers and became firmly established in a taken-for-granted way of dealing with the medium and its changed structures, conditions and offerings (Peil & Röser, 2007: 99). New ways of viewing television – facilitated on the one hand by new programme structures, and on the other hand by technical innovations – contributed significantly to this self-evident use of television, which became entrenched over the years. In this context, three factors in particular should be mentioned: (1) broadcasting times were massively extended, especially into the early morning and late evening hours, making it possible to watch television around the clock. (2) With regard to content, a larger selection of programmes was provided, especially in the entertainment sector. In addition, standardized programme schedules enabled a continuous viewing experience, famously described as “flow” by Raymond Williams (1974). (3) In terms of technical innovations, the remote control and the video recorder played an important role for the re-domestication of television, as they both gave viewers the opportunity to adapt it more to their own rhythms, routines and reception preferences in everyday life (Peil & Röser, 2007: 99). This new framework of television allowed people to integrate the medium into their daily lives in new and more profound ways. As its constant presence became a matter of course, 50

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“[d]eeply and almost ‘invisibly’ etched and stitched into the textures and routines of familiar, everyday domestic life and the home” (O’Sullivan, 2007: 161), television suddenly occupied niches that had previously been filled by non-media activities or by other media such as the radio. With the differentiation of media preferences and media-related interests, television also served new functions and purposes (e.g., providing an acoustic background for domestic tasks and routines or simulating co-presence). Accordingly, it was not “availability” alone that triggered the re-domestication process – even though this was an important prerequisite – but it was the increased needs and opportunities people perceived to embed television more deeply in their personal lives and to assign various, everyday-related meanings to it. It would be wrong to assume that in the current era of plenty, which Ellis (2002: 162–178) imagined in a visionary manner as being characterized by a coexistence of on-demand offerings, strong brands, and everyday-oriented series formats, a further re-domestication process automatically set in. After all, not every technical advancement or reinvention of television is necessarily accompanied by a change-intensive phase of use that is constitutive of media re-domestication. Nevertheless, many transformations of television – which has always been a volatile and heterogeneous object with many histories (Richter, 2020: 34) – have expanded the range of options for using television in a more flexible, self-determined way, adapted to individual interests, habits and daily rhythms. It is therefore not unlikely that Netflix, YouTube and other streaming services with a television-like quality (ibid.: 37–40) as well as their reception on a variety of devices provide the grounds for completely new forms and intensities of television viewing in everyday life.

Conclusion Based on three case studies, our chapter has sought to provide deeper insights into the nature and characteristics of media re-domestication processes. In this respect, the qualitative longterm study on the mediatization of the home (2008–2016), from which the first two case studies were taken, proved to be extremely valuable for gaining knowledge in this matter, as domestication could be analyzed over a longer period of time (Röser et al., 2019). This also revealed the particular strength of the domestication approach, which is capable of precisely describing and contextualizing processes of change. While domestication in itself is inherently processual, re-domestication processes refer to change-intensive phases of transition in which a media technology is inscribed in everyday domestic life in a new way. Crucial in this context are the associated, media-related changes in domestic communication cultures, which are closely interwoven with everyday routines, actions and structures. What is important – and the three case studies have clearly shown this – is that technological innovations or further developments are not the cause of re-domestication processes, but rather a necessary but not sufficient condition for them. Re-domestication processes can be triggered by various factors, which we will summarize systematically below. In the first case study on changing spatial arrangements with the Internet, altered communicative needs combined with more intensive uses of the Internet proved to be the impetus for re-domestication. The new mobile smartphones and tablets provided the technological potential to realize new demands for flexible Internet spaces, but they were not the cause of this process. Needs for new spatial-communicative arrangements arose primarily in the context of domestic togetherness, for example, to prevent fragmentation. In the second case study, profound upheavals in everyday life became apparent as an impetus for re-domestication. As everyday life at home is deeply mediatized and shaped with media, a change in lifestyle always has a direct impact on media use practices. 51

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In the third case study, transformations in the media system were the starting point. These led to structural, content-related and temporal changes in the medium of television. As a result, new modes of use and a deeper everyday integration of television in the sense of a re-domestication process developed. In this case, it is important to understand that the structural, content-related and temporal changes in the television programme met already existing needs among users, which they were previously unable to satisfy due to a lack of offerings: namely, the desire for greater temporal flexibility and availability of programmes as well as a greater selection of entertainment genres. When these wishes could be realized in the dual broadcasting system, the already existing technological potentials of remote control and video recorder were also exploited in a new way. The deeper causes of re-domestication processes thus always lie in communicative needs and practices in everyday life. Technological, supply related or legal innovations can only provide potential. However, re-domestication ultimately starts with the people who use media at home and integrate them meaningfully into their communication cultures and interactions.

Notes 1 Only recently, Neville (2020) has shown how the reception of so-called unboxing videos on YouTube and the related discourse in the comments can be understood as part of the domestication process of new media technologies (see also Neville & Borkowski in this book). 2 Further drivers for changes in media use became apparent in the sample, at least as a tendency: retirement, career changes, health impairments (Niemand, 2020: 200–215; Röser et al., 2019: 157–158). 3 In addition to the content, spatial and temporal dimensions, Niemand (2020) systematized other dimensions that can give rise to impulses for re-domestication processes: social, material, senserelated, emotional, as well as body-related dimensions (ibid.: 217–224). 4 It has also happened that in phases of upheaval, established patterns of media use, for example, with television, provided stability and were retained (Röser et al., 2019: 173). With regard to the Internet, however, the main observation was that people were integrating it more intensely into everyday life. A kind of de-domestication was evident in one individual case: after retirement, a woman radically reduced her Internet use, which she had previously practiced reluctantly due to professional constraints (Niemand, 2020: 209). 5 While orientation to the everyday life of an average household was characteristic of TV programme structures around the world, scheduling strategies varied widely among nations. Until 1957, the BBC in England did not broadcast any programming between 6 and 7 p.m., the so-called toddler’s truce, to make it easier for parents to put their children to bed (O’Sullivan, 1991). Iceland, however, did not broadcast any television program at all on Thursdays until the 1980s because this day was to be reserved for social activities (Ellis, 2002: 45).

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Corinna Peil and Jutta Röser Röser, J., Müller, K. F., Niemand, S. and Roth, U. (2019) Das mediatisierte Zuhause im Wandel, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Röser, J. and Peil, C. (2010) ‘Diffusion und Teilhabe durch Domestizierung. Zugänge zum Internet im Wandel 1997-2007,’ Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 58 (4): 481–502. doi: 10.5771/ 1615-634x-2010-4-481 Röser, J. and Peil, C. (2014) Internetnutzung im häuslichen Alltag, Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K. J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming Technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 13–28. Sørensen, K. H. (1994) ‘Technology in Use: Two Essays on the Domestication of Artifacts,’ STS Working Paper, 2/94, Trondheim: Centre for Technology and Society. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27048.26881. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana.

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4 MAKING DOMESTICATION RESEARCH POLICY RELEVANT Carolina Martínez and Tobias Olsson

While policy relevance has always been inherent to the establishment and development of the domestication approach, it has also often been an under-articulated aspect of it in actual research practice. In early outlines of the domestication approach, the changing media environment served as an important backdrop for its very formation. For example, regarding the notion of domestication, Morley and Silverstone stated that “this recontextualization is partly motivated by the recognition that television itself is changing” (1990: 31), and that in this change in media context, “a number of our working assumptions about television and its audience will need to be reconsidered afresh” (1990: 32). In light of the vast changes in the media environment, it was perceived as important to gain new knowledge of concrete everyday media settings, as such insights could serve as a corrective to more deterministic visions of a brand-new media world. Such visions were certainly produced within both policy and public debates at the time, calling for analyses treating “changes as evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” as Leslie Haddon (2006: 199) would later paraphrase Roger Silverstone. This is also how domestication research has often come to relate to both policy and public debates about the media. Writing in the mid-1990s and addressing what he called the “multimedia revolution” of “new technologies, new delivery systems, and new industrial alliances” (Silverstone, 1996: 217), Roger Silverstone proposed that domestication research could serve as a corrective to inflated claims of technologically driven social and cultural changes. He argued that domestication research can “offer an account of the supposed revolution which takes seriously the actual nature of the ways in which media and information technologies are shaped by the mundane but still complex realities of everyday life” (Silverstone, 1996: 218). The quotation is certainly clarifying regarding Silverstone’s overall understanding of the domestication approach, but it also reveals an obvious interest in making research based on the approach a counterargument to inflated claims about a media revolution. Similar arguments also resounded among other researchers at the time. This was during an era of rapid Internet and mobile phone development, when both public and policy debates were permeated by suggestive ideas regarding what these developments would mean to the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-7

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world we had once known. In light of such claims, media researcher Shaun Moores (2000: 59) argued convincingly for a more “down-to-earth” approach: Responses to, or consequences of, technological innovation … cannot be assumed at an abstract level of analysis. They require close examination at the point of connection with concrete day-to-day situations that social subjects inhabit and make meaningful. From the very outset, the domestication approach has obviously been inspired by an ambition to contribute to and inform policy debates, at least in principle. Practically, however, we have since then seen a lot of very good media research inspired by the domestication approach, and the chapters in this volume offer considerable evidence of that, but these efforts have surprisingly rarely been made with an explicit ambition to address policy agendas or issues. The lack of such an ambition is partially commented on in Maria Bakardjieva’s (2005) critical reflections on domestication research, asking domestication researchers to adopt a “transformative program” to turn “the murmur of everyday practices into a clearly audible legitimate public discourse” (77). To be fair, there are exceptions to this overall trend. Research approaches suggested by the notion of domestication have, for example, been used to address the digital divide (Röser & Peil, 2010). In studying the role of local experts in transferring ideas about and knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICTs), James Stewart (2007) emphasized the policy relevance of insights arising from domestication research. The Norwegian scholar Knud H. Sørensen has repeatedly applied the domestication approach in addressing policy issues and agendas. In his case, these studies rarely engage with domestication at the level of households or everyday life more generally. Instead, in very interesting ways, he has illustrated the relevance of the concept at other levels of analysis, for example, at the levels of national industry (Brosveet & Sørensen, 2000), local government (Liste & Sørensen, 2015), and the national adoption of various technological systems (Sørensen, 2013). In this chapter, we will present three examples of analyses that engage with the notion of domestication in everyday contexts, while also explicitly addressing policy. The three presented studies all engage with concrete everyday settings of online media usage, and all come from the Swedish context. However, in other respects, they are intentionally different from one another to help illustrate various ways in which domestication research can be made policy-relevant. The three cases differ in that they pay attention to different phases of domestication. Domestication research usually takes an interest in any or all four of the appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion phases (cf. Haddon, 2016). Due to lack of space, we will omit the fourth phase, conversion, from consideration and will instead illustrate how analyses of the three other phases can address policy issues and agendas. In our first case, we draw on the notion of appropriation when analysing Swedish working-class families’ decisions to acquire an Internet-connected computer. The objectification phase is in focus in our second case, in which we analyse the domestication of digital media in everyday life in Swedish leisure-time centres (LTCs), an institution within the formal education system that provides education and care before and after compulsory school. The third case illustrates how analysis of the incorporation of ICTs among elderly Swedes can help reveal policy issues that merit attention. Our cases also illustrate different stages of ICT development and different policy perspectives. Our first case is based on data collected two decades ago when home computers with Internet connections had started to become commonplace in many Swedish households. 56

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The case coincides with an era when Swedish governmental ICT policy was very excited about the opportunities that digital media were thought to offer. The second case is contemporary and the research project on which it is based considers the whole range of ICTs available in Swedish LTCs. However, in this chapter, we focus exclusively on how teachers deal with children’s mobile phones and relate specifically to how the Swedish national school curriculum interprets the place of digital media in school contexts. Our third case is similarly contemporary. It draws on data from recent interviews (2019–2020) with elderly Swedes (above the age of 65 years) covering their reflections on and practices of everyday ICTs. In terms of policy, the case reveals tensions between elderly people’s need for concrete digital support and Swedish policy preferences for the digitalization of information and services.

Development of the domestication approach If we leave our specific interest in policy aside for a while, it is interesting how the notion of domestication has come to “take on a life on its own” (Silverstone, 2006: 229). In the original reflections on the concept, contributed by Silverstone and various co-authors, the idea was to “provide a framework for the redefinition and analysis of television in terms of its status as a domestic technology” (Morley & Silverstone, 1990: 53). As the approach developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when television was still the dominant medium in much of the world, analytical attention was mainly paid to television as a medium, including connected features such as remote controls and satellite channels. Attention in these early texts on domestication also centred on domestic contexts. These texts sometimes referred to individual usage within households, but were usually concerned with how wider family dynamics shaped the ways in which media technology became parts of people’s everyday lives. While initial contributions to the field often focused on television and the home environment, from the outset, the approach was prepared to take additional directions. For example, a discussion paper from 1989 stated that the domestication approach is “concerned with … the process through which new technologies (of all kinds) are incorporated into the family and the household, and in that process acquire meanings of all kinds” (Silverstone et al., 1989: 4). It is specifically interesting to note the formulation “new technologies (of all kinds),” implying that, from the very beginning, the approach was perceived as suitable for analyses of a wide range of everyday technologies. In a way, this is also how the concept has come to travel. The concept has come to encompass additional, newer media technologies. With the rapid development of digital media technology since the 1990s, domestication studies came to include household-based studies of home computing (Habib & Cornford, 2002) as well as Internet usage use in home settings (Bakardjieva, 2005). However, domestication research has also followed the ongoing development of more mobile media technologies, consequently including new technologies such as laptops (Henriksen & Tjora, 2018), iPads (Luomanen & Peteri, 2013), and smartphones (de Reuver et al., 2016). What these later new mobile media technologies have in common is that they allow for increasingly flexible media use. This means that they all are definitely not exclusively for home usage – a simple but important fact that has contributed to another line of development of domestication research. This research has developed from a natural focus on home-centred analyses to also include analyses of media technology and usage in additional social contexts. There is a growing literature telling this particular story, which includes the application of the domestication approach as a useful point of departure for analysing the growing tendency to work in public contexts, such as cafés (Henriksen & Tjora, 2018). Other applications have 57

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noted that the approach can also be useful for analysing media technology and practices in educational contexts (Lindeman et al., 2021; Martinez & Olsson, 2021a). The research drawn on in this chapter to some extent mirrors the directions in which domestication research has developed. Our first case draws on research conducted two decades ago, focusing on the appropriation of home computers and Internet connections. The second case also draws on research based on the domestication approach, but it was conducted outside the domestic sphere. Our third case returns to the domestic context when analysing data on elderly Swedes’ everyday ICT usage. Despite these differences, all three cases stay close to the original ideas of the domestication notion as formulated in the early 1990s. Methodologically, the cases draw on interview data collected within the everyday contexts of media technology use. Also, ethnographic observations to some extent contextualize and complement interview data in all cases. Theoretically, the three cases start from the notion of domestication, but develop different phases of it – i.e., appropriation, objectification, or incorporation. As such, the cases present data and analyses that are theoretically and methodologically rather commonplace within domestication research. What is less commonplace, however, is how all three cases very explicitly address policy issues. In each case, we also comment briefly on how the different domestication analyses have come to feed into actual policy processes.

“Successfully meeting the future”? Working-class appropriation of Internet-connected computers Policy context At the turn of the millennium, Sweden had taken important steps towards making Internetconnected computers as widespread as possible.1 Over half of Swedes had household access to ICTs and there was a steady annual growth in the number of connected households (Nordicom, 2001). To some extent, this widespread access was facilitated by political interventions. There was, for example, a tax-reduction programme for home computers, the Home PC Reform, approved in 1997, which made it economically beneficial to first lease a computer through one’s workplace for three years and then buy it. Also, the Swedish Trade Union Federation (Landsorganisationen, LO) was involved in creating similar opportunities for all its members (Olsson, 2002). Under these circumstances, the Swedish government was not exactly modest when formulating policy agendas and visions addressing the new opportunities that household access to interactive ICTs could offer. Very much in line with international discourse on the topic (Goodwin & Spittle, 2002), Swedish ICT policy foresaw “wings of human ability” in the new ICTs (SOU, 1994), stating that “ICTs are … a part – maybe even the most important part – in the arsenal of tools needed in order to successfully meet the future” (SOU, 1994: 27, authors’ translation). What was potentially rather specific to Swedish ICT policy at the time was that it projected huge civic and democratic opportunities stemming from increased access to homebased interactive ICTs. A Swedish governmental investigation of the state of democracy from the year 2000, for instance, stated that digital ICTs could “be used by citizens to raise their voices in political parties,” “strengthen dialogue within political parties and between parties and the voters,” “strengthen civil society and enhance deliberative democracy,” and “enhance citizens’ opportunities for participation” (SOU, 2000: 101–102, authors’ translation). In the related governmental bill following this investigation, it was argued that

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information technology opens completely new lines of interaction for citizens or groups of citizens … The dialogue in these spheres can change people’s opportunities to influence [politics], and can also change the role of the politician and the ways in which politics works. (Governmental Proposition, 1999/2000: 18, authors’ translation) Obviously, key actors in Swedish policy formation were ready to associate the new ICTs with deeper and stronger democracy. They perceived the dissemination of Internet-connected home computers in Swedish households as a great opportunity to revitalize Swedish democracy and create opportunities for a more civically engaged citizenry. What ideas actually informed households’ concrete decisions to acquire an Internet-connected computer at the time? Did the policy visions influence working-class “everyday murmur” – to paraphrase Bakardjieva (2005) – in the appropriation phase?

The case study In autumn 2000 and spring 2001, interviews and observations were conducted in 15 Swedish working-class households that had recently obtained computers and Internet subscriptions through a deal organized by their trade union, LO. The interviews covered a wide range of everyday life aspects concerning the media, one particularly important area being the household discussions before the decision to acquire an Internet-connected computer, i.e., the appropriation of the technology (Silverstone, 1994). The interviews clearly revealed that this was very often perceived as an important decision requiring much discussion and deliberation between household members. The interviews also revealed that themes and ideas that were high on the policy agenda at the time – connecting computers and Internet connections with hopes of a deeper and stronger democracy – had little to do with the households’ actual decisions to acquire an Internet-connected computer. Instead, there was typically a sense of necessity, or even urgency, attached to the decision to acquire a computer and Internet subscription. In some households, this was even referred to as “a pressure” that the family needed to have Internet access and felt more or less obliged to be sure to acquire it. Paying close attention to this sense of urgent necessity shows that this feeling appeared to emanate from various sources. In some households, the sense of necessity was formulated with reference to the children. More specifically, parents felt that their children were at risk of lagging behind other children if they did not get access to an Internet-connected home computer. The idea was often formulated in association with schoolwork, i.e., the children would need a computer to succeed at school. In other families, the idea was instead informed by a less specific sense of concern for the children’s future. There was a sense that the children needed to become familiar with ICTs to “get a job” in the future or in the words of one interviewee: “We are heading towards an information society, and it is important to make sure that they [i.e., his daughters] get some experience” (Olsson, 2006: 620). In other households, acquiring an Internet-connected computer was perceived as a necessity for individual personal development for the adults. Such ideas were often connected to working-life development, including improving one’s general computer skills and skills related to the usage of specific software. What was specifically interesting in the working-class households’ appropriation of computers and Internet connections was their recurring sense of needing to have a computer in order to “keep up.” This idea was sometimes referred to in connection with

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other “needs” – regarding the children or regarding one’s own development – but it was sometimes also referred to as a more overarching driver of the decision to acquire the new ICT. A specifically telling quotation in this regard comes from an interview with Nina and Bengt, a married couple with three children: NINA: Well, to some extent I guess we felt a kind of pressure, but then I was also interested

myself. BENGT: … but I, who wasn’t interested at all to start with, kind of felt … If you don’t have

a computer, then you’re out! INTERVIEWER: Really? NINA: Did you feel that way? BENGT: Yes, well … It’s not that I need it, but for the rest of the family, for the children. Just

think of it – can we really not have a computer at home? (Olsson, 2006: 621) The quotation reveals an alarming sense of necessity when it comes to having an Internetconnected home computer. In the quotation, Nina initially refers to their decision to acquire a home computer in, terms of “pressure.” Bengt confirms this, adding that he actually was not interested in having one himself, but that the fear of being left out triggered the decision. At the end of the quotation, he asks a rhetorical question confirming the overall need to “keep up”: “Just think of it – can we really not have a computer at home?”

Implications for policy Insight from domestication research on the working-class appropriation of computers and Internet connections at the turn of the millennium stood in contrast to policy discourse at the time. While key actors in Swedish policy formation associated the new ICT with “wings of human ability” and with deeper and stronger democracy, the working-class households participating in this study instead appropriated it as a “necessity,” something one needs in order to “keep up.” Among some of them, the need to acquire the technology was even thought of as a “pressure.” Pointing out such contrasts between ideas and perspectives within policy and people’s everyday lives has an important value in domestication research. It seriously considers people’s thoughts and practices concerning media in a way that makes it possible for them to voice their concerns and reflections. Such insights can certainly serve as a corrective to inflated policy claims and can also help inform future policy-making of the perspectives and ideas of those in whose name policy visions are formulated and political reforms implemented. At a more concrete policy level, this study attracted considerable public attention when it was originally published as a PhD thesis in 2002, and Sweden’s leading news agency wrote an article based on the thesis. Consequently, portions of that article, or sometimes the whole article, appeared in numerous Swedish news media outlets by the time the thesis was published. The monograph was also reviewed in the cultural pages of Sweden’s leading morning newspaper as well as in other newspapers. This media attention resulted in invitations to give talks to various audiences, for example, a governmental committee analysing ICT development and various popular movements, including a lecture tour of Northern Sweden. Domestication research on Swedish working-class appropriation of Internet-connected home computers had become the subject of policy reflection. 60

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The immobile mobile phone: objectification of the smartphone in Swedish leisure-time centres Policy context In 2017, the Swedish government adopted a digitalization strategy the overall goal of which was that “Sweden shall be world leading in taking advantage of the possibilities of digitalization” (Regeringskansliet, 2017a, authors’ translation). To reach this overall goal, five sub-goals were defined: digital competence, digital safety, digital innovation, digital leadership, and digital infrastructure. The education system was identified as crucial for developing the area of digital competence (Regeringskansliet, 2017b), so later the same year the government adopted a specific digitalization strategy for the education system. This strategy stated that all children must have equal access to digital technology in schools and equal opportunity to develop their digital competence (Regeringskansliet, 2017b). In line with this, the national curricula for compulsory school, pre-school, and the LTC were revised (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). The concept of digital competence was introduced as an important learning goal, defined broadly as the ability to use digital technology, understand the consequences of digitalization for individuals and society, and use digital technology in a responsible and critical manner (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). According to these curricula, the whole education system has the mission to promote digital competence and work with “digital tools,” not only in the different school subjects but also in the so-called LTC. The LTC is integral to the Swedish education system, which provides education and care (so-called “educare”) for children aged 6–12 years, before and after the compulsory school day as well as on holidays. In Sweden, these LTCs are usually located in the same buildings as compulsory school. In 2021, 82% of 6–9-year-olds and 20% of 10–12-year-olds were enrolled in LTCs (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2021a).

The case study In 2018, an interview study was conducted with 21 teachers working in LTCs in southern Sweden.2 The study sought insights into how digital technologies were or were not domesticated in LTCs and how teachers worked to promote digital competence among their pupils. The teachers were selected purposively to obtain variation in age, gender, and the age of the children they worked with. Some teachers worked with the youngest children (pre-school class and grade one), some with mixed-age groups, and others with the oldest children (grades four to six). One important finding of this study was that teachers in LTCs made clear distinctions between the digital devices owned by the school – usually tablets and laptops – and those owned by the pupils – namely, their smartphones. The schools’ devices were integrated into various activities of the centres, such as making videos with iMovie or watching instructional YouTube videos in creative activities, while the smartphones were usually rejected or strictly controlled (Martínez & Olsson, 2021a). In the following, we discuss how pupils’ smartphones were objectified, that is, how they were placed and used within the spatial environment of the centres (Silverstone, 1994). The analysis illustrates how pupils’ smartphones were largely and somewhat paradoxically domesticated as stationary technologies. Pupils were generally not allowed to use their smartphones in the LTCs as the local school policy was that schools should be “mobile free.” Interestingly, this local policy did not correspond with the national digitalization policy, which did not specify which technologies 61

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should be used in schools, so the local policy reflects local interpretations and decisions. The teachers described telling their pupils to store their smartphones (e.g., in their bags) or collecting the phones and storing them in locked spaces. The teachers justified the local school policies and practices in different ways. One main argument for prohibiting smartphones was that it was very difficult to control their usage (Martínez & Olsson, 2021a). It was primarily the possibility of making videos and taking photos and sharing them on social media that was considered problematic. Teachers also claimed that allowing the use of smartphones would prevent pupils from engaging in other activities considered valuable, such as physical play, as the pupils would only sit with their smartphones. In the interviews, some teachers started to reason about this distinction between different digital technologies, in light of the demand to digitalize schools and promote digital competence. One teacher said: After all, the phone is a resource. I mean, we’ve written in our commitment plan that we want them [i.e., the pupils] to use digital tools as natural implements in their daily lives. So it’s a bit peculiar that we’ve actually taken that away … Yes, I do use my phone a whole lot. Like, “Who is playing football today?” when I go to write on the chalkboard. “Yes, it was these teams.” In other words, what we sometimes take from them is at the same time something that we say we want them to use as a natural implement. In this quotation, the teacher reflects on the seemingly inconsistent and somewhat paradoxical practice of prohibiting the use of smartphones, given the goal that “digital tools” should be a natural part of students’ everyday lives and given that teachers make good use of their own smartphones in teaching. Other teachers reflected that pupils’ smartphones indeed could be useful resources when documenting activities in the LTCs, and that pupils also needed to learn how to handle their smartphones. In light of this, the prohibition was considered somewhat counterproductive, but the teachers nevertheless concluded that allowing the use of smartphones would cause too many problems. In LTCs where smartphones were prohibited, teachers sometimes allowed their usage for very specific purposes. Communicating with parents through calls or text messages was considered legitimate, but the pupils could only use their smartphones for this purpose under strict teacher supervision (Martínez & Olsson, 2021a). Hence, in their objectification of the smartphones, the teachers created a stationary assemblage, including the pupil, smartphone, and teacher. The affordances of the smartphone, its possibilities for mobility and connection with the surrounding world, were in these LTCs mainly considered problematic. The journey of the phone from its storage in bags, pockets, or locked spaces to the pupils’ hands – and back again – was closely monitored and no deviation from this route was allowed. There were a few exceptions to this general prohibition of smartphones. In some LTCs, the pupils were allowed to use their smartphones for activities other than communicating with parents. In these cases, the smartphone use was less stationary. For example, one teacher played Pokémon Go outside with her pupils, and some other teachers allowed their pupils to make dance videos. In these few cases in which smartphone usage was mobile, the activities were planned and controlled by the teacher. In a few centres, pupils were also allowed to use their smartphones more freely on occasion, for example, for one hour on a Friday afternoon. However, such usage was controlled in both time and space, as described by one teacher: “We have one room that’s as big as this one, with couches. Then they have their smartphones in there, as we feel that we have to keep an eye on what our current pupils are looking at.” Even in these cases, pupils’ smartphones were domesticated as stationary technologies.

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Policy implications One aim of this study was to gain insight into the variety of ways in which digital technologies were domesticated in LTCs and to use this knowledge to develop our theoretical understanding of domestication processes. However, the study also had more practical goals, namely, to promote the development of policy and practice. Communicating the results to a wider audience of different stakeholders was considered important, and the idea was that revealing the varied ways digital technologies were used could provide a basis for reflection, which could lead to new policies and practices at the local school level. The national policy documents for digitalization provided little concrete guidance on how to integrate and work with digital technologies in schools, so teachers and principals needed support in this area. To reach out to relevant stakeholders, the results of the study were communicated in various ways, via public lectures, magazines for teachers, debate articles, radio programmes, etc. After the study was completed, collaboration was established with the Swedish National Agency for Education. The goal of this was to inspire principals and teachers to start working with digital technology in LTCs. To do so, two media reportages and a podcast were produced in collaboration with a professional media producer. In these reportages, Martínez (see Swedish National Agency for Education, 2021b) described different ways of working with digital technologies, mentioning Pokemón Go as a way to combine children’s interest in mobile games with physical activities. This particular example was chosen to provide teachers and principals with new ideas and to promote an open mindset about what digital media can be used (and used for), possibly influencing both practice and policy development regarding the use of smartphones.

On the need for everyday support: elderly people’s incorporation of ICTs Policy context The two previous cases have already made it evident how Swedish policy, over time, has manifested a strong belief in the opportunities afforded by new ICTs. This certainly includes identification of the possible advantages of digitalization and the ambition to become “world leading” (Regeringskansliet, 2017a) in taking advantage of these opportunities. The wide-ranging, overarching ambition is obviously very technologically deterministic, but it in fact reflects the already high degree of digitalization of Swedish society. Swedish citizens already encounter a rich variety of digital solutions in all areas of social life. For example, digital services are nowadays the default solution for banking contacts. Within the health sector, they are equally the preferred channel for initial contacts with potential patients. When moving around in everyday life, fees for car parking and public transport are usually paid using digital applications. This drive for digitalization also includes governmental agencies. According to the Swedish government, governmental agencies at all levels – from the state to municipalities – should be regarded as parts of the digital administration, in which digital services are “the first choice … in contacts with private individuals and organizations” (www.digg.se/utvecklingav-digital-forvaltning/). There is of course great potential in digitalization on this scale, but it also entails challenges. One obvious challenge is that the switch from traditional, analogue services to digital solutions is always both difficult and expensive. It is not a simple technical

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“quick fix,” but quite often involves the complete reworking of ways of thinking and doing (Thompson, 1995). However, what is specifically interesting and challenging is, in our view, how digitalization also presupposes digital knowledge and skills among citizens. Without access to the necessary skills to deal with digitalized everyday life, citizens are at risk of becoming excluded from services that help them assert their civil, political, and social rights (Marshall, 1950). Meanwhile, there are still important differences between groups of citizens when it comes to their abilities to deal with digitalized everyday life. According to Jan Van Dijk (2020), such differences include access to ICTs, patterns of usage, as well as the outcomes of access and usage. Senior citizens constitute one large and important group in this regard, and previous research has revealed how ICT access and competence decrease with age (Olsson et al., 2019a). This also influences usage patterns, and as a consequence, online repertoires become more limited with age (Olsson et al., 2019b). As an outcome, the fact that almost all spheres of social life are digitalized poses a specific challenge for elderly citizens. To be sure, there is, of course, great variation between elderly citizens in this regard (Olsson et al., 2019a). It is nevertheless important to gain insight into their concrete everyday situations. How do they perceive the increasing expectations to deal with digital technology and applications? What challenges do they face and how do they receive support when needed?

The case study In 2019 and early 2020, interviews were conducted with 22 individuals aged 70–94 years living in southern Sweden. This study was conducted within the larger research project Elderly people in the e-society: A project for digital participation and was intended to build understanding of the role played by younger generations in elderly people’s learning about digital media.3 Learning how to handle digital devices for different purposes is an important part of the incorporation phase, when media are integrated into the routines and practices of everyday life (Silverstone, 1994). Learning is here understood as a process of change in which the person broadens his or her capacities and gains increasing autonomy in a particular domain (Illeris, 2017). In the process of learning and incorporating digital media into everyday life, the surrounding social context plays a crucial role as it influences the learning taking place (see Illeris, 2017; Jarvis, 2006). Other people can facilitate learning by serving as sources of inspiration and motivation, as well as through active instruction (Bakardjieva, 2005). However, interaction with other persons can also obstruct the learning process, for example, through promoting misunderstanding (Illeris, 2012, 2017). In the interviews, the participants described how members of younger generations helped them address issues related to digital media in various ways. Some elderly persons needed constant support and experienced continuous challenges in everyday life related to the use of digital devices, while others needed support more occasionally and handled some of the learning on their own. Their children and grandchildren played the most important role in this, although other agents could also be involved, such as librarians, salespersons, and bank officials. When analysing the role played by family members in elderly people’s learning about digital media, it became evident how they contributed in different ways to the development of new competencies in, for example, using digital media for banking, communication with friends and family, or playing mobile games for relaxation and entertainment. Younger family members facilitated elderly people’s learning by, for example, instructing

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them calmly and providing step-by-step instructions, so that the elderly could easily follow the process and be able to practise by themselves while receiving instructions. Some participants are described as being very dependent on their family members for support. They felt unsure about the relevance of new digital technologies, such as tablets, smartphones, and apps, but experienced how support from family members changed their everyday lives for the better. One woman, 77 years old, described developing new routines when incorporating a smartphone into her life. During her often lonely evenings, she now used her smartphone to watch films and to find new recipes and templates for embroidery. When speaking of her initial hesitation and the support she received from her son, which led to her incorporation of the smartphone, she said: “He was smarter than me. [laugh] It was great. … there are many who aren’t interested at all, and that’s a shame, because everything is moving towards the new technology.” In contrast, the interviews also showed that family members were not always a source of support in learning about digital media. They sometimes spoke or demonstrated too quickly when instructing, used unknown technical terms, or could not adapt to the required level of understanding. One man, 75 years old, said: But there is no doubt that I mostly ask the 17-year-old boy. Because the others are incredible when they show – “Yeah, you just do it like this” – but then they go so damn fast, and say, pew, pew pew [sound effect, swiping his fingers rapidly across the phone]. “No,” I say, “take it easy now.” In this quotation, the man described how he usually asked his 17-year-old grandson rather than the younger grandchildren for support. The older grandson was calmer, and demonstrated and instructed much more slowly than the others. However, it was not just communication problems that sometimes made family members a poor source of support. In some cases, younger family members lived far away and could not offer support concerning digital media issues, and there were also participants who did not want to bother family members as they had busy lives and other obligations.

Policy implications The ongoing digitalization of society puts demands on people to constantly keep up with technological change, entailing ongoing challenges for elderly people. To address these challenges, elderly people often need support, which some find in their immediate social environment. As shown here, family members can indeed be an important source of support during the process of incorporation. However, the family as a support system also has weaknesses. Sometimes younger family members do not have the capacity to teach in a way that facilitates learning, and sometimes they are not available at all. This insight has important implications for policy. One such implication is that, as a society, we cannot rely on the family to be a support system when important functions are digitalized, as sometimes is the case in Sweden (Magnusson, 2020). The state should take greater responsibility for elderly people’s inclusion in digital society, and doing so calls for building generalized support systems that go beyond the family. As part of the project Elderly people in the e-society: A project for digital participation, we have communicated these findings in different ways to influence policy, for example, in articles in the magazine Elderly at the Center (Martínez & Olsson, 2020) and in debate articles in

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national newspapers. In one of the articles, we argued that Sweden needs to adopt a national strategy for elderly peoples’ digital inclusion (Martínez et al., 2021). Here, we identify the weaknesses in various existing support systems, including in the role of the family. We argue for prioritizing the elderly in work on digital inclusion and for developing a national support system that can reach all elderly.

Discussion and conclusion This chapter both argues for and illustrates the policy relevance of domestication research. In view of the digitalization of Swedish society as an overarching framework, we have presented three cases of domestication research that are distinct from one another, but that share an interest in addressing policy in different ways. The first case analyses the appropriation of Internet-connected computers in working-class households. The case is now two decades old, but it nevertheless captures recurring tensions between overarching policy-level visions and people’s everyday reflections and practices. What was interpreted in policy as “wings of human ability” and a space for civic participation in policy formulations was perceived as “pressure” and as something “you have to have” amid the murmur of everyday life. Such important discrepancies are important for research to pay attention to and tell about, as they would not otherwise reach public attention. Our second case applies the notion of domestication outside the domestic. It relates to visions and ideas from the Swedish school curriculum when analysing the intriguing ways in which mobile phones become immobile as they enter LTCs. Apart from contributing to the debate on the place of digital media in a specific schooling context, the case also illustrates the usefulness of the domestication approach outside of the home – here, within an educational context. We also think that the case can serve as a reminder that domestication research has many good reasons to move into educational contexts more often. School contexts are important and educational practice could certainly benefit from insight into how ICTs actually do or do not become parts of the everyday life of teaching and learning. In the third case, we re-enter the domestic, but 20 years later than the first case and with the specific ambition of understanding the challenges of growing old in a society with high policy expectations regarding the digitalization of information and services. Applying the notion of incorporation to elderly citizens’ use of digital media in everyday life clearly reveals their need for support, which often makes them dependent on children and grandchildren to manage their digitalized everyday life. Their dependency in this regard goes even further, we would argue. It points towards larger policy questions regarding the responsibility of the state, which formulates policies and regulations for digitalization but does not take actual responsibility for the levels of digital ability and inclusion among its citizens. Media technology is in a state of constant change and development, from which follows both new policy visions and ambitions. Simply stated, we can be very sure of the fact that there is much more to come from the policy contexts addressed here, and from numerous other such contexts around the world. No matter what new media technological domain is in focus, whether the Internet of things, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, it is important to offer perspectives and insights from domestication research. Domestication research can contrast, challenge, and hopefully also feed into the formation of insights into what is going on in new media technology. However, to do so, policy relevance should not remain an under-articulated aspect of domestication research, but ought to be explicitly formulated and communicated to relevant stakeholders as an integral part of research practice.

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Notes 1 This part of the chapter draws on a previously published article: Olsson (2006). 2 This part of the chapter draws on a previously published article: Martinez and Olsson (2021). 3 This part of the chapter is partly based on conference presentations made in 2021, ECREA in Braga 2021 (Martínez and Olsson, 2021b) and NordMedia in Reyjkjavik (Martínez and Olsson, 2021c). Among the participants were 13 women and nine men with secondary to post- secondary education. All participants regularly used digital media (i.e., tablet, computer, and/or mobile phone) to some extent, although their use patterns varied.

References Bakardjieva, M. (2005) Internet society: The Internet in everyday life, London: Sage. Brosveet, J. and Sørensen, K.H. (2000) ‘Fishing for fun and profit? National domestication of multimedia: The case of Norway,’ The Information Society, 16 (4), 263–276. De Reuver, M., Nikou, S. and Bouwman, H. (2016) ‘Domestication of smartphones and mobile applications: A quantitative mixed-methods study,’ Mobile Media & Communication, 4 (3), 347–370. Goodwin, I. and Spittle, S. (2002) ‘The European Union and the information society: Discourse, power and policy,’ New Media & Society, 4 (2), 225–249. Governmental Proposition (1999/2000) Ett informationssamhälle för alla [An information society for all], Governmental Proposition 1999/2000, 86. Habib, L. and Cornford, T. (2002) ‘Computers in the home: Domestication and gender,’ Information, Technology & People, 15 (2), 159–174. Haddon, L. (2006) ‘The contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption,’ The Information Society, 22 (4), 195–203. Haddon, L. (2016) ‘The domestication of complex media repertoires,’ in K. Sandvik, A.M. Thorhaugeand and B. Valtysson (eds.) The media and the mundane: Communication across media in everyday life, Gothenburg: Nordicom, 17–30. Henriksen, I.M. and Tjora, A. (2018) ‘Situational domestication and the origin of the café worker species,’ Sociology, 52 (2), 351–366. Illeris, K. (2012) ‘Non-learning,’ in N.M. Seel (ed.) Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning, Wiesbaden: Springer, 2478–2479. Illeris, K. (2017) How we learn: Learning and non-learning in school and beyond, London: Routledge. Jarvis, P. (2006) Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning, London: Routledge. Lindeman, S., Svensson, M. and Enochsson, A.B. (2021) ‘Digitalisation in early childhood education: A domestication theoretical perspective on teachers’ experiences,’ Education and Information Technologies, 26 (4), 4879–4903. Liste, L. and Sørensen, K.H. (2015) ‘Consumer, client or citizen? How Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology and configure their users,’ Information, Communication & Society, 18 (7), 733–746. Luomanen, J. and Peteri, V. (2013) ‘iDeal machines and iDeal users: Domesticating iPad as a cultural object,’ WiderScreen, 16 (1). http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2013-1/domesticating-ipad. Magnusson, E. (2020) Skånetrafikens råd till kritiska resenärer: “Ta hjälp från barn och barnbarn” [Advice from Skånetrafiken {i.e., the Skåne region public transportation authority} to critical passengers: “Get support from children and grandchildren”], Sydsvenskan, https://www.sydsvenskan. se/2020-01-20/skanetrafikens-rad-till-kritiska-resenarer-ta-hjalp-fran-barn-och-barnbarn. Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and social class and other essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martínez, C. and Olsson, T. (2020) En digital familje -angelägenhet [A family matter?]. Äldre i Centrum: Aktuell forskning om äldre och åldrande, 4, 65–67. Martínez, C. and Olsson, T. (2021a) ‘Domestication outside of the domestic: Shaping technology and child in an educational moral economy,’ Media, Culture & Society, 43 (3), 480–496. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443720948011 Martínez, C. and Olsson, T. (2021b) ‘Intergenerational interactions between elderly people and “warm experts”: Possibilities and barriers for elderly learning,’ ECREA 2021, September 6-9, Braga (online).

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Carolina Martínez and Tobias Olsson Martínez, C. and Olsson, T. (2021c) ‘The role of the family in elderly people’s appropriation of digital media,’ NordeMedia 2021, August 18-20, Reykjavik (online). Martínez, C., Olsson, T., Samuelsson, U. and Viscovi, D. (2021) ‘Regeringen bör ta fram en nationell strategi för äldres digitala inkludering [The government needs to develop a national strategy for elderly people’s digital inclusion],’ Sydsvenskan, https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2021-09-20/ regeringen-bor-ta-fram-en-nationell-strategi-for-aldres-digitala-inkludering. Moores, S. (2000) Media and everyday life in modern society, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morley, D. and Silverstone, R. (1990) ‘Domestic communication: Technologies and meanings,’ Media, Culture & Society, 12 (1), 31–55. Nordicom (2001) Mediebarometern 2000, Gothenburg: Nordicom. Olsson, T. (2002) Mycket väsen om ingenting: Hur datorn and Internet undgår att formas till medborgarens tekniker [Much ado about nothing: How the computer and the Internet miss their plight as tools of the citizen] (Uppsala Studies in Media and Communication, Vol. 1) [Doctoral dissertation, Uppsala University]. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Olsson, T. (2006) Appropriating civic information and communication technology: A critical study of Swedish ICT policy visions. New Media & Society, 8 (4), 611–627. Olsson, T., Samuelsson, U. and Viscovi, D. (2019a) ‘At risk of exclusion? Degrees of ICT access and literacy among senior citizens,’ Information, Communication & Society, 22 (1), 55–72. Olsson, T., Samuelsson, U. and Viscovi, D. (2019b) ‘Resources and repertoires: Elderly online practices,’ European Journal of Communication, 34 (1), 38–56. Regeringskansliet (2017a) ‘För ett hållbart digitaliserat Sverige – en digitaliseringsstrategi [For a sustainable  digitalization of Sweden – a digitalization strategy],’ Regeringskansliet, https:// www.regeringen.se/informationsmaterial/2017/05/for-ett-hallbart-digitaliserat-sverige--en-digitaliseringsstrategi/. Regeringskansliet (2017b) ‘Regeringen beslutar om nationell digitaliseringsstrategi för skolväsendet [The government decides on a national strategy for the digitalization of schools],’ Regeringskansliet, https://www.regeringen.se/informationsmaterial/2017/10/regeringen-beslutar-om-nationelldigitaliseringsstrategi-for-skolvasendet/. Röser, J. and Peil, C. (2010) ‘Domestizierung. Zugänge zum Internet im Wandel 1997–2007,’ M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 58 (4), 481–502. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (1996) ‘Future imperfect: Information and communication technologies in everyday life,’ in W.H. Dutton (ed.) Information and communication technologies: Visions and realities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 217–231. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating domestication: Reflections on the life of a concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R., Morley, D., Dahlberg, A. and Livingstone, S. (1989) Families, technologies and consumption: The household and information and communication technologies, CRICT discussion paper, Uxbridge: Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture & Technology. Sørensen, K.H. (2013) ‘Beyond innovation: Towards an extended framework for analysing technology policy,’ Nordic Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 1 (1), 12–23. SOU (Statens Offentliga Utredningar) (1994) Informationsteknologin: Vingar åt Människans Förmåga [Information technology: Wings of human ability], Governmental Investigation 1994:118, Stockholm: Fritzes offentliga publikationer. SOU (Statens Offentliga Utredningar) (2000) En uthållig demokrati! Politik for folkstyrelse på 2000-talet [A lasting democracy! Politics for popular government in the third millennium], Governmental Investigation 2000:1, Stockholm: Fritzes offentliga publikationer. Stewart, J. (2007) ‘Local experts in the domestication of information and communication technologies,’ Information, Communication & Society, 10 (4), 547–569. Swedish National Agency for Education. (2018) ‘Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2011 [Curriculum for elementary school, the pre-school class, and the leisure-time centre]’, (Revised 2018), Skolverket, https://www.skolverket.se/download/18.6bfaca41169863e6a6 ­ 5d48d/1553968042333/pdf3975.pdf. Swedish National Agency for Education (2021a) ‘Elever och personal i fritidshemmet läsåret 2020/21 [Pupils and staff in leisure-time centres, year 2020/21],’ Skolverket, https://www.skolverket.se/publikationsserier/beskrivande-statistik/2021/elever-och-personal-i-fritidshemmetlasaret-2020-21.

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Making domestication research policy relevant Swedish National Agency for Education (2021b) ‘Digitala verktyg och lärande i fritidshemmet [Digital  tools  and learning in the leisure-time centre],’ Skolverket, https://www.skolverket.se/ skolutveckling/inspiration-och-stod-i-arbetet/stod-i-arbetet/digitala-verktyg-och-larandei-fritidshemmet. Thompson, J.B. (1995) The media and modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Van Dijk, J. (2020) The digital divide, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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5 A DIALOGUE ON DOMESTICATION David Morley and Maren Hartmann

David Morley is one of the ‘founders’ of the domestication approach. In this role, I had encountered his work a long time before I actually encountered him live. But the conversations that began to evolve after our first encounter were always enlightening and fun. In the last few years (before COVID struck), these encounters mostly took place in the context of the informal Mobile Socialities network (see Hill, Hartmann & Andersson, 2021), especially under the great hospitality of our colleagues from Lund. The conversation below (originally framed as an interview) can be seen as a continuation of such a dinner conversation. It is a dialogue on domestication with not only one of the founders, but someone whose intellectual engagement with the notion of home, of non-media-centric media studies, of audiences and globalisation has always been extremely inspiring. At the same time, this is a conversation about our own everyday lives – conducted, as so many conversations these days, via Zoom in the spring of 2022.

David Morley (DM) In recent years, there has been a tendency to neglect the question of the domestication of media technologies, as if that was an issue that had only been relevant at an earlier stage of technological development. That is one of the things that has troubled me about media research in recent years – so much of it seems to have fallen into a rather a-historical perspective, in which it’s imagined that the only thing of interest is the contemporary and that previous technologies – along with previous forms of knowledge – are by definition redundant now, simply by virtue of being old. In the worst versions of this tendency, you also find a very simplistic invocation of a transition between different media ‘eras’: as if there was one period called the analogue/broadcast era which has now been entirely superseded by the digital era of streaming services. It is manifestly far too much of a simplistic understanding of historical change, but it is nonetheless surprisingly widespread as an implicit presumption underlying a lot of media research produced in the last few years. In that context, it has recently been a delight to me to begin to find some research being conducted by contemporary media scholars, which recognises the simultaneous existence of media elements and practices with their origins in different eras – and the continuing relevance of many issues raised in audience research in earlier periods – for the understanding 70

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of our contemporary media practices. The whole COVID period gave rise to a situation where older media practices, such as, for instance, collective household viewing of broadcast television – and alongside that, familiar questions about processes of domestication – regained a considerable significance. Those developments showed that, despite claims to the contrary, television is by no means dead. Indeed, in those circumstances, it adapted itself very quickly to the new demands of the situation, which it was able to meet better than other technologies. In this situation of crisis, it was the trustworthiness of information, rather than the speed of its delivery, which concerned people most – and in the UK at least it was things like BBC TV news that people trusted most. It was in that connection that I came across the research being done at the University of Huddersfield by Cathy Johnson and Cornell Sandvoss and their colleagues.1 During the COVID pandemic, they did audience research about how people navigated the new media environment and how they oriented themselves within it. They also explored very interesting questions about the way in which people now mixed broadcasting and streaming services together, in this hybrid environment. One of the other things that caught my attention about it was their principled refusal to buy into the kind of perspective advocated not so long ago by scholars like David Gauntlett – who claimed that, as a result of the technological changes of our times, media studies in its previous manifestation were now redundant and needed to be replaced by a new form of Media Studies 2.0 (or perhaps now 3.0). I then heard an interview on the radio in which Cathy Johnson and the journalist Emma Beddington were talking about household viewing during the pandemic. Beddington talked about how, in her own household, her family had come to feel that, given the strange and dislocated form of their social pandemic lifestyle, with the broader social world now unpredictable and threatening, their customary modes of individualised media consumption no longer felt satisfactory. She reported that her family, like many others up and down the land, came to feel that it was important that they did something together as a household, each day. As a result, in effect, they reinvented a regular practice of collective ‘prime time’ viewing in the evening. Interestingly, it turned out that, in terms of content, what they often watched together would be from Netflix, rather than from broadcast television, but in terms of viewing practices, they were nonetheless reconstructing an old-fashioned version of regular, habitual, collective family/household viewing.

Maren Hartmann (MH) This is interesting because it reminds me of a PhD dissertation I have recently finished reading (Klocke, 2022), while it also feeds into something I am experiencing in my own everyday family life. While I am generally not particularly nostalgic about television (I grew up in a household where television was frowned upon and therefore missed out on quite a bit of pop culture), I nonetheless found myself just yesterday evening wishing back for those times when you were forced to watch the same programme and choice wasn’t so much an option. If one wanted to watch television, one had to watch whatever was on offer (which usually wasn’t much). But while one might have been slightly bored, at least there was this moment of being bored together. Today, when I try to initiate a family film viewing, negotiations begin. My son, for example, would always prefer to watch on his own, mostly YouTube gamers playing games. We are all very much used to having a choice and ‘designing’ our own programme. You touched upon exactly this question earlier: it’s about family time. How do you create family time around this choice? There are obviously different versions of family time, but 71

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one of them is the sort of ‘sitting around the medium,’ and it’s quite difficult and interesting because nowadays the choice is (too) large. They’ve grown up with this notion of choice. And that makes it much more difficult to say ‘let’s now choose us rather than a specific film’ or ‘choose family.’ That’s quite a difficult task. DM: I think that is a very rich topic. My wife and I recently had a problematic technological

experience when we went to stay in a holiday house owned by – and designed for – younger relatives. To be in a domestic environment organised around the predilections of another generation is always an interesting experience. The house’s owners had evidently found, over the last few years, that on the whole, they rarely watched broadcast television. As a result, they had effectively deleted that option from their media ensemble. For us, accustomed as we are to watching broadcasting as one of the foundations of our own sense of ontological security, this constituted a significant difficulty. There were moments when we just wanted to watch broadcast television and ‘rest’ in the reliability of that scheduled world, as we felt overwhelmed by the vast range of streaming choices available to us. In effect, at those points, we were destabilised by not having the option to ‘join in’ with any form of communal viewing. It was not the absence of any particular form of media content that we found problematic, but rather, the absence of any sense of participation in some form of community (if only a virtual one) through media consumption. To pursue the theme of family dynamics, in the interview I was talking about earlier, Beddington returned to some of the issues initially explored by scholars like Ann Gray in the 1980s, in her book about the gendering of leisure technology.2 In that book, she examined the extent to which the new technologies of that time, such as the video, were thoroughly implicated in gendered identities. Of course, in recent years, it has sometimes been argued that traditional ideas of gender in the household are themselves now quite outdated and need to be abandoned. However, what emerged in the discussion with Johnson and Beddington was the extent to which traditional gender roles – such as the responsibilities of the mother in the household – remain highly relevant. Interestingly, many of those responsibilities now take the form of what we might call digital housework/home-making. Thus, when households re-discovered the pleasures of collective viewing, it customarily turned out that the specific member of the household whose responsibility it was to find things that might be suitable for all the family to watch together was, indeed, the mother. As someone who explored these issues in my Family Television book in the 1980s (Morley, 1986), it was, of course, instructive to find that they do indeed still apply in contemporary households. Thus, it remains the case that the significance of contemporary technologies cannot be understood separately from how they are mobilised, domesticated and operationalised through the dynamics of a household’s gendered and generational structure. Let me give you an example from my own family life. One of my daughters, a media journalist of some technological sophistication, recently found herself in a situation in which, in the absence of her teenage son, she was simply unable to manoeuvre her way through the range of controls in front of her, in the family’s living room, so as to switch the television on. In the context of his use of the TV set for gaming purposes, her son had done something with the controls which was completely unfamiliar to her, so she had to phone him up and get him to talk her through the procedure (which was so taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’ to him that he found it hard to explicate), before she could, in practice, watch anything at all. To say these things might perhaps seem no more than banal, but in fact they have a continuing significance. These issues about the imbrication of media technologies in the dense 72

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entrials of family life reveal one of the fallacious (though widespread) assumptions of most contemporary theory – which treats the users of media technologies as if they were all simply individual consumers, exercising their choices and making their decisions without reference to each other. In fact, it is only in a single person household that media consumption and technology use can be understood in those terms. In all other households, one has always to consider the complex dynamics of how media and technology use is negotiated within the power relationships of that household. It is simply unrealistic to imagine that these are issues that can be understood through a model of individual consumer choice, whether we’re talking about people viewing television soap opera in the 1980s or people viewing Netflix nowadays. MH: Actually, it’s one of the things that has drawn me back into the domestication approach

at some point. Because, like many of us, I have had the feeling of ‘been there, done that’ concerning domestication, but then returned to it later. One of the questions that struck me was this this notion of ontological security, which is not originally from the domestication framework, but which importantly links media use to the security question. And that’s something that I keep returning to, both in a sort of worried way, because I wonder, what is security these days? While ontological security captures it quite nicely, how does media use relate to creating security or insecurity? And how much security do we need? The ontological security concept does not provide the ultimate answer – how could it? – but it poses the right question. DM: In order to pursue that question, I think it’s interesting to reconsider contemporary media usage within the context of some earlier modes of theorisation of these issues. In the first place, as my comments above indicate, it would obviously be useful to go back to some of the issues raised by sociologists such as James Lull in their studies of the what they called the ‘social uses’ of television and how the dynamics of choice operate in relation to different media (e.g. Lull, 1988). It would also be useful to go back to longneglected perspectives such as the emphasis given to television as an institution whose significance (beyond its content) also lays in its role in the organisation of leisure time – as advocated many years ago by Conrad Lodziak in his book The Power of Television (1986). I have to confess that I say that as someone who, in my earlier work, probably paid insufficient attention to those issues, given my primary concerns at CCCS with questions of power and ideology. However, these days, I think I would say that, rather than thinking of those things as alternative perspectives, they need to be articulated with each other – so that one can address both questions of ideology and power and the role of different media technologies in articulating the micro-schedule of the household with the overall calendar of national time. That issue became particularly prominent during the COVID period. The extent to which households were required to live for long periods in physical isolation from their normal social contacts made the dangers of what Durkheim called ‘anomie’ rather more of a critical issue then they would normally have been. Thus, in the context of enforced ‘social distancing,’ modes of participation in various forms of sociality beyond the household were at a premium, even if they were only available in virtual modalities. To say that is, of course, to recognise that people still feel the need to create some sense of security for themselves in order to function – and I do think that research into contemporary media cannot afford to neglect those questions, even if they now appear in new forms. I have written elsewhere about the need to develop a non-media-centric perspective (Morley, 2009), so let me go back to how those issues apply in this discussion. As indicated by my 73

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quoting a scholar like Lodziak above, working within a fairly conventional sociological perspective, at a tangent to mainstream media studies, I do think that we need to re-incorporate the study of contemporary media technologies within the broader field of leisure studies. While that discipline is presently ignored by many media scholars, it has developed considerable expertise in the study of how individuals and households organise and divide their time and how, in doing so, their activities are articulated with and through different technologies. We can also learn a great deal by taking account of the important contribution made to these debates by people like Hermann Bausinger, coming from the tradition of ‘folk studies.’ As I say that, I can imagine some readers raising their eyebrows in dismay, unable to imagine what an old-fashioned approach like that could possibly tell us about the contemporary world. To some large extent, the answer is already implicit in the title of Bausinger’s major work Folk Culture in a World of Technology (Bausinger, 1990), premised as it is on the argument that ‘modern’ technologies are no less susceptible than those that went before them to incorporation into everyday cultures (see also Bausinger, 1984). In terms of how that applies to the study of media consumption, I would point to the example in one of Bausinger’s analyses of TV viewing, in which he comes across a woman who has previously told him how much she dislikes sport on television, but who he finds happily sitting on the sofa, watching football on the television with her teenage son. Bausinger asks her about the seemingly contradictory nature of her behaviour (in relation to her espoused viewing preferences for different kinds of content). Her reply is most remarkable for the way in which she disabuses him of the notion that ‘watching television’ necessarily has anything at all to do with the particular content on the screen in question, so far as she is concerned. As she makes plain to him, in this instance, she is simply using joint TV viewing as a pretext for spending intimate time in her son’s company; as otherwise, she only rarely gets to see him alone. When examined closely, in the fine grain of everyday practices, our lives and relationships are closely intertwined with a variety of communications technologies. Thus, what can look like simple choices of media content are often profoundly influenced by the relationships within a household, as people use various technologies to both connect (and in other instances disconnect) themselves from and to each other. The key point is that this principle applies in the world of contemporary Netflix-viewing every bit as much as it did in the world of broadcast television in the 1980s. MH: Let me briefly, just because we talked about Bausinger, show you a picture (see Figure

5.1). This is in German, a newspaper clipping from 20th November 1967. It’s the evening newspaper, the eight o’clock edition (the morning-evening-paper division is of those time-structuring aspects of media that has disappeared). On it you see a picture of a young Hermann Bausinger, here called the ‘Tarzan-Professor’. The article also describes his research about so-called trivial literature within the folk institute. And then it states that this university professor is begging for ‘Schundhefte’ – this word is so wonderful – an outdated term: a very negative description of a scandalous piece of literature. The headline basically says this university professor is begging for this horrible literature. And then the article explains in a rather puzzled manner that this crazy professor is actually researching comics. It is a great expression of its time, emphasising the sort of change that has taken place since. Pop culture is obviously a non-negotiable aspect of our research today, but it’s important to underline that this has not always been the case. But I also really like these little bits about the Tarzan professor – I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a Tarzan professor? DM: I recently found a video of Bausinger on YouTube, done just before he died. He was at a conference, doing a presentation on the treatment of old people in care homes. He was 74

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Figure 5.1

A 1967 cover of the German newspaper ‘Abendzeitung’ featuring Bausinger and his search for comics as research objects

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explaining that often, those in charge took a very ‘rationalist’ approach to what should be done with old people, e.g., imagining that it would be better if they were given a specially designed ‘wet room’ where they didn’t have to climb in and out of a bath, and they could have a space where there’d be no awkward barriers for them to trip over when washing. But he then explains that making an old person (who probably knows their way around their old bathroom inch by inch) move to what is (notionally) a much ‘safer’ space, in fact, often proves to be more dangerous for them. That’s simply because the unfamiliarity of the new space results in a higher risk of them injuring themselves through falling over. Anyone who has faced this problem with an aging parent in an old, ‘unsuitable’ house, which they may still be reluctant to leave, knows this very well – but it is apparently invisible to many of the rationalist architects and social workers who often control old people’s lives. It’s that superb ethnographic attention to detail that distinguishes Bausinger’s work and it was by following his example that I came to see how profoundly the whole issue of media consumption is transformed, once you take the domestic and familial context of those practices as constitutive of what is going on – not as some sort of ‘optional extra,’ but rather, as the essential starting place for the analysis. That’s why I was so interested in Cathy Johnson and her colleagues’ work, because I saw that they, too, had begun to do that, in the context of their contemporary analysis of how new technologies are being domesticated. The key point is that things like familial structures and gender patterns impact on that contemporary process of media consumption every bit as much as they did when the video technologies that Ann Gray studied were coming in. As I said earlier, for me, both the COVID experience and that of spending time in a house with technologies designed for by people 30 years younger than me were extremely revealing in understanding how all these technologies of this new era are being domesticated, and grasping what has now become normalised, or taken-for-granted, and how many different modes of technology-control with which people are assumed to be familiar and competent with. MH: I totally agree. This is the core question in the PhD that I mentioned earlier (Klocke,

2022; see also her contribution in this volume). She actually uses the domestication concept, which is rare. Her use of the concept itself, however, is not the most interesting aspect of her work (although I appreciate the framing and think it has great potential). But what she’s done practically was very fascinating, because she actually went into different kinds of household settings. And she literally sat (or even lay) down with these people on their sofas. So first, in the beginning, she got to know her study participants, more or less befriended them and then kept returning. Next to the ethnographic material, which she condensed into thick descriptions (written with a certain literary freedom), she also used video re-enactments of actual technology uses and 3D-modelling of the spaces she was in. There was therefore a different way of capturing the usage scenes. This is an approach that would not have been possible in the 1980s, but it turns out to be quite useful. In her material, you can watch her gradually moving further and further into the sofas. While she observes people and interviews them, too, her focus is primarily on the materiality of these settings, asking ‘how is this connected, where is the switch and how is all this used?’ There’s one case study in Klocke’s work where the complexity of the setting becomes an issue. These are (young) people, a group of friends, who really know their way around 76

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the technology, but they can’t switch between different programmes anymore, because the set-up has become so complicated. They would need to get up from the comfortable sofa in order to switch from one programme to another. Instead, they simply watch the film until it’s over. They are plugged into this network of different technologies (plugs, switches, WiFi cables, etc.) and it’s quite interesting to see how the technology has become so advanced that it’s stabilising them in their viewing positions. They’ve just become used to it because it would otherwise require them to get up. They have a huge range of applications and programmes on offer, but they are also fixed in their positions and limit themselves in their choices. DM: I think the current re-design of sofas is very interesting. When I was growing up, most

families had a sofa in their living room on which two or three people sat and then, separately, there would usually be two armchairs – but everybody was assumed to be sitting pretty much upright. Whereas now, people often have a sofa which is made up of several different sections and the idea is that the different members of the family/household are all going to be lying casually about on it, at different angles to the screen, in a relaxed and intimate manner. The notion of treating media consumption as an embodied activity is often very illuminating. I think it’s worth pursuing the way that furniture design has adapted to this and is now creating more fluid physical environments in which people can casually flop or shuffle about, while they are watching. It may seem trivial, but I think that dimension of home furnishing and the provision of particular forms of seating/lying areas for media consumption is really illuminating in throwing light on the implicit protocols of contemporary viewing practices. There’s a TV scholar based in Glasgow, called Amy Holdsworth, who has a book called On Living with Television (Holdsworth, 2021). It’s really interesting because as it happens, she had a disabled sister when she was growing up who she spent a lot of time looking after. The sister wasn’t very mobile, so that involved them spending an unusually large amount of time watching television together. That experience clearly made her alert to the fundamental ways in which television becomes inscribed in domestic life. It’s not just that you watch certain programmes at particular times – it’s more that in certain circumstances TV becomes a key resource around which life is structured and planned. It’s important to insert it back into the materiality of the space and of the structure of the household. To go back to the gender issue, it was that Bourdieu diagram of the Berber house, the one from his ethnography with the Kabyle (Bourdieu, 1970), that first alerted me to the relationship between the divisions of domestic space and the use of technologies and the gendered performance of tasks. That opens up a great deal of potential for domestication theory in this era, if we broaden it out beyond the television and think about all the different technologies in play now. That’s what we tried to do at Brunel in the HICT project and, that’s exactly what I think is so interesting about Sarah Pink’s contemporary anthropological work on domestic technologies (Pink, 2019; Pink et al., 2017). She offers a detailed and sensitive analysis of the little domestic rituals in which specific electrical items are routinely switched on and off by particular family members at regular points in the day or at night. In doing so, she demonstrates very well just how wide a range of technologies is now closely woven into our home lives and how much our domestic routines are constituted and regulated by them. Once one grasps this, it follows that contemporary domestication analysis clearly needs to study media usage within the context of the full range of technologies in the house. It’s essential to take that on board because nowadays the domestic environment itself is so much more penetrated 77

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by technology. If you buy a house nowadays, the house itself is technologised and you are, in part, paying a price set by its degree/speeds of techno-connectivity. MH: Let me turn to some books of yours: on the one hand, Media, Modernity and Technology

(Morley, 2007), on the other, Communications and Mobility (Morley, 2017). To remind myself, I flicked through the list of keywords and was surprised to see that home doesn’t appear therein (only ‘housing in containers’). One could think that you’ve moved away from the home and instead moved into broader spaces, which also links to the aforementioned ‘materialist, non-media-centric media studies’ (Morley, 2009) (although the materialist always seems to get forgotten). But when I listen to you now, there seems to be a fascination with the home. Maybe it’s a way of being fascinated, but nonetheless broadening it out? There seems to have been a move of some kind? DM: There was a notion of home that was important for me right from the early 70s when I discovered that Bourdieu diagram that I mentioned earlier. We had hoped to incorporate that dimension of things into the Nationwide project (Morley, 1980), but we didn’t get the funding to do that. The next book, Family Television, focused principally on those domestic issues at a micro scale (Morley, 1986). That trajectory was what then led me into the Home Territories project, where I began to see how you could talk about home both at micro- and macro-levels; about the domestic household and the nation (or indeed, a broader community such as Europe) as a symbolic ‘home’ (Morley, 2000). In terms of understanding the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, that was why I had earlier picked up on Mary Douglas’ notion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966). Her approach is marvellous, precisely because it can be applied at any level, whether it’s a ‘problem’ about mud in the bedroom, or people with the ‘wrong’ colour of skin in your suburb. The two subsequent books, Media, Modernity and Technology (Morley, 2007) and then Communications and Mobility (Morley, 2017), were where my focus shifted to macro-issues around technology and geopolitics. That was what those two books were about, as an exploration of cultural geographies and of the importance of material forms of transport, not just communications in the symbolic sense. But I never stopped being interested in the questions of media consumption. However, I also wanted to get those macro-issues in play, in order to then talk more effectively about the mobilities and immobilities of audiences, hence my complementary focus in that work, on various forms of migrancy alongside the modalities of domesticity. I also felt that I had to expand the range of technologies I was looking at, beyond the TV – especially in relation to the mobile phone, as it was such an important technological development of that period. Kevin Robins and I had spent a lot of time talking about globalisation in our Spaces of Identity book (Morley & Robins, 1995), but I had got very frustrated by the way that many people seemed to think that globalisation was just about email or satellite TV. Once I understood that globalisation was, in fact, principally about container shipping, as the basic form of the distribution of goods in the global supply chain, I realised that to understand the dynamics of globalisation better, I had to also consider questions of what had previously been dismissed as the relatively ‘unimportant’ discipline of transport geography. Of course, nowadays, after all the bottleneck/supply chain issues that disrupted things during COVID, people are much more conscious of those issues. When the container ships were stuck in the Suez Canal during that period, I found it quite amusing – it was as if I had BBC publicising my research topic for me, as the news about the dramas about what happens when 78

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maritime trade goes wrong was being broadcast non-stop. Now, because of those traumatic events, many more people are talking about the fragility of long-distance supply chains and the potential dangers of blockages in the global flow of commodities. They even now speak of the possible end of globalisation or maybe a post-global era and, of course, in terms of contemporary politics, we now see a corresponding world-wide retreat in all kinds of exclusionary nationalisms. What that all connected with for me was the rise of populism. Coming from Birmingham, as I do, which had one of the biggest Brexit votes in the UK, I’m very conscious of that de-industrialised area of the country as housing one of the most broken down, ‘left behind,’ disgruntled indigenous populations you’re going to find anywhere. Seeing how those people went through Brexit and seeing the rise of their exclusionary, anti-immigrant, Little England populism have been one of the main things I’ve been thinking about for several years now. All that has brought me back very much to that question of nationalist ideologies of ‘home’ in the macro sense that I first explored in Home Territories. That focus has, of course, been sharpened by seeing how powerfully a politician like Boris Johnson has been able to exploit those exclusionary themes in the UK. Then, once I started encountering the work that I was talking about earlier, by Amy Holdsworth and Cathy Johnson, about contemporary modes of media consumption, I began to see a way to link the micro- and macro-perspectives on issues about ‘home’ and return to some of the questions that I had been addressing in Family Television and in Home Territories from a more contemporary angle. If COVID had an upside, in my experience, it was that it made me re-think my own and other people’s media practices – and the place of different media technologies within our homes. In effect, it also forced us all into a kind of experimental mode, in terms of our own lifestyles. Because COVID restricted us to the physical home for so long, that meant that, in order to sustain any kind of sociability, we had to consider, in our own home lives, questions about the limitations and possibilities of virtual communication. I had been writing about globalisation and materiality and transport and communication for years, but in a way that was quite abstracted from my own life. The experience of COVID, in which we all suddenly were finding out how immigrants have been living for years, in terms of their usage of virtual modes of communication to stay in touch with geographically distant friends and family, was very illuminating in relation to how all those issues applied in my own life during that period, when we couldn’t even socialise directly with our next-door neighbours. However, I have to say, that period did have some positive sides to it. I haven’t been to so many interesting seminars based in different countries in the world for a long time. Now, of course, as a ‘virtualised’ practice, that has its limitations, because you just sit in on a formal seminar, without getting the opportunity to have an informal chat afterwards or go for a cup of coffee – when all the most interesting conversations happen, when you actually go to a conference. But, however, once it stopped mattering where people were coming from, people felt happy to invite other people from thousands of miles away to speak at their seminar with a more ‘adventurous’ kind of attitude. I participated in all kinds of discussions that I would have completely missed out on before, simply because they took place in countries I couldn’t easily get to, whether for reasons of time or expense. In a way I’ve found the whole COVID experience really interesting, treated as an academic media experiment in so far as it’s made me more thoroughly explore both the possibilities and the limits of virtual forms of communication within academia. MH: As a word of caution to our readers: we agreed here to not address the suffering that

the pandemic has obviously also caused, but concentrate on the question of media use. 79

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When I began to write the first version of the introduction to this book, I also kept thinking that I have to write about COVID, since it has obviously brought back this whole idea of the domestic. While the domestic is not necessarily about domestication, the questions ‘how do we live?’ and ‘how would we like to live?’ are prevalent. We, for example, have several neighbours who now decided to move to the countryside. This is a result of COVID. And other people have realised that they don’t want to travel to work anymore, they want to work from home. There’s a lot going on at the moment that really centres around this question of what is a home? And what makes it a good home? These are questions of individual life choices, but they are also embedded in the other questions you mentioned, about the nation and other versions of home. DM: These questions have been neglected for too long and even when they re-emerged in relation to what came to be called the question of work/life balance, their already long history was largely ignored. In relation to current debates about ‘working from home’ there is a great article by Cynthia Cockburn in a book called Consuming Technologies (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992), which was based on a conference held at Brunel during the HICT project in the late 1980s. Cynthia argued what was going to happen, technologically, was that work was going to make much more impact on the home than the home was ever going to make on work (Cockburn, 1992). Now in that context, I think that one of the most interesting transitions during the COVID period was the transition from describing what people were doing as ‘working from home’ to recognising it for what it actually was – people effectively converting one of their bedrooms into their office. That rephrasing better captured the way in which for many people, their home had become their office, and it just happened to also be where they slept. A couple of years ago, there had been talk about changing life/work balances, but I think all that needs to be considered much more seriously – in terms of the work-centred colonisation of domestic space. This has been a huge domestic transformation and it is not going to go away. The COVID experience shifted it on a gear and now we get all these ‘kickbacks’ from employers who now want their staff physically back in their offices. They talk a lot about the productive benefits of people actually being together in the office, in relation to ideas like the creative function of so-called ‘watercooler conversations.’ But that’s all very different, once an awful lot of people have realised that their work can, in fact, be done from home. So now you’ve got all these attempts set up by employers to technologically monitor home-working; using systems that monitor how much time you actually spend doing work-related tasks at the keyboard, as opposed to fiddling around on Google or YouTube or playing games. That raises crucial questions about what is left of any idea of domestic privacy, under these new conditions of technological surveillance. MH: Absolutely. In many ways I keep thinking about this notion of ‘home,’ partly because of COVID, but also because of this ‘homelessness’ research project that I’m currently conducting. DM: Yes, I very much like your phrasing as ‘roofless.’ I really like that. MH: I think it’s very important to keep that in mind. We are working with roofless people and I just spent time in a shelter last week doing some questionnaires with them. One of the interesting things on a ‘meta-method-level,’ is that you cannot do a questionnaire in this context without it turning into an interview, because many roofless people just want to talk. But one of the other things we keep observing, is the inability to stay connected due to the circumstances, so it is very difficult for roofless people to hold on to a phone number, for example. Actually, it extends to holding onto the phone 80

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itself, and therefore to the SIM-card and therefore to the phone number. So, this basic understanding of being reachable: they managed to invest in their (out)reach, but not in their reachability. But this desire to be connected is for the most part very strong; many roofless people we worked with want to reach out, they want to be connected. And one of the things that we originally naively thought, was that they want to use this phone to find work, to find housing, maybe to reach family and friends. And while all that was confirmed, the other desire many had – and much more so – was to be entertained (to watch television or films). And they found all sorts of ways to meet that desire; all sorts of ways of appropriation and expertise; just to be able to fulfil a very basic desire for entertainment (or for news, i.e. to stay informed). That has been very enlightening to me. This functional approach is partly there, but usage focuses on something much less goal-oriented. This returns me to that question whether this is also a version of ‘home’ or homing. DM: Isn’t that just another dimension of ontological security? It has to do with having reliable and familiar forms of mediated pleasure – and also simply having seen the film or programme that everybody is talking about. That is crucial in terms of social inclusion – so if you haven’t seen the latest media ‘event’ you are effectively excluded from the public conversation that it produces. It’s worth remembering Claus Dieter Rath’s credo that the motivation for much television watching is not to see a specific programme, but rather to be among those who have seen that programme and thus can talk together about it. Even if you’ve only just seen a glimpse of it, on somebody else’s smartphone, at least you then know what the new ‘thing’ looks like, when the other people in the homeless shelter are talking about it. Those are the minimal levels of consumption which are required for effective cultural citizenship, and I think it’s really illuminating to hear about those also being explicit concerns for people in that roofless/unsettled situation. Of course, their need for sources of practical information for their survival comes first – like having a phone number of their own, being reachable by others, as you put it, having an anchoring, a sort of a findability – those are terrible things to be deprived of. But that’s far from being the sum total of what people in that situation need: their exclusion is cultural and symbolic, as well as practical and material. MH: But connected to that is exactly that question, which I think applies to the roofless in an extreme, but also applies to lots of other precarious living situations that we see nowadays: the lack of the roof has the most extreme consequence for being able to accommodate, being able to domesticate in that sense that things cannot easily be kept. So, they show all these different notions of appropriation, but the appropriation does not continue. It keeps being interrupted, because the material questions are so big. There’s a tension between the understanding that obviously these people do appropriate these technologies in order to have some sort of entertainment and information and so on – as well as their bit of reachability… but then again, it slips away from them as soon as they don’t have this roof. Not all of them, but many of them just kind of lose that phone; it gets broken, it gets stolen, it gets sold. DM: Yes! If you’re begging in the street, and then you need to use the toilets and you leave your things for five minutes, when come back, the whole lot could have been taken… I once did a dialogue with Arjun Appadurai, who’d been doing work in India about homelessness and street people. He gave a very vivid description of the importance of a stable ‘place of rest’ for even the poorest of the people who migrate to the Indian cities from the countryside. The first thing they have to do, when they get to an area where they might want to stay, is to get in touch with whatever gang controls that street space. 81

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If you’re going to have a place where you are going to be able to keep your things, even if all you possess is two saucepans, two blankets and a cup, those things are precious to you. The gangs offer a service, it’s a protection racket: you pay them a certain amount of money and they will look after your space on the pavement and make sure nobody steals your saucepans and your blankets while you are off working or begging somewhere else. What the example points to is the notion that control over the physical space of ‘real estate’ is every bit as important at the bottom end of the housing scale as it is in a district like Mayfair in London; even roofless people need a reliable bit of pavement to call their own, where they can store their possessions, however meagre those might be. I think we need to know much more about those things you said about the skills that ‘roofless’ people develop – like realising that, if they’re going to get certain kinds of entertainment satisfactions from mobile technologies, they’re going to have to get hip with recording things and then deleting them quickly (to save the expense of memory storage space on their machine). Those are really critical skills and capacities that we don’t often recognise or talk about enough. MH: We’re currently thinking about writing the next application to continue the project

and a lot of that is around exactly those sorts of forms of appropriation, but also cultures of homelessness. This is not a new topic, but we’ve seen that there are so many different expressions of culture (or whatever you might want to call it) and I would like to acknowledge that and begin with this notion. It would be an attempt to move away from the media-centricity. At the moment, we’re still fairly media-centric in that project, in the sense that it centres around this understanding that ‘we hand out smartphones’ or we ask people about their media use. As so often though, it’s so much more than that: their media use is embedded in these other notions of making space or of making yourself heard or of being invisible. And often it is related to different cultures of rooflessness. It would be nice to be able to draw that out, rather than concentrating on the digital. But surely, the digital also plays an important role: it is an empowerment tool of sorts in certain moments, but it needs other things – such as Housing First – in order to be able to accommodate and appropriate properly. DM: You’re right. There’s a question about the power and effectivity of things in relation to their visibility. It’s all too easy to think that what is impactful or powerful, is necessarily that which is most visible. Actually, it’s often the invisible things, the things that you take for granted, like a constant electricity supply – that might actually be the most important thing. When I was trying to write my piece on non-media-centric approaches, various people seemed to think I was trying to say that the media aren’t important! That’s not what I was saying at all. But I am saying that the manner and the modality of the media’s importance is often indirect and is mediated through various banal and relatively invisible assumptions and infrastructures. To take a different example, Lynn Spigel’s work about television shows photographs from as early as 1948 in the USA, where you see that already, there are homes that have been built for the ‘returning heroes’ from after WWII in which the television was already built into the wall (Spigel, 2001). Now we’re into a whole other thing with Bill Gates et al. and that more recent discussion of the ‘wired house’ – but they are just two different, inter-connected stages in one long story about domesticating media, not some entirely new ‘revolutionary’ idea. I think the idea of the house as itself a medium provides a very rich 82

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way to think about all that. But also, we have to attend to the materiality of the house, the way its rooms are continually being redesigned to accommodate new technologies. If you try living in an old house with all your new mobile technologies, you quickly find that the wiring system just wasn’t built to provide enough plugs to re-charge everyone’s batteries regularly enough. Hence, we have to think about the effect of house/room design and room organisation on technology uses, along with the way in which, as I was saying earlier, things like furniture design are also adapting to new practices of media consumption and technology use. When Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch and I were beginning to think about domestication, it was Daniel Miller’s work in a little article, ‘Appropriating the State on a Council Estate’ (1988), that we started from. It provided a very detailed observation of the ways in which different people in the same block of council flats in London had transformed their kitchens so as to make them ‘their own.’ That is a particular notion of domestication, of it being a process of ‘making it mine.’ Clearly, a standardised form of accommodation like a block of public council flats gives you the most extreme example because those are completely standardised units. They are all the same size; each unit is of the same shape and design. There’s a particular premium there, for people to want to change that, so as to inhabit their home in a way that makes it more particularly feel their own. The beauty of Miller’s model was that it managed to link the micro and the macro: it linked the whole question of the provision of public housing to the way in which, within that, people wanted to differentiate their flat from Mrs. Jones’ flat next door. This differentiation process was often very simple, like them having different coloured doors and cupboards, but by focusing on those seemingly micro-issues, Miller also revealed a crucial dimension of the macro-issue concerning the power relations of the client/tenant to the state. MH: This reminds me of a picture book about typical GDR flats. It was a project that two

photographers did a few years after the wall came down (Hopf & Meier, 2001). In East-Germany, you had the ‘Plattenbau,’ a sort of standardised newly built GDR architecture, easily assembled. The authors went into the living rooms of the people living in these buildings and took pictures of the rooms from exactly the same angle every time. It’s a fascinating book of exactly what you were saying, of the differences in the interpretation of what this room could be, although it’s architecturally the same room. The furniture was also somewhat standardised, so you didn’t have that much choice but nonetheless it’s different each time. And then again there are those small bits of similarity that are also fascinating; exactly this question of ‘do you have a television or don’t you and if you do have one, where is it?’ comes to mind. Because that was in the 1990s, so it’s definitely still TV time. The differences, but also the slight patterns emerging are quite fascinating. To come back to the early domestication project, there’s one question that I would still like to pose, which is this question of conservatism that’s been asked around the idea of domestication. It was Andrew Feenberg, who wrote a critique in 1999 of the domestication approach as being, in his words, ‘too cozy.’ He accuses the approach of being conservative as sort of ‘conserving’ in the sense that the moral economy of the household and the ontological security are described as processes of technology being made less aggressive, this taming idea, that technology is sort of taken on board and thereby ‘calmed down.’ But his accusation is that the domestication approach doesn’t see the potential in media, the potential to disrupt, the potential to speak back into the public and so on. 83

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Roger Silverstone actually answered this challenge in his 2006 piece and admits that there might be something in this accusation. He actually ends his reflections about domestication with musings about this integration aspect of it. Maybe there is some kind of ‘smoothing out’ in this process of appropriation. I’ve been struggling with this for a long time, because in some sense that’s the same struggle as with ontological security: maybe there is a need to smoothen out; maybe everyday life has a necessity to oppose too much disruption as causing instability. How would you live your everyday life with too much upheaval? I think that’s why R.D. Laing’s work is also interesting in terms of the question what happens to you when you can’t rely on this idea of waking up and thinking ‘I know the world, I understand what’s around me.’ In some sense then, Feenberg’s accusation is wrong or rather misunderstands basic human needs in a way. Then again, I’m still intrigued by this idea of the question of how much does domestication actually push away some of the abilities to disrupt and therefore create something new? And maybe there is a process of making it too much your own and in that sense also letting the Other not come too close. So, there is that struggle that I’m dealing with, and I was just wondering what do you think of that? DM: To address that topic from another, contemporary angle, let me just go back for a

moment to our earlier discussion, when I was talking about the Cynthia Cockburn piece on work and home technologies, written 35 years ago. Over the last six months, I examined a couple of Australian PhDs done during the COVID period. Both of them were picking up on gender questions, concerning the burden that had fallen on mothers in Australian families, once home schooling was introduced. Just like in most countries in the world, once home-schooling came in, it was the mother in the family who usually supervised it. What I realised was that, in a historical perspective, there’s a useful connection there to Althusser’s early work on the relationship between the family and the education system as agents of socialisation. In one of his early essays, Althusser talks about the school as an ideological apparatus of the state – as a form of political control and ideological transmission. It became apparent in these PhDs about the introduction of digitalised home-schooling in Australia, that it was a close parallel to the process of the invasion of the office into the home that we were discussing earlier. So, just as we might say that you now ‘sleep in your office’ rather than you ‘work in your home,’ the process of home-schooling, in the way that it was mobilised during COVID, went some way to (temporarily) converting the family (as a substitute for the school) into functioning as an ideological apparatus of the state. Althusser himself talked about the family as always being, to some extent, an ideological apparatus of the state – which manifestly was far too crude. But at the point at which the home was being required to do the educational work of the school, his theory was much applicable. So, the newly wired-up digital home is being transformed not just by the penetration of working life, but also of schooling life, in so far as it becomes a space for digitalised home-schooling. That’s potentially a massively important transformation of the role of the household with, apart from anything else, profound ramifications for gendered parenting roles and for the notion of domestic privacy and the boundary between the private home and the territories (whether actual or virtual) controlled by the state. MH: And it becomes actualised right now in the Ukrainian question: we have had quite a few people fleeing to Germany, the influx is large, especially here in Berlin. As one obvious consequence, there’s been the question of schooling. The schools here in Berlin offered to take these children in and initially there was a huge debate on whether we 84

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still put these children into ‘welcome classes’ or whether you put them straight into existing classes. Then suddenly, the Ukraine intervened, saying that they didn’t agree with Ukrainian pupils being put into German schools. The reasons for this were for one that the German standard with regard to education is seen as worse; second of all, the Ukrainian students could ‘go to school’ remotely, so they can actually stay in their own school system. It’s happening both ways now: some are visiting German schools, others are studying remotely. They are actually managing to keep it up despite the war, which makes me pose the question ‘how do they do that?’ DM: That is very interesting, the Ukrainian state taking that position of not wanting their (infant) citizens moved into German schools and socialised as German, rather than Ukrainian. Their national state evidently wants them to remain on (virtual) Ukrainian cultural territory, in pedagogical terms (even though geographically, they have left the boundaries of the nation) as a kind of educational diaspora, rather than risk having them absorbed by the German system. MH: Yes, and it is especially interesting how it will develop. Some part of it might be driven by the idea that the war is over within five weeks or so, which is obviously what we all hope for, but we know it isn’t going to be that way. It is also a strange intervention into these affairs, so the invitation of opening our schools were sort of shut down quite quickly. Our conversation continued for a while after this. We briefly discussed possible limitations of our understandings of the domestic environments and actions that are being researched. When, for example, domestic viewing activities in the early domestication approach ignored possible outside viewing, this was (rightly) criticised (Tufte, 2006; see also Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen in this book). We also touched upon the possible Eurocentrism of the domestication approach, which, e.g., Brian Larkin’s work helps to broaden and extend (Larkin, 2008). What happens if you take away the assumptions that those of us living in richer, better-resourced nations in the global North can make (e.g., about having things like reliable electricity systems)? Eventually, our conversation came to a (temporary) end. The final sentence here, however, will be a quote from this conversation, where David Morley said (and I can only agree): ‘I think that research into the future relationship of variously mobile homes and precariously connected technologies will require a very complex form of algebra, the outlines of which I think we have, thus far, only just begun to imagine!’

Notes 1 https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cpc/ourprojects/routes/. 2 Ann Gray, Video Playtime (1992).

References Bausinger, H. (1990) Folk Culture in a World of Technology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bausinger, H. (1984) ‘Media, technology and daily life,’ Media, Culture and Society, 6 (4), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378400600403 Bourdieu, P. (1970) ‘The Berber house or the world reversed,’ Social Science Information, 9 (2), 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847000900213 Cockburn, C. (1992) ‘The circuit of technology: Gender, identity and power,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming Technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London & New York: Routledge, 18–25.

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David Morley and Maren Hartmann Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Praeger Publishers. Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology, London & New York: Routledge. Gray, A. (1992) Video Playtime: The Gendering of Leisure Technology, London: Routledge. Hill, A., Hartmann, M. and Andersson, M. (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities, London: Routledge. Holdsworth, A. (2021) On Living with Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hopf, S. and Meier, N. (2001) Plattenbau privat: 60 Interieurs, 4th ed., Berlin: Nicolai Verlag. Klocke, V. (2022) Mediale Häuslichkeiten. Logiken und Strategien von Fernsehen in Haushalten der Gegenwart, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hildesheim. Larkin, B. (2008) Signal and Noise. Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Lodziak, C. (1986) The Power of Television: A Critical Appraisal, London: Francis Pinter Publishers. Lull, J. (1988) World Families Watch Television, London: Sage. Miller, D. (1988) ‘Appropriating the state on the Council Estate,’ Man, 23 (2), 353–372. https://doi. org/10.2307/2802810 Morley, D. (2017) Communications and Mobility. The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Morley D. (2009) ‘For a materialist, non-media-centric media studies,’ Television & New Media, 10 (1): 114–116. Morley D. (2007) Media, Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New, London: Routledge. Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories. Media, Mobility and Identity, London: Routledge. Morley, D. (1986) Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia. Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience, London: BFI. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity. Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, London: Routledge. Pink, S. (2019) ‘Afterword: Electricity as inspiration: Towards indeterminate interventions,’ in S. Abram, B.R. Winthereik and T. Yarrow (eds.) Electrifying Anthropology. Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures, London: Bloomsbury, 201–208. Pink, S., Leder Mackley, K., Moroşanu, R., Mitchell, V. and Bhamra, T. (2017) Making Homes: Ethnography and Design, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (eds.) (1992) Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse. Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tufte, T. (2006) ‘Televisione, modernitá e vita quotidiana: Intorno all’opera di Roger Silverstone messa a confronto con diversi contesti culturali,’ in A. De Simone and F. D’Andrea (eds.) La vita che c’é…, Vol. 2, Milan: Edizioni FrancoAngeli, 197–218.

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6 THE DARK SIDE OF DOMESTICATION? INDIVIDUALIZATION, ANXIETIES AND FOMO CREATED BY THE USE OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES Tem Frank Andersen and Peter Vistisen Within media studies, cultural studies and studies of the social construction of technology (SCOT), the development of the theory of domestication brought forth a strong voice for the audiences and the users of media and technology (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992; Moores, 1993; Ling, 2004, 2008; Berker et al., 2006; Andersen & Jensen, 2015). The idea was that the ideological power of the “discourse” embedded in or afforded in both the artefacts and the flow of content was not able to infuse dominant ideology in everyday life and the people living in it and living it. It may be argued whether or not the theory of domestication de facto represents or equals an empowerment of families and individuals. A study of domesticating the mobile phone demonstrates that domestication is to some point ambivalent (Andersen & Jensen, 2015). This means that it may function as an empowerment, but this aspect is normative. As Roger Silverstone claims in his article Domesticating domestication. Reflections on the life of a concept, questions about power relations and the deep interest in affecting the consumers may have been left not quite answered (Silverstone, 2006). But is domestication truly a shield or a regulating “power” to help individuals and households wave off or navigate in the intense flow of information and content “knocking” on the door of the moral economy of the household? In this chapter, we will try to answer some of these questions theoretically. Our interest is to explore the aptly named “dark side” of domestication. With this, we intend to shed light on the unintended and unexpected aspects of domesticating media and technology in everyday life. Some of these aspects can be labelled “anxieties” and even “fears.” These aspects are quite different from the notion of “narcosis” or the anaesthetic effects induced by the use of media technologies described by Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan, 1964). For McLuhan, the use of media technology extends particular parts of the human system of perception by “dulling” other senses and parts of that system. Our claim is that part of the “dark side” of domestication is a sharpening, not a dulling of the senses, which, in turn, strains the sense of self and identity through a hyper-focus on the behaviour afforded by the media technology. Even though the research literature on “fear of missing out” (or FoMO) is still limited, the case of FoMO shall serve as an example of the “dark side” of domestication. It has been

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-9

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indicated that “heavy” daily use of social media creates a mental state of stress nurtured by a heightened reflection on all the knowledge and all the events that might have been important for the individual in order to create a “preferred identity” (Hunt et al., 2018; Milyavskaya et al., 2018). But if an individual experiences unease and anxieties interacting with media technologies, then what components of domestication have made this state of self possible or rather have failed to encounter and “tame” the flow of information and the interactive features of media technology? It is our claim that the “dark side” of domestication is created in the interplay between the individual and institutional contexts (e.g., the household and the home) due to unresolved or unresolvable issues (with needs, attitudes, routines and habits), related to conflict and consensus (Pantzar, 1997; Andersen & Jensen, 2015). Or, in the terminology of cultural studies, the dominated and oppositional “coding” processes of domestication are unable to create a clear or operational fix (Hall, 1973). Individualization can be part of the explanation for this, but maybe it can also be explained by a reversion of Raymond Williams’ notion of “mobile privatization” (Williams, 1974: 18), namely a cultural state in which the private is not mobile, but the other way around and evoking an ambivalence, an insecurity what to do and how to act with media technology when being “outside” of the home. This implies a state that could be labelled “private mobilization” (Andersen & Jensen, 2015).

Being in a state of private mobilization: domestication and individualization In this chapter, it makes little sense to list the diverse academic insights into the definition of domestication and the different models this work has spawned. However, for the purpose of supporting the argument of the “dark side” of domestication, two interpretations of this work need to be presented. It must be noted that the argument or critique of the domestication theory only considers the Anglo-Saxon version and not other versions within the total perspective of the field (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Birkland, 2013; Hargreaves & Wilson, 2017). The first model is inspired by the moral economy of the household approach (MEH) as proposed in a seminal work by Roger Silverstone, Leslie Haddon, David Morley, Maren Hartmann, Knut H. Sørensen and Thomas Berker et al. (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992; Morley, 2000; Berker et al., 2006; Haddon, 2006; Hartmann, 2020). In this approach, the domestication is

Figure 6.1 The authors’ interpretation of the moral economy of the household approach to domestication

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a complex process in which the uses and meanings of specific media technologies are being cultivated to fit into the institutional life and practices of the household (Figure 6.1). The distinction between the public and the private spheres is part of many studies of media and technology. The notion of “in-between” or the liminal is well established in anthropological academic work on rituals or the practice of how to deal with transformations, be it changes, transformations, conflicts or crisis (Turner, 1982, 2009). The addition of the liminal space in the concept of domestication is new in the sense that it has not been explicitly addressed in studies of domestication and the use of media technology. In relation to the moral economy of the household, this in-between space marks not a direct challenge to the habitus or habits of the household. But it does indicate an element intrinsic to the process of domestication. What this means is that in the liminal space, the moral economy of the household is confronted with limits that may lead to new understandings, new insights that need to be considered in the moral economy of the household. This interpretation of domestication has added the element of realization as part of the in-between space so that the element of imagination is linked to that of realization. The theoretical point is to include reflexivity in the process of domestication so that conversion is not just a production of discourse about “how we use smart phones or ubiquitous media technology in our home” legitimized by the concrete elements of the moral economy (e.g., duty before pleasure), but rather a result of experiences with concrete media technologies weighing imagination (“the smartphone gives you freedom”) and realization (“the smartphone introduces too many choices”). Now, the in-between sphere may prove useful to understand the negotiation of the uses and meanings of media technologies such as smartphones, applications and even computer games. The in-between sphere points to a structural element that creates a gap in establishing a moral economy. Later, it will be argued that if domestication fails to deal with or if domestication actually contributes to the generation of FoMO, these aspects are of importance. It is vital to stress that the basis of this model is built on the notion of asymmetry, inspired by the work of cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (Hall, 1973). Hall proposed with his work that any mediated relation and interaction is asymmetric. But Hall’s focus was on the asymmetry between professional market institutions (like press media, corporations and businesses) and the private institutions (like the family, the community, the young couple and the household). The asymmetry was not considered to be part of the decoding practices within the institutions. Instead of reproducing an asymmetry of power and negotiation within the household, the notion of the in-between space marks another kind of asymmetry, one in which household practices open to new ways of interaction with the public and in relations to others. But it is also an asymmetry that leaves the household and the moral economy “vulnerable” to or rather “ripe” for unforeseen elements and impacts of new media technology. Besides the point of the in-between sphere, some other points are of interest in relation to the “dark side” problem. One of them concerns objectification and incorporation aspects in the private sphere. The moral economy of the household maybe informs or even dictates the “proper way” to organize the use of media technology in a kind of “under our roof ” manner. But as studies have demonstrated, adolescents do not consider parents or parental guidelines in relation to media technologies to be adequate due to the generational gap (Andersen, 2005). This will be elaborated later in relation to Margaret Mead’s notion of figuration (Mead, 1970). But the key element to consider is exactly what James Lull demonstrated in his media ethnographic work on “family television” and the transformation and the diversification of the family (Lull, 1988, 1990, 1995). In other words, what if domestication is a practice in which generations and even the individual partners do not share the same understanding of issues in relation to the use of media technology, and further that the process of domestication 89

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happens within a discourse pointing to an “inequality” of technological competence across age differences and generations? The discourse “adults as digital immigrants” is well supported by, e.g., Schultz Hansen’s work on generation Alpha (Hansen, 2011). This is a challenge to the moral economy model, even if this gap between digital natives and digital immigrants is changing. This change is relevant to the study of domestication of media technology but will not be addressed further here. In order to understand and to argue for a dark side of domestication, we have included a second conceptual model which is labelled the individualization model (Pantzar, 1997). What this model does, is to elaborate on the asymmetries of the institution on an individual level (Figure 6.2). This model proposes that the relations between the institution (as a group) and the individual are always charged with the duality of conflict and consensus. Following Hall (1973), the notion of negotiation is key for understanding how living everyday domestic life is not totally unbearable. Compromises are made through negotiations, but in relation to the question of FoMO, this model opens a further gap in establishing a moral ground with which to use media technologies and navigate in a complex ecology of media technologies. Of particular interest is the axis of the individual’s directedness. The notion of inner- and other-directedness has been observed in media sociology as well as in cultural psychology (Andersen, 2005). This directedness has to do with how the individual, to use the terms of the first model, imagines and practises the potentials and the pitfalls of particular media technologies, and based on that determines a strategy to cope with media technologies, such as social media and smartphone applications. Theoretically, inner-directedness is a strategy that works to create a safe space in which control or lack of it is not an issue. Inner-directedness focuses on the well-being and the possibility to reproduce an individual status quo. Otherdirectedness, however, focuses on grasping the possibility of expansion (or learning) and seeking out that which is not familiar, but could be desirable and developing. These two forms of directedness are linked both to the ontological security in the domestication model (“this is my base”) and to the moral economy (“this is my map to navigate my everyday interaction with media technology”). Now, this balance or negotiation is not an easy job, as will be explained later. As mentioned above, studies of media ethnography have documented that households can be of different types. James Lull documented with his media ethnographic work that families can be either traditional or object-oriented (Lull, 1990). But today many societies (especially welfare states) acknowledge up to 37 forms of families or primary socialization institutions (Denmark’s Statistics, 2013). This of course presents a problem with establishing a “code” or a moral economy with which to navigate and participate in a complex media technology ecology. Once again, the point to be made is that the

Figure 6.2

The authors’ interpretation of the individualization model of domestication

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process of negotiating a proper or adequate way to domesticate any media technology is no easy task. It can be considered very precarious. At the heart of this precariousness is the issue of generation gaps. Even though the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead predates the emergence of the current media technologies in question, Mead offers a way of understanding why domestication as a process of negotiation is complex (Mead, 1970). This insight is relevant in relation to the dichotomy of digital natives and digital immigrants, which have been important concepts within the current discourse on digital generation gaps. The key concept in Mead’s understanding of generation gaps is figuration. A figuration is a deep rooted and taken-for-granted model of how to transfer or to share knowledge from one generation to the next. This of course is relevant to the moral economy of the household precisely because figuration deals with what to value and where to look for guidance and inspiration. Mead proposes three modes of figuration: the post-figurative mode, the co-figurative mode and the pre-figurative mode. In the post-figurative mode, tradition is key. This means that problems in everyday life are solved by looking at how similar problems have been dealt with by former generations. This mode of figuration is based on an understanding of continuity. What we try to deal with in relation to media technology now can be resolved or informed by looking to the past. Mead acknowledges that tradition and past knowledge are important, but she also stresses that the condition of modern everyday life challenges the tradition especially if the hope is democratization and more respect for the individual. Mead’s second mode of figuration is co-figuration. This mode emerges in societies and domestic contexts in which other institutions than the family (or the state) become central in everyday life. Schools and education are such institutions, but also popular culture. In the co-figurative mode, the voice of peers (e.g., classmates and friends) provides advice on how to deal with issues in everyday life. In this mode, tradition is viewed as insufficient to help or inform choices not only, but also in relation to media technology, and how to deal with content, actions and beliefs. The final mode of figuration ­ proposed by Mead is pre-figuration. Mead uses the metaphor of the infant to describe this state of figuration. The infant is not-formed, but in some sense “shapable.” The infant is “pure,” not affected by tradition or the need to consult peers to make choices. The infant is somehow free, not ideologically imbued, but it also represents a mode of figuration that does not distrust tradition or disapproves the experience of peers, but accepts that everyday life is contingent (Andersen, 2005). An interpretation of Mead’s work can be that Mead wanted to accept more playfulness, and to understand the dealings with everyday life in a more open manner. In this sense, Mead proposes that the problems of figuration, and particularly in relation to domestication, need to be met with an openness. Our point is that this openness is key to understanding the problem of the dark side of domestication. Being a household in a mode of pre-figuration is a challenge. The point here is that the theory of domestication in both versions is confronted with the problem of how a household is defined, and more importantly how its practices in relation to media technology are to be understood. The notion of pre-figuration is precisely connected to the workings of the in-between sphere and the conflict/consensus problem of the individualization model of domestication presented above. But how does this translate into the study of the domestication of social media technology as an important media technology of our times?

Fear of missing out: the case and some trajectories In this section, FoMO1 will be explained by mapping waves and changing meanings of this elusive phenomenon. The point is not to present FoMO as an exclusive dysfunctional response to the use of media technology in general and social media in particular. But FoMO 91

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is an issue to consider in relation to understanding how media technology (in both form and content) creates modes of uses and meanings that possibly challenge the stabilizing force of domestication not because of technological affordances but because of the moral economy of the household. In a report on Fear of Missing Out, published by the JWTIntelligence organization, the phenomenon is defined as follows: Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out – that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you. FOMO may be a social angst that’s always existed, but it’s going into overdrive thanks to real-time digital updates and to our constant companion, the smartphone. (Berelowitz, 2012: 4) The report frames the phenomenon as something that needs to be considered critically in relation to social media. In the report, FoMO is explained as something that the generation of millennials both suffer from and worry about. The almost endless flow of texting about what others are doing, what they are buying and what they now know that you do not know yourself is creating a sensation of panic. FoMO is also explained as a form of autocommunication that social media only fuels, but never encourages to slow down, leading to a constant present (“what happens now is the most important thing to mind and take action on”), and often accelerates an anxiety for making the wrong choice or prioritization (Alt et al., 2018). At the heart of FoMO lies an experienced loss of individual control, both of what actions to choose, what to prefer and prioritize in the flow of opportunities, and finally a loss of control of how to create a sense of identity and personal integrity. However, what this professional report does not consider is the human ability to adapt to conditions cognitively, culturally and in relation to awareness. Further, the report does not consider that the “condition” can change or “mutate” into other forms both due to this human ability and transformations in domestication in all the three spheres, i.e. the public, the private and the in-between (Figure 6.1). In the following overview, a series of waves of FoMO is presented to illustrate the point that transformations of this particular phenomenon have occurred, and that domestication may have played a part in both negative and positive ways (Figure 6.3). This proposed overview of the different waves of FoMO is an interpretation of professional, academic and public life discourses. This overview does not clarify whether FoMO represents a case of continuity or discontinuity. Is FoMO the result of global developments in economy, sociality and culture? The relevant question in relation to the topic of this contribution is: How can the study of domestication deal with FoMO? How can it explain or fail to explain why FoMO challenges the “decoding” practices of taming new media technologies in relation to values (such as needs, wishes, duties, obligations and responsibilities)? As the overview indicates, the problem with domestication is to be found in the in-between and the private spheres. If millennials as the dominating segment of users experience a state of panic, it may be explained as a problem with balancing imagination (desires, needs, preferred sense of self ) and realization (where to go, whom to be with, what to strive to know). Another part of the explanation can be that the use of social media and of the software of particular media technology is not informed by any clear model for objectification and incorporation. Maybe if social media applications were not placed on the first interface page

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Wave

Observations and problem

First 2000s

What a terrible feeling! Physical and mental unease amongst university students, experiences of attention difficulties and loss of control. Not a clinical diagnosis, rather at term trying to identify something new in users’ attitudes and self-perception in relation to online life and social media. FoMO is linked to procrastination but is linked even more to taking part in socially desirable events and overbooking personal calendars. Early studies indicate that FoMO has a marketing potential in strategic communication.

Second 2010s

Diagnosis and institutionalization! Clinical psychology acknowledges FoMO (e.g., Przybylski et al., 2013), and links it to widespread stress and problems with motivation (attention disorders like ADHD). FoMO is compared to addictive behaviour (e.g., ludomania) and conditions of phobia. In news media FoMO was adopted at the level of news media segments (e.g., In Case You Missed It, which translates into a practise of using old content to trigger the readers’ anxiety of not being in the know or informed of what the press media has curated).

Third 2018 and on

Lifestyle and normalization? FoMO had become part of everyday life discourse, a concept functioning like a self-help “diagnosis” (e.g. “Ah, maybe I have FoMO”) as argued by e.g. Alt et al. (2018). Software developers and SME businesses implement features in media technologies (screen time, break notifications), but these features are not presented up front, only to be used at the discretion of the user. FoMO is identified as the driver of the experience economy (in the competition for consumers’ attention). In press media, content is increasingly presented with the meta communicative label “expected reading time.” FoMO is identified as an ambivalent response to the loss of control (over flow of time and information), despite the promise that media technology can support and enforce personal control (e.g., just one place to look, problems can be solved by a few clicks).

Future?

Figure 6.3

Toxicity or existentiality, or both?

Overview of the waves of FoMO from 2000s and on (authors’ own construction)2

of the smartphone, and maybe if the notification functions were set to a certain time frame, the panic of FoMO could be avoided. But this regulation needs to be learned. If this part of the value system of the household is to be learned, it has to be something that is explicitly negotiated. However, the conversion of domestication may very well have been a factor for the changes in the discourse of FoMO. Conversion is of course not just stories of our victories and mastery over social media technology, but also our worries. And it may very well be that the accumulated distress and panic have changed the very modes of conversion in relation to social media technology. In accordance with the principle of reflexivity as central to individualization we – or certain segments of users – talk differently about their media uses and habits, thus forcing or enabling the media ecology to respond.

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If we turn to the individualization model of domestication to understand FoMO, this model indicates another explanation why domestication may be challenged by the use of social media technology. In this model, the dimension of public and private is not the issue (how and what we communicate in public about the uses of media technology in our household and how this use is organized), but the issue is rather the problem of creating a balance between the other- and inner-directedness in the individual dimension. This problem can be understood parallel to the in-between sphere (imagination, realization) in the moral economy model. This can be translated into situations where social media technology offers a mode of ubiquitous connectivity to a moral economy that organizes and practises connectivity in a non-ubiquitous manner. The individualization model points out that the attempt to resolve the conflict/consensus problem is increased because the preferred mode of social media technology is other-directedness. Turning to inner-directedness may very well serve as a valued user position in the household (the institution), but this creates conflicts in relation to the overall practice of using social media technology. The point here is not that domestication theory is flawed because it lacks an understanding of psychology and psychological mechanisms. The point is that domestication theory does not explain the workings of these particular asymmetries and negotiations even though they are at the heart of domestication.

Discomforts and continuity: domestication and reflexive modernity Previously, it has been claimed that domestication theory does not avoid addressing the social and cultural significance of reflexive modernity and of generation gaps (Silverstone, 2006; Andersen & Jensen, 2015; Syvertsen, 2017). This is not the place to explain reflexive modernity theory in detail. But a key point in reflexive modernity theory is that the solutions to societal, cultural, institutional and individual problems in themselves constitute what defines and further complicates the problem (Giddens, 1990, 1991; Beck, 1992; Bauman & Donskis, 2013). In the case of FoMO, social media technology was (albeit not exclusively) designed and developed to support social interaction and relations, but as it turns out, this also complicated problems of social interaction and relations. Instead of just making social relations stronger, deeper and social interaction more easily accessible and ubiquitous, it also made these more precarious and problematic. From this perspective, solutions or practices of the moral economy of the household have inverted on themselves. This inversion is our definition of the discomfort of domestication. The notion of discomfort is by far something new in studies of media and technology. In this section, only some examples are mentioned in order to support the claim that discomforts in relation to media technology can be considered a case of continuity. FoMO may be exclusively linked to the emergence of social media technology, but as a discomfort it has several predecessors. Even though it has been more than half a century since Marshall McLuhan published the ideas of the numbing effect of the use of media technology and the state of individual narcosis following, the ideas are still relevant today. McLuhan introduces the idea that when we use media technology, we experience that we get a grip on the world. We learn what is happening in places we have no access to, and we experience being able to act in ways we did not have entry to earlier (e.g., claiming to have a voice and be part of institutions in new ways). But in the moment we experience (McLuhan would call it “perceive”) getting a grip, the media technology also gets a grip on us. McLuhan further claims that getting free of this grip is painful. This can be translated into this scenario: What would a college student (millennial) or a parent (boomer) respond to the advice to delete the Facebook, Twitter or 94

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TikTok user account? We claim that users of both generations would decline and explain that too much personal time and effort have been invested in maintaining and interacting with the social media technology and in doing so will constitute some sort of loss of self. The discomfort stems from an anxiety for not being connected, not being part of what is happening in the relevant social circles, or simply the FoMO on potential significant events that support the individual narrative of identity. But the discomfort also stems from the experience that interacting with media technology can be stressful. Sherry Turkle’s work dates back almost as long as Marshall McLuhan’s. Turkle’s work on computer technology is based on the psychoanalytical premise that emotions and sense of self are key to understanding why users choose to interact with and domesticate new media technologies (Turkle, 1984, 1997, 2010, 2015). In Turkle’s work, the concept of evocation is key to understanding why we interact with computers, games, the internet, smartphones and social media technologies. It is possible to trace a development in Turkle’s work from the early studies of how computers enable us to reflect our humanity and identity, to the later studies of how media technology traps us into settling for less and transforming our expectations of the values of social interaction and togetherness. In her later work, Turkle stresses the emergence of anxieties. This notion of anxiety can be translated into a state of mind (or subjectivity) in which we crave intimacy (be with me), but also prefer to keep everything and everybody at a distance (Turkle, 2015). In relation to the individualization model, this can be interpreted as an unresolved conflict between inner- and other-directedness. Now, neither McLuhan nor Turkle consider domestication (although Turkle frequently mentions examples of “learning at home”), and as such they can be understood to subscribe to technological determinism. But they both share a notion of discomfort created by the uses and meanings of media technology. Where McLuhan’s and Turkle’s notion of discomfort indicate unpleasant impacts in the uses of media technology, the work of Trine Syvertsen claims that the discomforts are indeed toxic (Syvertsen, 2017, 2020). Syvertsen demonstrates with her studies that users in fact negotiate differently and respond in opposition to (to use Stuart Hall’s term) the presence and availability of media technology. What Syvertsen documents is a particular conversion and oppositional practice: the formation of communities or institutions that seek to domesticate media technology by rejecting or banishing them from the household as a principle (see also Karlsen in this book). However, Syvertsen also points to the fact that this politics of critical media use is ambivalent. Even though abstinence is advocated as a way to counter the toxicity in the use of social media technology, the practice of saying no to media technology still includes the use of media technology to mobilize collective resistance and to reclaim personal agency. In media studies, this practice is observed as activating and employing coping tactics (Hartley & Schwartz, 2020). This can be translated into Hall’s notion of the negotiated decoding practice. But employing coping tactics and negotiation presumes a strong awareness of what is going on behind the interface of media technology. This premise is something that McLuhan, Turkle and Syvertsen all share. As users, we may be aware of the symptoms of discomfort, but we are not really aware of the fundamental mechanisms of media technology. In domestication terms, the discomfort refers to a problem of incorporation and conversion in the moral economy, and not least the cultural imagination of the potentials and the pitfalls of media technology. How are we to incorporate media technology that seems to challenge the way we organize our everyday life? How are we to talk and share our problems with media technology if the channels themselves are part of the creation of discomfort? And how can we imagine living with specific and yet convergent media technology if our 95

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common cultural imagination is clouded by the use of the media technology? As pointed out earlier, FoMO may serve as a case to support this claim of discomfort being a consequence of domestication. In the next section, we will elaborate on this discomfort by examining a case of FoMO not created from an inner-directed private sphere, but rather from the other-directed public sphere.

Domesticating risks and anxieties: the COVID-19 press media and infection-tracking app Ulrich Beck (1992), Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) and Zygmunt Bauman (Bauman & Donskis, 2013) have all published their analysis of the contours and inner workings of the risk society. All scholars point to the emergence of the risk society as a consequence of the acceleration and accessibility of information and a radical form of what Raymond Williams termed “mobile privatization,” and as this chapter, following Andersen and Jensen (2015), dialectically termed “private mobilization.” This indicates a state in which society, culture and mind are so strongly interconnected or interwoven that the modern project of enlightenment and “growth” based on “proper” distance (the ability to observe, analyse and evaluate) is challenged or rather disrupted. We are beyond the postmodern era and the loss of “grand narratives” and the possible promises of liberation of the late modernity era. We have entered the era of a precarious modernity, in which our use of media technology helps us identify risks, but also makes us aware how we are a part of the production of risks. In a sense, this can be translated into a reflexive domestication, which at the point of realization generates the experience that the “wild” outside the household is not really tamed. A study of the significance and the forms of “cookies” would exemplify this, just as the case of FoMO. After 2017, and the EU enactment of the Cookie Law, users of media technology and not least social media are explicitly confronted with both an awareness of the capitalization of user data and of an awareness that something is going on beneath the process of objectification and incorporation (Trevisan et al., 2019). It will require further study to better understand how the flow of data created by users’ domesticated appropriation of media technology is or is not becoming part of a digital moral economy of the household. The point here is that domestication theory is confronted with a new problem: How may we understand when conversion is not controlled by our intentions as users, but by a flow of data that we cannot domesticate and therefore control? To illustrate this point as another dark side of domestication, we may turn to the role of media technology in the COVID-19 pandemic situation manifested in the proliferation of infection-tracking applications for mobile phones (Kondylakis et al., 2020). As a media technology, the infection-tracking applications were designed to help citizens become aware if they had been in any close encounter with an infected individual by using anonymous near-field token tracking. The application prompted a notification instructing the citizens to follow the modus operandi of controlling the virus by getting tested, by notifying close peers and to be tested for the infection him-/herself. At the operational level, the application as a media technology makes perfect sense. With information and a set of instructions provided by the national health authorities, each individual was able to take part in the fight against the infection. It generated a sense of agency, and it is fair to assume that the application (and the authority public authority behind, The Department of Public Health) resulted in a compliant domestication – an external push towards the moral economy of the household. Even if concrete households may not have incorporated the use of the application in any uniform way, the individual and institutional experience of the risk was domesticated: let us all take 96

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part in solving the problem! But what the application also created was an awareness that individuals who were not part of the household or the group of friends or our close social network were connected with us. Suddenly it became clear through the data flow and the notifications that we are all connected, and that our individual actions may cause problems to individuals that we do not consider to be part of our everyday life. Suddenly, our interactions with other individuals became potentially contagious. Now, the infection-tracking application promised a sort of agency, but it also created an awareness of the potential contagious impact of our social interaction. And the application reminded us of this. The dark side of domestication of this is the generation of anxiety or discomfort: when will I get a notification informing me that I have been in close encounter or contact with an individual tested positive with COVID-19? New research will inform us how we as individuals and institutions responded and domesticated this situation. But speculations can be made. Maybe one way of domesticating the infection-tracking applications could have been not to turn on the application, thus not to be available for notifications. Another could be to use the application as a kind of radar to scan any concrete venue or public space to check out if it was safe or non-contagious. This may not have been done in all national cases because the technology was supported differently in different national contexts. A third case could be for the user to seek sanctuary and isolation, and in doing so changing the habits and everyday routines. The point of the COVID-19 infection-tracking applications in relation to the possible dark side of domestication is that such cases of compliant domestication may contribute to the creation of anxiety and discomfort and not shielding or giving agency to the users. In this respect, the stage of conversion becomes a flawed or problematic one, because if we use the application and talk about its use, we are reminded of the risks and not imagining how the media technology helps to reduce these risks. This happens when individuals become aware that their moral economy of the household has critical limits. The link between the case of FoMO and of the COVID-19 infection-tracking applications is that both play a part in the reflexive assessment of risks and of the production of related social anxiety. In the case of FoMO, the anxiety is connected to risks within the known or familiar social network. In the case of COVID-19, the anxiety is connected to risks outside the known social network. In both cases, applications represent a media technology that promises a solution to problems of social ontological security (Giddens, 1990, 1991), but does not provide a form of domesticated shielding of the individual. Either way, both cases demonstrate that the principles and inner workings of domestication are challenged by reflexive modernity, and that living with anxieties is part of the fabric of everyday life and the practice of domestication. This is why, in our opinion, the in-between space (the elements of imagination and realization) becomes important, and that the moral economy of the household informing and guiding the process of concrete cases of domestication is not just considered a “safeguard” and key to creating and sustaining the ontological security of the household and the individuals being part of it. The point is that imagination is configured differently, so to speak, and as with the case of FoMO and social media technology, the domestication of this technology is based on a gap or an asymmetry in relation to individual household member’s actual imagination and ability to achieve realization. Even though Sherry Turkle’s work on the uses and significance of technology (from computers, the internet, mobile media and robots) does not directly cover either FoMO or COVID-19, she stresses a growing concern of new emerging anxieties (Turkle, 1984, 1997, 2010, 2015). In Turkle’s perspective, human beings in the course of the diverse global cultural history have had many types of anxieties, but she also points out that the contemporary anxieties have to do with lowering our standards for accepting and participating 97

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in interaction with each other and with and through technology. Turkle concludes in her psychoanalytic work that identity, or the basic matrix of human identity, changes due to the emerging anxieties. The ability of empathy and our sense of patience are changing. And a sense of hyper-alertness or hyper-sensitivity emerges as a precondition, but also as a consequence of the uses of media technology. In psychiatric research, FoMO has been identified as a symptom in stress-related cases among adolescents (Przybylski et al., 2013). The point in relation to the cases is that the principles and process of domestication are not providing a clear moral economy helping to imagine, incorporate and converse about the anxieties. This points to the need for further investigation and research into the dark side of domestication and how issues of risks and anxieties are articulated and integrated into concrete processes of domestication.

Empowering reflexive domestication in darker times? Concluding indications As indicated in this chapter, domestication theory is challenged both by the workings and uses of specific media technologies and of the conditions of a hyper-alerted and reflexive modernity. One conclusion may be that the complexity of the conditions living with social and networked media technology is caused by a diversity both found in the many forms of being a household (e.g., being a family, a couple or living alone in a single culture) and found in the potential of conflict in mobile privatization, implying that the basic elements of a moral economy are created along the trajectories of reflexive modern individuals. However, it may be fair to observe that media technology and social media technology (the case of FoMO) are still domesticated. But given the cases presented in this chapter, it is a just question to problematize domestication theory. Maybe it needs to be revised in order to conceptualize and explain why the problems of anxiety arise in relation to the complex media technologies that circulate and are used in everyday life. To be fair, domestication theory never indicated or promised to explain every use of media technology. Domestication theory promised to explain why media technology is not simply appropriated according to any mainstream or ideological mode of use. But domestication theory holds a key or a promise to inform and raise awareness of the quirky and sometimes paradoxical practices of making technology our own. This promise has been part of the digital literacy turn, and it is our understanding that domestication will play an important part in the digital disconnect turn. Not because of higher levels of knowledge of and insight into how data flows and works, but because it tells us to focus on what we do and the values that guide our interactions with media technology. In more than one sense, the concepts of domestication presented in this chapter address a concern. Not a concern about the sinister and opaque ways in which media technology works and functions as technology, even though this is certainly a concern. It is a concern that the concept of domestication is unable to fully grasp what is going on in the everyday practice of domestication in the context of a highly connected media technology environment. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide principles to achieve digital literacy in terms of domestication theory. But as Turkle indicates with her research, we need to observe that incorporation and conversion and even imagination must, to some degree, include moments or periods of abstinence and “media fasting.” But these moments should reflect the moral economy of the household and not be considered unadoptable in relation to this. In order for studies in domestication of media technology to deal with anxieties like FoMO, further investigation into the process of figuration may be a focus point. How do individuals in a reflexive modernity share and incorporate experiences into a moral economy 98

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of the household, and how are households (however they are configured) able to grasp a media ecology that is even more interconnected and opaque, despite the fact that the surface appears transparent and user-friendly?

Notes 1 The labelling of the phenomenon “fear of missing out” uses both the acronyms FoMO and FOMO. The difference is viewed as insignificant in this context. 2 These are the references used in the study to understand Fear of Missing Out as something that has transformed. The references are ordered by publication year to support the argument of a transformation in the discourse and maybe the conversion of FoMO: Schmuck, 2021; Hunt et al., 2018; Alt, 2017; Buglass et al., 2017; Fuster et al., 2017; Stead & Bibby, 2017; Wegmann et al., 2017; Wiesner, 2017; Abel et al., 2016; Hanton, 2016; Hodkinson, 2016; Nørgaard, 2016; Hertz et al., 2015; Reagle, 2015, 2014; Andersen, 2013; Przybylski et al., 2013; Dykeman, 2012.

References Abel, J.P., Buff, C.L. and Burr, S.A. (2016) ‘Social media and the fear of missing out: Scale development and assessment,’ Journal of Business & Economic Research, 14 (1), 33–44. Alt, D. (2017) ‘Students’ social media engagement and fear of missing out (FoMO) in a diverse classroom,’ Journal of Computers in Higher Education, 29, 388–410. Andersen, T.F. (2013) ‘Free Us from FOMO: fear of missing out on social media,’ KommunikationsForum Online (Danish net-journal), Copenhagen: Kommunikationsforum A/S. Andersen, T.F. (2005) Adolescents and Computer Culture. Ambivalences and Social Interaction in High School Students’ Computer Use, PhD Thesis (Danish), Aalborg University. Andersen, T.F. and Jensen, T. (2015) ‘Where ever I lay my device, that’s my home. Revisiting the concept of domestication in the Age of Mobile Media and Wearable Devices,’ Academic Quarter, 11, 212–231. Bauman, Z. and Donskis, L. (2013) Moral Blindness. The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Berelowitz, M. (ed.) (2012) Fear of Missing Out. JWTIntelligence, March 2012 Update, New York: J. Walter Thompson Company. Berker, T. et al. (2006) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Birkland, J.L.H. (2013) A Theory of ICT User Types: Exploring Domestication and Meaning of ICTS through Comparative Case Studies, Syracuse: Syracuse University. Buglass, S.L., Binder, J.F., Betts, L.R. and Underwood, J.D.M. (2017) ‘Motivators of online vulnerability: The impact of social network sites use and FOMO,’ Computers in Human Behavior, 66, 248–255. Denmark’s Statistics (2013) ‘Statistiske perspektiver,’ Danmarks Statistik No. 8, December. Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2011) Divining A Digital Future. Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Dykeman, A. (2012) The Fear of Missing Out, available at https://www.getrichslowly.org/ do-you-suffer-from-fomo/. Fuster, H., Chamarro, A. and Oberst, U. (2017) ‘Fear of Missing Out, online social networking and mobile phone addiction: A latent profile approach,’ Aloma, 35 (1), 7 pages. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Haddon, L. (2006) ‘The contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption,’ The Information Society: An International Journal, 22 (4), 195–203. Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Hansen, S.S. (2011) Year 2012. Social Life and Togetherness in a time of New Media, Copenhagen: Information Press. Hanton, S.M. (2016) ‘Managing my fear of missing out,’ Science, 353 (6306), 1458–1458.

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Tem Frank Andersen and Peter Vistisen Hargreaves, T. and Wilson, C. (2017) Smart Homes and Their Users, Springer Briefs in HumanComputer Interaction, Cham, Switzerland. Hartley, J.M. and Schwartz, S.A. (2020) ‘Trust, disconnection, minimizing risk and apathy: A compass of coping tactics in datafied everyday lives,’ Journal of Media and Communication Research, 69, 11–28. Hartmann, M. (2020) ‘(The domestication of ) nordic domestication?, ‘ Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2 (1), 47–57. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2020-0005. Hertz, P., Dawson, C.L. and Cullen, T.A. (2015) ‘Social media use and the fear of missing out (FoMO) while studying abroad,’ Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 47 (4), 259–272. Hodkinson, C. (2016) ‘“Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) marketing appeals: A conceptual model,’ Journal of Marketing Communications, 65–88. Hunt, M.G., Marx, R., Lipson, C. and Young, J. (2018) ‘No more FOMO: Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression,’ Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 37 (10), 751–768. Kondylakis, H., Katehakis, D.G., Kouroubali, A., Logothetidis, F., Triantafyllidis, A., Kalamaras, I., Votis, K. and Tzovaras, D. (2020) ‘COVID-19 mobile apps: A systematic review of the literature,’ Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22 (12), e23170. https://doi.org/10.2196/23170. Ling, R. (2008) New Tech, New Ties. How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ling, R. (2004) ‘Making sense of mobile telephone adoption,’ in R. Ling (ed.), The Mobile Connection. The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Lull, J. (1995) Media, Communication, Culture. A Global Approach, Oxford: Polity Press. Lull, J. (1990) Inside Family Viewing. Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences, London & New York: Routledge. Lull, J. (ed.) (1988) World Families Watch Television, London: Sage. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, London & New York: Routledge. Mead, M. (1970) Culture and Commitment. A Study of the Generation Gap, Garden City: Natural History Press. Milyavskaya, M., Saffran, M., Hope, N. and Koestner, R. (2018) ‘Fear of missing out: Prevalence, dynamics, and consequences of experiencing FOMO,’ Motivation & Emotion, 42, 725–737. Moores, S. (1993) Interpreting Audiences. The Ethnography of Media Consumption, London: Sage. Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity, London & New York: Routledge. Nørgaard, B.K. (2016) A Shift in Mindset: Lévinas as Inspiration. Otherness Instead of Difference and Sameness, Danish University Colleges working papers. Pantzar, M. (1997) ‘Domestication of Everyday Life Technology: Dynamic Views on the Social Histories of Artifacts,’ Design Issues, 13 (3), 52–65. Przybylski. A.K., Murayama, K., DeHann, C.R. and Gladwell, V. (2013) ‘Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out, ‘Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 1841–1848. Reagle, J. (2015) ‘Following the Joneses: FOMO and conspicuous sociality,’ First Monday, 20 (10), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i10.6064. Reagle, J. (2014) ‘FOMO’s etymology,’ Open Codex: Code & Culture, available at https://reagle.org/ joseph/pelican/social/fomos-etymology.html. Schmuck, D. (2021) ‘Following social media influencers in early adolescence: Fear of missing out, social well-being and supportive communication with parents,’ Journal of Computer-Mediated ­communication, 26, 245–264. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating domestication. Reflections on the life of a concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Silverstone, R and Hirsch, E. (1992) Consuming Technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge. Stead, H. and Bibby, P.A. (2017) ‘Personality, fear of missing out and problematic internet use and their relationship to subjective well-being,’ Computers in Human Behavior, 76, 534–540. Syvertsen, T. (2020) Digital detox. The Politics of Disconnecting, Bingley, Cheltenham: Emerald Publishing. Syvertsen, T. (2017) Media Resistance, Protest, Dislike, Abstention, London: Springer. Trevisan, M., Traverso, S., Bassi, E. and Mellia, M. (2019) ‘4 Years of EU Cookie Law: Results and lessons learned,’ Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2019 (2), 126–145. https://doi. org/10.2478/popets-2019-0023. Turkle, S. (2015) Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, New York: Penguin Press.

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The dark side of domestication? Turkle, S. (2010) Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books. Turkle, S. (1997) Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet, London: Phoenix. Turkle, S. (1984) The Second Self. Computers and the Human Spirit, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Turner, V. (2009) The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure, New Brunswick & London: AldineTransaction. Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Publications. Wegmann, E., Oberst, U., Stodt, B., and Brand, M. (2017) ‘Online-specific fear of missing out and Internet-use expectancies contribute to symptoms of Internet-communication disorder,’ Addictive Behaviors Reports, 5, 33–42. Wiesner, L. (2017) Fighting FoMO. A Study on Implications for Solving the Phenomenon of the Fear of Missing Out, Master thesis, University of Twente. Williams, R. (1974) Television. Technology and Cultural Form, London & New York: Routledge.

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PART II

Extending domestication

Extending domestication Introduction Lars Bajlum Holmgaard Christensen

The domestication framework has guided much research into media consumption and media practices in everyday life. As an overarching framework, it has shed light on the dialectic between the public and the private understandings of media technology, that is, the dynamics between the commodified and hegemonically imagined public sense-giving to media technology as opposed to the local sense-making in people’s everyday lives. However, in the past 30 years, we have seen disruptive changes to our media landscape. The technological infrastructure underpinning the forms of media consumption possible today is quite different from when the domestication framework was publicized in 1992 (Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). The internet is no longer an incomprehensible novel phenomenon, laptops and mobile phones are not seen as new inventions and tablets and smartphones have made global connectivity on websites and on social media ubiquitous. Furthermore, digital media consumption leaves digital footprints, which means that our use of media technology is never just private but always subject to dataveillance and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015). Digital media use as registrational interactivity means that we constantly produce data for content suppliers. In other words, we become part of a consumption cycle with personalized media content based on our own media interaction and preferences. This challenges one of the key concepts from the original framework, the semioticsinspired idea of the double articulation of media technology. This is the notion that media technologies become meaningful by being articulated both as objects and as media texts. The concept has already been extended to include different contexts of use through the suggestion of a triple articulation (Hartmann, 2006), that has shown to have practical relevance in research as well (Courtois et al., 2011), but could we rethink or extend this concept even further? Additionally, media technologies have become wireless, which means that media technology today is less bound by cords to physical spaces and less bound to our private homes as the dominant site for media consumption. The objectification and incorporation of media technologies therefore become less predictable and less private. We could say that we now see much more media use in the wild that needs to be tamed and understood in novel ways.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-11

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Why a ‘moral’ economy and the household as the natural setting? The dynamics between the public sense-giving and the private sense-making practices are to be understood as a transactional system of economic and social relations. But why does the domestication framework have to focus so much on this transaction system as a ‘moral economy of the household’? The term moral economy originates from the work of E.P. Thompson, who in 1993 reflected on the concept: Maybe the trouble lies with the word ‘moral.’ ‘Moral’ is a signal which brings on a rush of polemical blood to the academic head. […] I could perhaps have called this ‘a sociological economy,’ and an economy in its original meaning (oeconomy) as the due organization of a household, in which each part is related to the whole and each member acknowledges his various duties and obligations. (Thompson, 1993: 259) French anthropologist, Didier Fassin, later pointed out that Thompson’s general idea is to contrast a materialist approach, focussed on consumer goods in the marketplace, the technology as a commodified object, with an ethnographic approach, which seeks to explore the experiences of people’s socio-cultural practices. Hence, Fassin claims, Thompson contrasts a quantitative understanding with a qualitative understanding of people’s experiences and practices. Consequently, if we are to understand the social world and people’s experiences therein, it becomes a two-dimensional affair. It is not just about “the production and distribution of goods and services but about evaluation and action, which of course concern the economy as well as other types of social activity” (Fassin, 2009). In its essence, a moral economy is to be seen as a total system of exchange based on everyday cultural, social and technical practices of integrating media technologies into everyday life. But why should this be limited to households? For Thompson, it is in the household as a family collective that we care for each other and a subsistence ethics works to secure the well-being for the individual family member in the household. But could this subsistence ethics not be extended to outside the household, to more communal settings or even to corporate companies? Corporate companies today claim that they are ‘families,’ mostly to strengthen employer branding, employee loyalty and commitment and through corporate values expressed explicitly through vision and mission statements, they try to guide the cultural behaviour of employees. It is standard that companies offer a range of media technologies that need to be domesticated as part of a specific organizational culture. We could therefore pursue the more general understanding of the transaction system, which Etzioni suggests, when he argues that broader moral, social and political concerns modify economic behaviour and shape individual decision-making (Etzioni, 1990). Corporate values are typically negotiated to meet the demands of stakeholders; hence, a sociological economy is at play here as well. In many cases, we can identify a strong interplay between corporate culture and the discourse formations and narratives in society. In this way, we should interpret the moral economy as more loosely tied to the household and with much more openness to other types of contextual moral transactional system. With changes in the way we can appropriate, objectify, incorporate and convert media technology in our everyday lives, key aspects of and concepts from the original framework are somewhat easy to challenge. However, this does not mean that we no longer domesticate, ‘tame’ and make sense of media technologies. On the contrary, today we also need to 106

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construct the ‘homeness’ of media technologies, that is, negotiating and knowing various cultural backgrounds and the right contexts for using media technologies. With boundaries of the household breaking down, this opens new questions of where the action is when we domesticate, and what a natural setting actually looks like.

What is ‘natural’ in this setting? The Western world is not an obvious starting point for all types of media consumption. At least this is one of the points put forward by Helle-Valle and Storm-Mathisen (see Chapter 11) in their reflections from field work in the Kalahari. They claim that the natural setting in the original domestication framework carries a high degree of ethnocentrism and it concerns itself with the affluent Western world and a particular Western way of life. In their research, they find communal values and communal life very different from the ideology of ‘familism,’ the set of ideas about the importance of the domestic unit as the site for the emotional, close bonds, which they see as inherent in the domestication framework. They go on to assert that when applying the framework globally, some of the analytical premises of domestication theory do not really fit well with the empirical reality of the villages that they themselves have been studying in Botswana. One reason for the lack of empirical reality check is explained by the fact that practitioners of the domestication framework often have insufficient ethnographic practice; hence, they call for more varied and extensive ethnography if we are to extend the framework globally. Or, as Ogone proposes in his reflections on the use of the domestication framework, we “could do with a more decisive focus on the local knowledge ecology of the user as a crucial variable in the successful adoption of new technologies, especially in the African context” (see Chapter 9). Ogone wants to advance “the domestication debate towards the communal context in which social media technologies are domesticated within African societies. Indeed, situated cultural affordances dictate the path and pace of the domestication of technologies in Africa.” Hahn (Chapter 10) supports these efforts to re-evaluate innovations in local cultural contexts and to adapt them to local value orders. His focus is also on Africa where the digital transformation of materiality can be found in the local specificity of use as well as in how people overcome the material challenges associated with access to and use of the smartphone. Despite the challenges in applying the domestication framework and in accepting its analytical premises, Ling (Chapter 7) emphasizes that the domestication framework is still very useful as a heuristic through which to examine the adoption and use of media technology anywhere. He examines how the conceptual framing of the approach allows it to be reapplied in other contexts and outside a predominant Western ideology. He shows how appropriation can take on a variety of conditions and issues when it is examined in the context of the Global South. Focussing on women, he found that it can be hard for them to collect money for a major purchase such as a mobile phone. Consequently, they develop fewer private systems of purchase and instead set up informal shared systems through which they can collectively save up money for a purchase. This might be even more aligned to predominant communal values. In their study of the adoption of smartphones and mobile communication in Asia and of what they call multifunctional ‘Super Apps,’ Lim and Fernandez (see Chapter 8) refer to a study of how the ‘Super App’ WeChat in particular provides women with a link to acquaintances and loved ones but these women are also burdened with the pressures of ‘life 107

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archiving’ where they must take, upload and share photographs, videos and status updates of their lives. Their study found that gender norms and power hierarchies introduced a form of technologically charged emotional burden and “such pressures accompanying the intensifying use of mobile communication are leading people to de-domesticate technologies.” In many ways, this resembles Ann Gray’s study on the domestication of the VCR, where women strategically resisted to learn how to use the VCR because they knew that after the initial attention and excitement shown by typically the men in the household, the ‘boys with toys,’ operating the VCR would become just another household chore for the wife and mother in the household to carry out (Gray, 1992). To sum up these introductory comments, extending the domestication framework leaves us with the challenge to figure out how we can preserve the framework and its original ideas about a moral economy, double articulation and the taming of the wild and at the same time renew and extend the framework to include and embrace a changing media landscape, a global networked infrastructure that is characteristic of the digital platform society (Van Dijck, Poell & De Waal, 2018) and perhaps in particular be less media-centric and more ethnographically curious about the cultures underpinning uses of available media technology.

References Courtois, C. et al. (2011) ‘The triple articulation of media technologies in teenage media consumption’ New Media & Society, 14 (3), 401–420. Etzioni, A. (1990) The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics, London: The Free Press. Fassin, D. (2009) ‘Moral economies revisited’ Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 64, 1237–1266. https:// www.cairn-int.info/journal--2009-6-page-1237.htm. Gray, A. (1992) Video Playtime - The Gendering of a Leisure Technology, London: Routledge. Hartmann, M. (2006) ‘The triple articulation of ICTs. Media as technological objects, symbolic environments, and individual texts’ in Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K. J. (eds.) The Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (eds.) (1992) Consuming Technologies, London: Routledge. Thompson, E.P. (1993) Customs in Common - Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, New York: The New Press. Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and De Waal, M. (2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, New York: Oxford University Press. Zuboff, S. (2015) ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’ Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75–89.

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7 DOMESTICATING MOBILE COMMUNICATION BY WOMEN IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Rich Ling

Introduction The notion of domestication is a useful heuristic through which to examine the adoption and use of mobile communication by women in the Global South. The phases of domestication provide a standard against which we can examine the use of mobile technologies. While the notion of domestication arose in the UK (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Silverstone et al., 1992) and often had the household as its unit of analysis (Haddon, 2003), it has since been reapplied to the examination of mobile communication (Haddon, 2003, 2020). This chapter examines how the conceptual framing of the approach allows it to be reapplied in other contexts. In its broadest sense, domestication examines the cultural, social, and technical dimensions of integrating artefacts into everyday life. It considers how we become aware of, adopt, and use different objects. Domestication considers how the artefacts are given meaning and assigned their place (possibly a physical place, but also eventually a temporal or even a conceptual space). It also considers the changes in use and the changes in our estimation of the devices as we embed them in our day-to-day practices. It is used to examine the interaction between the individual and different devices, both in the home (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) and those which the individual carries on their person (Haddon, 2003). Finally, domestication examines how others perceive and categorize the individual based on the individual’s consumption of a particular array of devices (e.g., “He is the type of person who always has the latest mobile phone”). The analysis here will examine the domestication of mobile telephony among users in the Global South where many of the foundational assumptions are different. Indeed, notions of status, legitimate use, and the potentials and the threats of mobile communication are quite different. The next section will discuss the framing of domestication. This will be followed by an examination of how the phases of domestication provide a useful heuristic for understanding the use of mobile communication among (mostly) women in the Global South.

The boundaries of the domestication paradigm The nexus between the commercial and the private domains The goal of the domestication framework is to understand the interactions between social and economic activities of society and how we work out the adoption, integration, and display DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-12

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of artefacts (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; see also Douglas & Isherwood, 1979; Hartmann, 2013). As suggested in the name, the early formulation of the approach considered the home as a nexus between the commercial world and the private sphere, the domus. The home is where commercial objects are redefined so as to be consistent with the household’s sense of culture and display (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996). In this context, there was the metaphor of bringing “wild” artefacts to leash (Berker et al., 2006, p. 2; Haddon, 2003, p. 46).1 The early work in the area of domestication examined this in terms of the television and the home computer (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992), but later devices such as the mobile phone (Haddon, 2003) as well as different services and platforms (Ling et al., 1999) were also examined using this perspective. In a commercialized world, there are many items that are bought and brought into what Silverstone et al. called the moral economy of the home (1992), that is, the objects are brought into the nexus between society at large and the home. It is in this transition that there is the need to translate the object into the specific context/aesthetic of the home. The movement of an artefact from the commercial into the domestic sphere is a process that can involve the collective and often continuous work of the household since the item needs to fit into the common sense of what the home (or perhaps the family unit) represents. In this process, the members of a home need to have a system with which to determine that which is acceptable, and that which should be excluded. The criteria can include an item’s functionality, its aesthetic qualities, its potential to cultivate a certain identity/status, etc. The local culture often provides a template for consumption (Lynne, 2000). It can suggest that an acceptable home needs an array of furniture, perhaps certain religious or sacred times, photos of the family, or, for example, an air-conditioning unit in warm climates and a furnace in cold climates. Some of the items are more prominent and culturally central. Others can be more functional (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979). The items that are available for placement in the home are also, in many ways, determined by their availability in the commercial realm. Indeed, there is an interaction between the demands of the individual and the artefacts that are available and indeed promoted in the shops and stores of a particular culture.

The emergent case of information and communication technologies Information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose a particular issue when considering their domestication into the home or in the case of mobile telephony, the objects carried on our person (Lynne, 2000; Thrane & Ling, 2001). Since ICTs are relatively new and are not encrusted with the legacy of other cultural items, they have demanded particular curative attention in their movement from the commercial to the domestic domains (Silverstone et al., 1992). Various types of furniture and different forms of personal dress have a long cultural tradition; there is most often a strong sense of how and where they should be displayed. With ICTs, we need to create the scripts with which to integrate these devices (e.g., the television or more recently smart speakers (Brause & Blank, 2020) into the aesthetic and the flux of the home (e.g., the PC needs different types of cables and perhaps a table; the mobile phone needs a pocket or a secure bag that heretofore may have been used for other purposes). Thus, ICTs need to find their place, not just functionally, but also in an appropriate cultural sense. They must, in some broad way, fit into our conceptualization of the home or our personal display. In the process of bringing ICTs into our domestic sphere, there are issues of power and control that must be addressed. ICTs, like other items brought into the home, can be 110

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purchased for the benefit of some, and the explicit, or perhaps the unintended, suppression of others. Purchasing an ICT can, for example, use up money from the family’s budget meaning that other family members are not able to consume the items that they feel are important. Thus, domestication does not necessarily imply that there is a unity of mission regarding any particular artefact. The exercise of power is also seen in who has access to the ICTs. For example, the new item can become a de facto part of the fiefdom of one or another member of the home. Such entitled use does not necessarily need to be once and for all. It can be that one person has a type of implied access right in one time period, while another person enjoys this right in another time slot. Indeed, the idea of placing the children in front of the TV so that the parents can have some free time suggests that the right of use can also encompass the right of yielding use when that is expedient. Following the issue of power and access, there is often a gendered dimension. Silverstone et al. (1992) discussed how the domestication process has gendered, age-based, and status-based dimensions. As will be developed below, there are classes of individuals who will not be seen as legitimate consumers or users of technologies. Finally, it is worth asking about the application of domestication, a perspective developed in the Global North, to technology adoption in the Global South. Domestication arose from work in the UK (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992), Europe (Hartmann, 2006; Sørensen, 2006), and North America (Bakardjieva, 2006), where there are particular notions of what constitutes a home and the construction of status. This is not universal. For example, the polygynous families of Kenya (Komen & Ling, n.d.), or the situation of North Korean refugees (Kang et al., 2018), expose different understandings of personal technologies and their role in one’s life when compared to their consumption in the Global North (Bolin, 2010; Cooper, 2016; Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008; Mwithia, 2016; Oreglia & Ling, 2017). The material discussed below suggests that domestication provides a useful heuristic for examining technology adoption in a variety of locations. The lens it provides problematizes some issues. Further, as will be seen below, the concepts that domestication uses can provide a foil with which to glean insight into the ownership and use of technology.

The cycle of domestication among (mostly) women in the Global South The genius of the domestication approach is that it helps us to think about the “career” of a technology as it moves through the different phases of its consumption (Haddon, 2003). Using a somewhat expanded version of domestication, the phases include the imagination, appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion of ICTs. These posts in the domestication process will be examined below in addition to the idea of decommissioning/ recommissioning ICTs.

Imagination Background The imagination phase pre-dates the actual ownership, access to, and use of an item. Silverstone (1994: 125) discusses the idea of imagined consumption when we become aware of an item. According to Silverstone, who draws on Baudrillard, we experience the unquenchable desire/aspiration to acquire it. The “consumption” at this point is only in the notional, imagined sense of the word. It is in this phase that according to Silverstone 111

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and Haddon (1996: 63), these as-yet-unpurchased items exist in the minds of the individual “prior to any loss of illusion that comes from ownership.” These imaginings can be aided and encouraged by various advertising systems and marketing messages. It is important to consider how people develop their ideas about the potentials of the device previous to owning one. Particularly when thinking about people living in resourceconstrained situations, tracing the process through which one becomes aware of a device and following the maturation of that understanding is illuminating. It reveals the significant gulf between the abstract knowing about an ICT and actually being a user.

Indirect understanding of ICTs The individual from the Global South who finds him/herself in the imagination phase is often not directly in the sights of capitalistic marketing efforts (Lu, 2021). Their eventual understanding of an ICT can come through circuitous routes. By way of example, mobile telephony came late to Myanmar (Ling, Aricat, et al., 2017). Until approximately 2014, the country was on the very bottom rungs of the adoption ladder with about five subscriptions per 100 people (ITU, 2013). Thus, people did not see mobile phones on the streets; there were very few people who owned one and in general, they were not in common use. Given this lack of direct access, people in Myanmar were left to glean an understanding of the devices from other sources. They might, for example, see an actor in a Bollywood film at a local tea house use a phone (Oreglia & Ling, 2017) or hear other second-hand information. Through these decontextualized and far-removed links to global media (Appadurai, 1996), people could gain a certain disembodied sense of how a mobile phone functioned and the potentials it might provide. During the period between when people in Myanmar first became aware of the mobile phone and actually used one, they were left to construct imagined notions of its use and its benefits/drawbacks. These reflections could also include how the device will play into and perhaps upset gendered relations of power (Oreglia & Ling, 2017). It is at this phase that people will start to make out a rough sense of the device’s moral profile and how this matched their everyday lives. These understandings of the devices can be derived from local talk, or, for example, their portrayal in Bollywood films seen at the local teahouse. It may be that it was seen as a godsend that will make life easy and ensure the status of its owner (as seen in the Bollywood movie). However, it could also be seen as a channel through which negative things happen (again, as seen in the Bollywood movie). These considerations will pre-figure the later stages of the domestication process.

Appropriation Background The next general phase in the domestication process is what Baym called that “euphoric point” (2010: 44) when the artefact moves from the commercial world into the sphere of the user (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992). At this point, the item loses its mercantile identity to become some type of fixture in the home or in the life of the user. This is often conceptualized as a one-way transition. The power of the domestication approach is that it focuses our attention on how this transition is not simply the “rational” exchange of money for an artefact as the economists would have it. Rather, domestication examines how the conceptual work pre-dating the purchase is continued afterwards. Indeed, appropriation is a particularly intense point in the career 112

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of the artefact. The individual (or eventually the household) must work out how the new purchase fits into the pre-existing cultural context. There may be the need to dispose of, or repurpose, other items to make way for the new. This was seen, for example, in the transition from pagers to mobile phones. The individual who had owned a pager needed to develop a transition strategy upon the purchase of a mobile phone. This may have involved jettisoning the pager, gifting it to another person, or somehow compartmentalizing its use (e.g., “the pager is for my work calls and the phone is for my family”). During the appropriation phase, there was a need to start making concrete the imagined use of the new mobile phone as it moved from the imagined phase into everyday use.

Alternatives to the simple cash-purchase nexus The heuristic of appropriation is problematized when considering the use of ICTs in the Global South. The purchasing process is not necessarily a simple nexus where cash is exchanged for the item. There can be various group-based issues associated with the procurement process. In addition, the item itself may retain some of its fungible character even after purchase and there can be the need for various types of subversion when getting it. In the Global North, buying an item is often seen as a rather streamlined commercial transaction. However, in the Global South, it is frequently difficult for individuals (particularly women) to collect the capital with which to make a major purchase such as a mobile phone. Thus, groups of people have developed informal systems through which they are able to collectively save money (Komen & Ling, n.d.; Ling et al., 2015). In Myanmar, for example, when mobile phones had started to arrive, they were still too expensive for people to purchase. However, groups of people banded together and, on a weekly basis, they contributed money to a common “pot.” Each week, there was a drawing where the winner got the money with which to buy a mobile phone. This relied on a sense of common trust whereby all of the members committed to participating until the last person was able to purchase a phone. If there were, for example, 20 or 30 individuals participating in the group, it could take several months before all the members were able to buy their phones. Putting this into the context of domestication, the procurement process is quite different from the situation in the Global North where often the individual gets their shrink-wrapped box after a quick trip to the shopping mall. Another point that arises from studying the consumption of ICTs in the Global South is that the objects do not necessarily lose their commercial character after they have been purchased. A mobile phone can be seen as a device that affords mediated communication, or a repository of fungible capital in a resource-constrained situation. There is the example of a man in Myanmar who needed roofing material for his chicken coop. Lacking other resources, he sold his phone to finance a new roof. His understanding of the phone expanded the idea of what a phone is, and it recognized that in these situations, the device retained its position as a commercial object. One can suggest that in his eyes, his phone had less utility as a communication device than as a repository of cash (Ling, Parekh, et al., 2017). Similar findings have been reported in Brazil (de Souza e Silva et al., 2011). Looking at this in the context of domestication, presumably, the device did not fulfil the expectations of the owner so as to secure it a permanent place in his life. Thus, the device moved back over the cash nexus and the resources were used to benefit the chickens. Taking up one last dimension of the appropriation process, while the individual can see the purchase as a “euphoric point” (Baym, 2010: 44), others in the individual’s private sphere can have a different estimation of whether a mobile phone is a desirable item. To be sure, in some 113

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cases, a mobile phone can be seen as a most unwelcome addition to the assemblage of the home or the individual. This is perhaps seen best in strongly patriarchal societies where the adoption of a phone by a wife or daughter represents a disruptive and unwelcome channel for subversive and unseemly communication (Cohen et al., 2007; Djane & Ling, 2015; Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008; Malhotra & Ling, 2020; Soleil Archambault, 2011). The eventual appropriation of a mobile phone by a woman in these situations needs to take place subversively, for example, with the help of one’s paramour. Once in the possession of the woman, it needs to be carefully guarded and kept out of view (Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008). A similarly fraught situation is seen among women refugees from North Korea (Kang et al., 2018). In this case, it is not communication with a romantic devotee that is in play; rather, the phone can be used to organize escape over the border. If found, owning an illegal mobile phone can result in a criminal conviction and service in a labour camp. Thus, the idea of appropriation can take on a variety of conditions and issues when it is examined in the context of the Global South. The conceptualization of how appropriation takes place, its permanence, and the precarity of the ICT in the life of the individual take on different dimensions.

Objectification Background The third phase of the domestication process considered here is objectification. This dimension examines the physical/aesthetic integration of the ICT. According to Silverstone et al. (1992: 22), this often includes the actual placement of the newly acquired object (e.g., the television or the PC) within the home. In the process of locating the ICT in the home, there is the expectation that it will fulfil some functional purpose, but also that it can eventually fit into and perhaps contribute to a pre-developed aesthetic. There is the idea that the new addition will help to fulfil the occupants’ sense of the home and perhaps become a status display. While the commercial marketing of the ICT may focus on certain dimensions of the object, the experienced reality is often different when it is in situ. For example, the PC may be a well-designed and stylish object. However, the cables required for its operation and the clutter of papers that collect around it will complicate its integration into the aesthetic of the home. Likewise, the mobile phone may provide convenience, but finding a place on our person (in a pocket, a bag, or someplace else?) can pose some of the same issues. Indeed, Fortunati (2013) has suggested that the mobile phone is perhaps similar to a piece of jewellery that needs to be integrated into the aesthetic of the individual.

The dangers of ICT display Turning to the situation of users in the Global South and their adoption of mobile communication, there are different elements of objectification that come into focus. Since the mobile phone is in some cases a new element of dress, there is a question of how to integrate it into the assemblage of one’s garments. For example, since there are no pockets in the genderneutral skirt-like longyi used in Myanmar, there is the need to construct a method with which to carry the smartphone. This is often done by tucking it into the waistband (Ling, Parekh, et al., 2017). Following Fortunati’s suggestion (2013), this has the advantage of making the device discretely visible so as to mark the status of the individual. As noted above, however, the display of a mobile phone is not always possible. In those cases where possession of a mobile phone can be seen as problematic (Chib & Chen, 2011), 114

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discretion, and even concealment, may be necessary. For women living in patriarchal situations or for those living in repressive regimes, any form of display would be dangerous. As noted above, interviews with North Korean refugees revealed that they would bury the phone in their garden when it was not in use (Kang et al., 2018). Similarly, the Palestinian teen girls who had covertly received a mobile phone from their boyfriends needed to hide them for fear of the consequences should their fathers find them (Cohen et al., 2007; HijaziOmari & Ribak, 2008). In these cases, there was no status to be gained, but rather taboo to be avoided. The functionality of the object was sought after, but the physical object itself was not to be celebrated as seen in other domestication analyses.

Incorporation Background Where objectification has a strong spatial dimension (and the integration of ICTs into a particular aesthetic), incorporation is directed at when and how a device is used and by whom (Silverstone et al., 1992). Layered onto this are the perceptions regarding the gendered, age-based, and status dimensions of use, that is, the consideration of who is seen as a legitimate user. In determining these issues, the moral sensibility of the user’s social sphere is brought to bear, and eventually, power is exercised. This process is particularly precarious when it comes to ICTs since they are, to some degree, undefined. ICTs often have features and uses that challenge other, more settled objects, e.g., the mobile phone can be a replacement for the landline phone. Thus, their adoption and use imply the need to rethink how, when, and by whom mediated-interpersonal communication is to take place. This process requires reference to wider moral registers (Berger & Luckmann, 1967).

Misunderstanding the functionalities of mobile communication In using a new technology, there is also a need to distinguish between its real and its imagined functionalities. Silverstone et al. (1992) note that it is in the incorporation phase that the individual is forced to sort between their abstract “marketing-based” notions of the device and the experienced reality. For example, we might not master the complexities of the device, and at the same time, we may discover uses and functionalities that were not considered by those who designed, built, and/or marketed the device. The use of an ICT can make obvious latent social rifts (Chib & Chen, 2011; Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Soleil Archambault, 2011). Latent schisms can be exposed when the new artefact arrives on the scene. Disagreements regarding who should use the ICT, questions about the cost of use, and disruptions to the sense of propriety can all come into play. It is in the incorporation stage that the fundamentally power-based dimensions of mobile phone use come to the surface. Mobile communication can expose the new user to various unfortunate and frustrating situations (Oreglia & Ling, 2017). For example, new users in Myanmar, who had never really used mediated communication, are often glad that their new mobile phones were configured to download a daily horoscope. Unbeknownst to them, however, they were charged for the service. Their first impression was that this unexpected functionality is truly wonderful. At the same time, they accused the service provider of stealing their money. It took some time before the local shop owner was able to sort out the misunderstanding. The situation, 115

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however, illuminates how the new ICT provided both positive and negative experiences to these neophyte users. Another example from Myanmar is in somewhat the same vein, showing how a potentially positive experience can be rendered in the opposite light. In this case, a user who, soon after starting to use a new smartphone, met a “friend” online who was interested in an exciting new business opportunity. The friend encouraged the user to arrange a bank transfer, etc. For experienced ( jaded) users, it is easy to see that this is a set-up for the typical online scam. For the new user, however, the excitement of being able to use a mobile phone was supercharged, given what she thought was the chance to also become rich (Oreglia & Ling, 2017). Other more seasoned friends were able to warn off the new user. Here again is an example of how an incorrect grasp of the mobile phone suggested that the mobile phone was truly a transcendent device since it could (falsely) promise access to unheard-of wealth. Likewise, the reality of the situation was a bitter disappointment. The experience derived from actually using the device shows how the incorporation stage can have a variety of moral and emotional dimensions. Another domain where the mobile phone underscores ambient beliefs and perceptions is in the practice of patriarchy. In many locations, the arrival of mobile communication has given rise to the perception that it is an illicit channel for extramarital affairs. In a context where the foundational assumption is that there is infidelity, the mobile phone is seen as an obvious tool through which betrayal can take place. Following Soleil Archambault (2011; see also Komen & Ling, n.d.) and her analysis of young couples in Mozambique, jealousy (that is the suspicion that one’s partner is untrue) is a commonly held belief. Soleil Archambault writes: Infidelity is indeed common and somewhat expected, especially from men but increasingly from women […] In some cases, however, jealous sentiments could translate into physical violence. As Angela, a young student, once told me, after showing me her bruised thighs: ‘[…] he would not bother beating me if he didn’t care about me’. (Soleil Archambault, 2011: 449)2 In this context, an unexpected text message on a woman’s phone can arouse suspicion (Komen & Ling, n.d.). Similarly, if the woman has the practice of erasing her text messages, that can also arouse suspicion since there is the idea that she is hiding something. Regardless of whether or not there were incriminating text messages, and regardless of whether or not the woman was having an affair, when there is the cultural assumption of infidelity, the mobile phone is suspected as a channel since it introduces the possibility for discreet and direct interaction (Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008). Finally, it is not only extramarital issues that can be carried out via the mobile phone. In addition, the device can be a conduit through which dark forces can operate and one can be cursed. Some users suspect that spirits that are transmitted via the mobile network can cause them bad luck (Djane & Ling, 2015; Katz, 2006). Because of this, they avoid taking calls from particularly suspicious numbers.

Innovative exploitation of mobile communication The previous discussion has circled around misunderstandings associated with use. In addition, users in the Global South have also developed innovative ways to exploit the new technology.

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This can be seen in the earlier use of so-called beeps or “missed calls” as a signalling system (Donner, 2007). Missed calls exploited the caller ID function of mobile communication to avoid the cost of sending a text or making a call. In this system, one person would call another, but hang up before the “receiving” person took the call. The missed calls were often between, for example, a couple who had agreed beforehand that when one received a missed call from the other, that the person sending the missed call was done with work and needed to be retrieved. Thus, the two interlocutors needed to have agreed on the meaning of the missed call beforehand. This use of the mobile system was not considered a “legitimate” mobile service by service providers since it did not generate revenue. That said, this type of messaging could constitute a major portion of all traffic in a mobile network (Geirbo et al., 2007). Their use shows how users in resource-constrained situations seek out innovative practices.3 Another innovative use of the mobile communication system was the use of pre-paid airtime as a way to transmit payments. In this case, the person wanting to send a small sum of money from, for example, a larger city to a village bought a comparable amount of pre-paid airtime on a scratch card. They then sent the code for the airtime to the person to whom they owed the money. The recipient could then either use the airtime themselves, or they could go to a local store and, in effect, sell the airtime to the store and thus redeem the cash (usually minus a handling fee). This system meant that there was no need to send cash that can be pilfered nor is there the need to deal with banks or wiring services. Seen from the perspective of domestication, these examples illuminate different ways in which mobile telephony is incorporated into the flux of the individual’s life. Many of these are different from the incorporation of mobile communication in the Global North. They show how the idea of incorporation can be readjusted to encompass other cultural contexts. The vignettes outlined here show innovative use. They also show how the legitimacy of use (and indeed the legitimacy of ownership) gets played out in the context of patriarchy.

Conversion Background In classical “home-based” domestication, the conversion stage describes how a particular device that has come into the home (as well as its newly minted owners) is judged in the eyes of others who are not members of the home (Silverstone et al., 1992). Artefacts of personal consumption, such as mobile phones, can be seen in a similar way (Haddon, 2020). Just as the appropriation phase moves the artefact from the commercial sphere to the home, the conversion phase makes the item symbolically accessible to a different sphere which has its own criteria for evaluation and assessment (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979). An important point is that while the domestic sphere may judge the object using one criterion, the judgement of the wider sphere may use another set of criteria. Silverstone et al. (1992) drew on Veblen (1973) and his notion of conspicuous consumption when framing this phase of domestication. There is implicit in the notion of conversion, as with the earlier phases in the domestication process, that, for example, a mobile phone is an object that the user feels will impress others and play into elevating his/her status. In the conversion phase, the question is reversed. There is the idea that the others who view the device will bring their own aesthetic and cultural sensibilities to bear when considering the user’s possession of the device. They may consider it as worthy of awe, as the height of kitsch. To its credit, the domestication approach considers this as a part of the consumption and appropriation process.

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Discrete consumption of mobile communication As has been noted above, the mobile phone is not necessarily an object of universal acclaim. Indeed, other’s knowledge that one has a device can bring unpleasant consequences and it can label the individual in unfortunate ways. For example, using a mobile phone on the street (de Souza e Silva et al., 2011) or in public transport (Paragas, 2005) can mark the individual as a target for theft. As has been discussed, in patriarchal societies, the use of mobile technologies by those who, in the eyes of society, should not be using them is a threat to the reputation of the home and the patriarch (Cohen et al., 2007; Hijazi-Omari & Ribak, 2008; Malhotra & Ling, 2020). The fact that wives or daughters have a mobile phone can be seen as a signal that the husband or father lacks control. This was seen, for example, among midwives’ use of mobile telephones in the Aceh province of Indonesia. Chib and Chen (2011) examined a project to distribute mobile phones to midwives when few others in the local society had these devices. While there were good functional reasons for the women to have mobile phones, their access to the technology conflicted with the broader, patriarchal ethic that assumed men should be the first to adopt new technology. Some women resolved this issue by simply giving the phones to their husbands. Thus, the project functioned as a type of breaching experiment writ large (Woolgar, 2005). Women’s access to the technology made explicit the implicit gender/power-based assumptions regarding who should have access to the technology. The resolution was to give the men the devices so as to realign the situation. As noted above, the women in North Korea needed to go even further in their efforts to hide their mobile phones for fear of the consequences. Thus, while there can be a status associated with the adoption and consumption of mobile communication, it can also carry with it fears and threats.

Decommissioning/recommissioning ICTs When considering the Global South, an extension to the domestication process can be examining how decommissioned ICTs from the Global North are eventually recommissioned in the Global South. The domestication literature does not have a strong focus on the antiquation of ICTs (Natale, 2016). The devices that were at one time the sleek markers of social status, with time lose their lustre and perhaps even become an indication of being decidedly behind the fashion curve (Fortunati, 2005; Ling, 2001; Simmel, 1904). Just as there is the need to manage the integration of new ICTs into our lives, there is also the need to manage their extraction. The used phones can be added to landfills or they can be recycled for their fundamental elements (Cooper et al., 2020; Ess, 2020; Hielscher et al., 2007). Alternatively, they can be refurbished and resold. Indeed, many of the mobile devices that are used in the Global South have had a previous career in other locations (Mathews, 2007; Qiu & Wallis, 2009; Wallis et al., 2013). Seen from the perspective of domestication, this process suggests restarting the cycle, albeit with a device that has lost some of its original “shrink-wrapped” lustre. There is often the implicit understanding that the recommissioned phone may have a sub-standard battery, a pirated operative system among other scratches, faults, and flaws. In this recycling, the same mechanisms noted above can be in operation, namely that men are able to buy new, though often cheap Chinese shanzhai (Lu, 2021) phones while women consume second-hand phones (Tacchi & Chandola, 2015; Wallis, 2011). In this, the domestication process would then be re-enacted, albeit with a device that has been through the drill one time before. 118

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Conclusion The elements of domestication are, to be sure, fruitful heuristics with which to examine the use of mobile communication in a variety of social contexts. The different phases provide insight into how technologies such as the mobile phone (and now the smartphone) are first understood; how they make the transition from the commercial world to the sphere of the individual; how they are integrated into everyday life; and finally, how the device comes to tag the individual in the eyes of others. In this sense, domestication traces the process of embedding technology into a particular social context just as it traces the evolution of users’ understanding/use of the technology. The approach was framed around the consumption of ICTs in the Global North where the different ICTs present the need to integrate them into a context. The same context, the same aesthetic, and the same use of these devices, however, cannot be expected in the Global South. There is not the same process of forming preliminary understandings of the technology (Oreglia & Ling, 2017); there is not the same system of attributing status; and the devices do not have the same position in others’ estimation. While they can facilitate everyday life and lead to a better life (Aricat & Ling, 2020), this is not always the case. Indeed, rather than being seen as a positive trajectory, the use of a mobile phone can be seen as a wildly dangerous provocation to the authorities as in North Korea, a channel through which there is licentious behaviour or submission to Satan. That said, domestication is a useful heuristic. The different elements that are posited by the approach problematize issues and assumptions. Domestication provides us with a lens through which to see the adoption process. As noted, the eventual decommissioning of ICTs also bears further examination. In this way, the application of domestication to the use of mobile communication in the Global South among women provides insight and also relevant questions for further examination.

Notes 1 Indeed, the etymology of “to domesticate” arises from the word domesticus, e.g., that which belongs to the home. 2 According to Tacchi and Chandola (2015) as well as Stark (2013) and Horst and Miller (2005), the mobile phone is used to facilitate various types of sex-work. 3 The use of missed calls went indeed beyond simple functional messages to include a variety of specialized, though limited, functions (Donner, 2007; Geirbo et al., 2007).

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aricat, R.G. and Ling, R. (2020) ‘Valuable information and cashable scrap: Mobile phone adoption and non-adoption among scrap dealers and rag pickers in Myanmar,’ The Information Society, 34 (5) 242–251. Bakardjieva, M. (2006) ‘Domestication running wild. From the moral economy of the household to the mores of a culture,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 62–79. Baym, N.K. (2010) Personal connections in the digital age, Cambridge: Polity. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1967) The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge, Hamburg: Anchor. Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. (2006) ‘Introduction,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1–18.

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Domesticating mobile communication Katz, J.E. (2006) Magic in the air: Mobile communication and the transformation of social life, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Komen, L.J. and Ling, R. (2001) ‘“NO! We don’t have a joint account”: Mobile telephony, M-banking, and gender inequality in the lives of married women in western rural Kenya,’ Information, Communication and Society. 25 (3), 1–18. Ling, R. (2001) ‘“It is ‘in.’ It doesn’t matter if you need it or not, just that you have it.”: Fashion and the domestication of the mobile telephone among teens in Norway,’ Presented at the conference “Il corpo umano tra tecnologie, comunicazione e moda” (The human body between technologies, communication and fashion). January 2001 at Triennale di Milano, Milano, January, 2001 Ling, R., Aricat, R.G., Panchapakesan, C., Oreglia, E. and Lwin, M. (2017) ‘Mobile communication in Myanmar,’ in G. Goggin and M. McLelland (eds.) Routledge companion to global internet histories, London: Routledge, 296–310. Ling, R., Nilsen, S. and Granhaug, S. (1999) ‘The domestication of video-on-demand folk understanding of a new technology,’ New Media & Society, 1 (1), 83–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 14614449922225492. Ling, R., Oreglia, E., Aricat, R.G., Panchapakesan, C. and Lwin, M. (2015) ‘The use of mobile phones among trishaw operators in Myanmar,’ International Journal of Communication, 9, 3583–3600. Ling, R., Parekh, P., Zainudeen, A. and Galpaya, H. (2017) ‘Rationalization of mobile telephony by small-scale entrepreneurs in Myanmar,’ Information, Communication and Society, 22 (3), 420–436. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1391310. Lu, M. (2021) ‘Translating a Chinese approach? Rural distribution and marketing in Ghana’s phone industry,’ Media, Culture & Society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720987811. Lynne, A. (2000) Nyansens makt—En studie av ungdom, identitet og klær, Rapport 4–2000, Statens institutt for forbruksforskning. Malhotra, P. and Ling, R. (2020) ‘Within contextual constraints: Mobile phone use among female  live-out domestic workers in Delhi,’ Information Technologies and International Development, 16, 32–46. Mathews, G. (2007) ‘Chungking mansions: A center of “low end globalization.”,’ Ethnology, 46 (2), 169–182. Mwithia, J. (2016) Domesticating the mobile phone in Kibera: How Nairobi’s poor are integrating the mobile phone into their everyday lives, Doctoral dissertation, University of Technology, Sydney. Natale, S. (2016) ‘There are no old media,’ Journal of Communication, 66 (4), 585–603. Oreglia, E. and Ling, R. (2017) ‘Popular digital imagination: Information and communication technologies in the Global South,’ Journal of Communication, 68 (3), 570–589. https://doi.org/10.1093/ joc/jqy013. Paragas, F. (2005) ‘Being mobile with the mobile: Cellular telephony and renegotiations of public transport as public sphere,’ in R. Ling and P.E. Pedersen (eds.) Mobile communications, Singapore: Springer, 113–129. Qiu, J.L. and Wallis, C. (2009) Shanzhaiji and the transformation of local mediascape in Shenzhen. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical change and everyday life,’ in R. Silverstone and R. Mansell (eds.) Communication by design: The politics of information and communication technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 44–74. Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (1992) Consuming technologies, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, 15–31. Simmel, G. (1904) ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly, 10, 130–155. Soleil Archambault, J. (2011) ‘Breaking up “because of the phone” and the transformative potential of information in Southern Mozambique,’ New Media & Society, 13 (3), 444–456. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444810393906. Sørensen, K.H. (2006) ‘Domestication: The enactment of technology,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 185–204. Stark, L. (2013) ‘Transactional sex and mobile phones in a Tanzanian slum,’ Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 38 (1), 12–36.

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8 THE CEASELESS DOMESTICATION OF MOBILE COMMUNICATION IN ASIA Benefits, trade-offs and responses Sun Sun Lim and Tricia Marjorie Fernandez Introduction The fervent adoption of smartphones and mobile communication in Asia has heralded transformations in people’s everyday routines. Asia is widely regarded as a techno-optimistic region where many countries invest heavily in education and ICT infrastructure for economic advancement (Lim & Goggin, 2014). The leapfrogging capabilities of the smartphone that literally puts computing and internet access into peoples’ palms have made it the most pervasive internet-connected device. Asia is undoubtedly also ‘mobile first,’ where smartphones are the principal device people first turn to for going online, be they in rural or urban areas. It is in this very climate that Asia’s ‘super apps’ such as WeChat in China, Gojek in Indonesia and Grab in Malaysia and Singapore have become a mainstay, enabling users to perform a gamut of tasks, including transportation bookings, ordering food, shopping online, banking, reading the news and playing games. Along with these super apps has sprung a thriving ecosystem of countless other apps that cater to every need, from the flighty to the weighty. The convenience, versatility and sheer indispensability of this rich mosaic of apps have ensured that mobile communication is not just domesticated in daily life but has become virtually entrenched. This chapter will engage with the mobile communication-infused nature of everyday routines across Asia to consider peoples’ lived realities, while pondering issues of dependency, privacy and work-family balance through the lens of technology domestication. The convenience, versatility and efficiency of mobile communication and super apps have made people even more reliant on their smartphones. To appreciate the full significance of mobile communication and its shape-shifting possibilities, especially within micro-settings such as homes and workplaces, we apply the technology domestication framework to analyse how mobile communication has been incorporated into quotidian routines in all facets of life. It is in studying the mundane and the prosaic that technology domestication theory comes into its own, empowering us to critically examine how the growing reliance on mobile communication has unleashed possibilities and risks. In particular, the emergence and intense usage

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-13

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of super apps call into question issues of publicness, dependency, privacy, work-life balance and digital divides. Technology domestication theory has long enabled us to delve into detail the processes of media appropriation in the household’s moral economy, where media is doubly articulated as both an object and a conduit for content (Hartmann, 2006). With the growing prevalence of mobile communication, domestication theory has been increasingly deployed by researchers to examine ‘mediated mobilism,’ where technological affordances are examined through the prism of a combination of ‘possibility and actuality in both the social and the technological’ as appropriated and interpreted by users (Hartmann, 2013: 47). With technology domestication theory as our analytical lens, we first outline the nature of smartphone and mobile communication adoption across Asia and highlight its ‘mobilefirst’ characteristics. We then explain the emergence and success of super apps in particular Asian countries and how they are situated within a broader app ecosystem. Following this, we review research evidence that explicates how these apps are domesticated into users’ routines in all realms of life. We then consider how this domestication of smartphone apps and the growing incorporation of mobile communication have unleashed both possibilities and risks. We conclude by putting forward market, policy or public education interventions that will help to ensure that mobile communication grants people benefits with minimal costs.

Key trends in mobile communication in Asia Asia’s current digitalisation wave has been marked by several significant trends. Not only do more people own smartphones, but a growing number are spending an increasing amount of time on their smartphones and on the internet. Gaming analytics company Newzoo (2021) reported that China is ranked number one globally in terms of the number of smartphone users, at 953.5 million, followed by India at 492.8 million. Southeast Asia is also a closely watched market noted for its astounding growth rates. Over a decade ago, 80% of the Southeast Asian population had no internet connectivity and limited internet access. Fast forward to today, Southeast Asians are the most engaged mobile internet users in the world (Google, Temasek & Bain, 2019). There are now 440 million internet users in the region (Google, Temasek & Bain, 2021), of whom nine in ten are connected to the internet mainly through their mobile phones (Google et al., 2019). The region’s internet economy has also hit $170 billion and is expected to grow to $360 billion by 2025 (Google et al., 2021). Although the number of smartphone users remains the highest in China and India, users from the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia are more active online, connecting to the mobile internet for an average of 5–6 hours per day. Additionally, they are among the top ten countries in the world by mobile internet usage, exceeding the global average of 3 hours and 39 minutes (We Are Social and Hootsuite, 2021). Digital services like mobile e-commerce, ride-hailing and food delivery are popular in Southeast Asia, outperforming even China. Indonesia is the top country worldwide in terms of the percentage of internet users aged 16–64 who bought something online via any device in the past month, at 87.1%. Thailand and Malaysia came in at third and fourth places (83.6% and 82.9%, respectively). With super apps such as Gojek and Grab, it is not surprising that Indonesia came out top again worldwide in terms of the percentage of users who have used an online ride-hailing or taxi booking service in the past month (65.3%) and those who have used an online service to order take-away food for delivery (74.4%) (We Are Social and Hootsuite, 2021).

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The ceaseless domestication of mobile communication in Asia Table 8.1 Top 10 Countries Worldwide by Number of Smartphone Users

Rank

Country

Total Population

Smartphone Penetration Rate (Users/Population)

Smartphone Users

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

China India United States Indonesia Brazil Russia Japan Mexico Vietnam Germany

1.44B 1.39B 332.9M 276.4M 214.0M 145.9M 126.1M 130.3M 98.2M 83.9M

66.0% 35.4% 82.2% 61.7% 55.4% 70.1% 65.9% 57.4% 68.2% 78.8%

953.5M 492.8M 273.8M 170.4M 118.5M 102.2M 83.0M 74.8M 66.9M 66.2M

Source: Global Mobile Market Report (Newzoo, 2021).

The evidence above shows that the rapid adoption of smartphones, mobile apps and the internet has fostered a pronounced ‘mobile first’ culture in Asia. We will now look at how the culture is further enriched by intensive mobile app innovation in other realms of life, including social interaction, education, religious worship, environmentalism and fitness, highlighting notable apps in Asia.

Social interaction For most users in Southeast Asia, social media and communication apps account for almost half the time they spend on the mobile internet (Google et al., 2019). Smartphone applications simplify everyday life and foster social interactions via social network and messenger platforms (Montag, Zhao, et al., 2018). Some common social media and messaging apps that come to mind include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and most recently, hit mobile video app TikTok. Even in developing nations like Myanmar, Facebook serves as a multipurpose app operating not only as a social network, but also as a search engine that is akin to Google (Leong, 2017). Indeed, ‘Facebook is such an essential product that phone shops have capitalised on the installation and set-up of Facebook on phones’ (Leong, 2017: 152). Such is the dominance of such social media apps in the lives of consumers, especially those in Southeast Asia.

Education With the growing popularity of smartphone apps, mobile technologies have immense potential for educational use (Wai, Ng, Chiu, Ho & Lo, 2018). Previous research has shown that the use of apps in mobile learning and teaching can engage students in lectures and apps have contributed to significant improvement in students’ learning (Nevin, 2009). A study of undergraduates in Hong Kong found that students often use mobile apps to participate in learning activities related to their academic studies, especially for communication and collaborative working, accessing and checking resources such as dictionaries (Wai et al.,

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2018). The study also established that students have a positive attitude towards using apps in everyday life as well as for learning. In less developed parts of Asia where access to education is less forthcoming, mobile communication can help to level the playing field. In India, for example, children’s learning app BYJU aims to combat the ‘one-size fits all’ approach due to the disadvantageous teacher-student ratio in many regions in the country. BYJU offers a gamified and personalised learning experience for students which comprises watch-and-learn videos, animation and simulations. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic compelling a massive shift towards online learning, mobile learning in Asia is predicted to grow in scale and scope along with greater innovation in virtual reality (VR) and gamified apps (Leung, 2016).

Religious worship In the more spiritual realm of life, people’s religious rituals also reflect the high penetration of mobile technologies in Asia (Muslim, 2017). A notable example is One Day One Juz, an online Islamic community based in Indonesia that utilises smartphones and WhatsApp to support daily religious practices. Its members are required to recite one juz (a section of the Quran) per day and report back daily to their group chat. Hence, members can connect with the group administrators and other members for ‘motivation, reminding, and warnings regarding their recitation practice’ (Muslim, 2017: 38). Other than WhatsApp, Recite Lab also assists Muslims in Malaysia to read the Quran by offering them validation and feedback on their recitals (Recite Lab, 2022). This trend of deploying mobile communication for religious services has been noted in all religions that are dominant in the region, with COVID-19 accelerating adoption as well. At the start of the pandemic, churches in Singapore swiftly shifted their worship services online to prevent the spread of the virus as they streamed their services on apps like YouTube (Today Online, 2020) and even held ‘live’ services via Zoom (Lee, 2020). What followed was the rapid rise in hybrid physical and digital churches (Lee, 2020) as congregants can still watch and participate in online services to this day. While mobile communication and digital services offer people with more ways to practise their faith (Muslim, 2017), it also provides religious institutions with a viable platform for promoting offline and online religious services (Campbell, 2013; Muslim, 2017).

Environmentalism In view of the growing awareness of environmental concerns like climate change and air pollution, smartphone apps have also been marshalled to encourage environmentally-friendly behaviour. Environmental apps, or eco-apps, serve as vital platforms to facilitate environmental education and action because of their omnipresence, capabilities and customisation (Typhina, 2015). For instance, one study investigated the effectiveness of gamified ecoapps. They focussed on students in Malaysia taking environment-related courses, who were required to use an eco-app that rewards players for performing environmentally-friendly acts (Mahmud, Ikhsan & Zakaria, 2018). The findings showed that students who used the app, JouleBug, engaged in more environmentally-friendly activities compared to those who did not use the app. Besides apps that urge people to do more for the environment, apps that help people protect themselves from environmental hazards are seeing growing use. In Hong Kong, the PRAISE-HK app was launched in 2019 to help users minimise their exposure to outdoor 126

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air pollution. It leverages big data and sensor technologies to provide futuristic real-time information and forecast air quality and health risk information down to street level. By providing the public with differentiated air quality information, it is believed that the app can help shift public perceptions of the scourge of air pollution and ultimately propel consumers to play their part in alleviating the problem (Sharon, 2019).

Fitness With smartphones becoming virtual appendages as people use them all the time for a multitude of purposes, it is no wonder that their ability to track individual activity has been much leveraged, especially for health and fitness apps. Fitness tech is a fast-growing industry sector in Asia, particularly in India and China. Principally, these two governments are promoting physical health as a key tranche of their national policies. India’s most well-funded fitness tech company is CureFit. It consists of a three-tiered health and wellness platform – eat. fit (nutrition guides), cult.fit (workout classes) and mind.fit (mental health support). It also includes a mobile app that monitors users’ health data and incentivises them for healthy behaviours (CB Insights, 2017). In China, top fitness app Keep has reached over 300 million users in 2021 (Liao, 2021). It enables users to access complimentary exercise videos and track their workouts. It also integrates social media and e-commerce within the app, providing a platform for fitness fans to post their own content and for vendors to advertise fitness classes and sell fitness gear using mobile payment methods like WeChat Pay or Alipay (CB Insights, 2017). The Singapore government is also encouraging health and wellness through mhealth (mobile health) with its Healthy 365 app. Users can monitor their daily physical activity and take part in challenges like the ‘National Steps Challenge’ to earn rewards based on their activity levels. The challenge was widely successful as the first three challenge periods accumulated more than 5.5, 12.2 and 35.4 million daily physical activity records, respectively (Yao et al., 2020). Other challenges include the ‘Eat, Drink, Shop Healthy Challenge’ which incentivises users to choose healthier food and drink options (Health Hub, 2022). The success of the Healthy 365 app shows that mhealth-based interventions, including financial rewards, can be effectively scaled at the population level (Yao et al., 2020). As all the preceding examples demonstrate, the combination of portability, ubiquity, connectivity, and multi-functionality has made these smartphone fitness apps part and parcel of everyday life.

The dominance of super apps In light of Asia’s mobile first and mobile online traits, it is an archetypal example of how the internet and mobile applications have transformed the way businesses exploit opportunities to meet ever-changing customer demands and to trigger new demands as well (Nurqamarani, Jonathan, Gaffar & Indrawati, 2020). Smartphones and their applications have generated fresh revenue streams for technology companies, altered how people communicate and are situated within media environments ( Jin & Yoon, 2016). This is the confluence of factors that has ushered in super apps – ‘Swiss-army-style’ apps that do everything (Steinberg, 2020). The term ‘super app’ was apparently coined in 2010 by Mike Lazaridis, the founder of BlackBerry: Super apps are integrated with other apps, giving a seamless experience across the device. They’re contextual – aware of things like your location and status. Super apps 127

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are apps that once you start using them, you wonder how you ever previously lived without them. Lazaridis was referring to BlackBerry apps that could ‘talk to each other’ and were hardware-dependent. However, modern super apps are hardware-agnostic; there are no outstanding differences when one uses a super app to different mobile operating systems (Rodenbaugh, 2020). What seems to have started the super app phenomenon that is especially pronounced in Asia is China’s WeChat (Rodenbaugh, 2020). The success of WeChat in China in terms of its market penetration and growth in its diverse functionality has made it a textbook example of successful technological disruption. Within Asia, other countries in Southeast Asia also embarked on the super app wave with the emergence of Gojek and Grab, both of which have achieved a ‘decacorn’ status (start-ups valued above US$10 billion) (The Business Times, 2019). Super apps have been observed to bear three main characteristics: (i) comprising an ecosystem of different apps, e.g., ride-hailing, e-commerce, payments, instant messaging, food and grocery delivery; (ii) being used on a daily basis and (iii) having payment facilities for daily transactions (Sianipar, 2021). These are what differentiate super app companies from the revered FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) of the West. Indeed, Amazon has since been delivering groceries and also ventured into video streaming, while Facebook has its own messenger app. Nonetheless, Sianipar (2021) argues that they are not true super apps because users need to use different apps to access different features. Rodenbaugh (2020) further states that super apps should have at least one service or feature that has a high open rate. For instance, WeChat started with messaging, while Gojek and Grab started with ride-hailing. In recent times, ride-hailing services have been among consumers’ top preferences (Kee, Rusdi, Mokhtar, Ridzuan, & Abdullah, 2021) as it was the second biggest performing sector of Southeast Asia’s internet economy in 2019 (Google et al., 2019). It has almost tripled in value, from $2.5 billion in 2015 to $6 billion in 2021, albeit suffering a $1.5 billion drop in two years ($7.5 billion in 2019) probably due to the pandemic (Google et al., 2019, 2021). Its value is predicted to grow to $19 billion in 2025 (Google et al., 2021). Southeast Asia’s top two super apps, Gojek and Grab, warrant a closer analysis, given their pervasive reach and impressive growth. Gojek is Indonesia’s first ‘decacorn’ start-up and the first super app as well (Nurqamarani et al., 2020). Founded in 2010 with the main aim of solving Jakarta’s traffic woes, it started as a call centre comprising only 20 motorcycle-taxi drivers or ojek (Gojek, 2022). Gojek provides a plethora of services ranging from online transportation, food delivery, courier service, online payment and news and entertainment services within a single application (Nurqamarani et al., 2020). The Gojek app was launched in January 2015 for users in Indonesia to offer motorbike ride-sharing (GoRide), delivery (GoSend) and shopping (GoMart) services. At present, Gojek Singapore only offers ridehailing services, but it is working on expanding other features. Within Indonesia, Gojek has become a virtual one-stop platform with over 20 services, connecting users with over two million registered driver-partners, and 500,000 GoFood merchants, chalking up over 170 million total downloads across the region. With the ease of accessibility of products and services across multiple sectors, Gojek has been helping to generate more value for society, enhancing efficiency and productivity, as well as supporting financial inclusion by providing financial services previously inaccessible to the unbanked (Gojek, 2022). In Southeast Asia, Gojek’s main competitor is Grab, which has its headquarters in Singapore. Founded in 2012, it now operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, 128

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Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan. Today, Grab has become Southeast Asia’s largest mobile technology company connecting millions of customers to legions of drivers, merchants and businesses (Kee et al., 2021). The company started in Malaysia as an online booking taxi service called MyTeksi. From these humble beginnings, it has metamorphosed into a super app that provides rides, food delivery and financial services, including loans, insurance, payments (GrabPay) and investments. Grab aims to ultimately transform itself into a virtual bank for Southeast Asia’s 600 million strong population (Vaswani, 2021). At present, Grab has 187 million users, 25 million monthly transacting users and 160 million app downloads. There were also 78,000 merchants onboarded to the GrabMerchant platform between March and April 2020 (Smith, 2021). Beyond Southeast Asia, super apps have also made their mark elsewhere on the continent, particularly in East Asia. LINE is an essential part of the social media landscape in Japan (Ohashi, Kato & Hjorth, 2017). It was developed in response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and created as an online method of communication that did not depend on the destroyed telecommunications infrastructure (Statista, 2021a). LINE provides text messaging services among individuals or groups and allows users to make free phone or video calls. A unique feature of LINE is its use of stickers, which allows communication without the need for text messaging (Ohashi et al., 2017). According to Ohashi et al. (2017), its stickers are part of Japan’s kawaii (cute) culture, which have been pivotal to its success. LINE stickers are responsible for the proliferation of stickers on other platforms like WeChat and Facebook. Amateur producers can even sell their own stickers in the Creators Market in LINE, hence fostering a sense of entrepreneurship (Steinberg, 2020). Besides communication functions, LINE provides freemium games, allows users to order taxis, has indoor maps of shopping malls, acts as a news hub, offers music and video streaming services, and affords direct-to-user advertising (Steinberg, 2020). Additionally, LINEPay, which enables users to make payments at affiliated online and brick-and-mortar stores, and to send money to one another, was launched in 2014 (Staykova & Damsgaard, 2016). There are 167 million monthly active users in the key markets of Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia as of September 2020 (Statista, 2021b) and it reached 86 million monthly active users in Japan during the third quarter of 2020 (Statista, 2021a). Lastly, the behemoth of all messaging apps in Asia is WeChat. Launched by the Chinese multinational Tencent Holdings in 2011 (Montag, Becker & Gan, 2018), it is one of the most important smartphone apps in China and is ‘inseparable from its users’ everyday habits’ (Chen, Mao & Qiu, 2018: 2). As it goes beyond the features of its closest Western counterpart, WhatsApp, this super app offers a variety of services such as messaging, socialising, mobile payment (WeChat Pay) and even integrates urban services by allowing users to book transportation or to pay for traffic fines. Like the other super apps described above, WeChat offers free video and voice call features (Montag et al., 2018). In terms of social media, WeChat Moments is a core feature of the super app. Moments is a platform where users can post texts, upload pictures, repost articles and like Facebook give a ‘thumbs up’ by clicking on the ‘like’ button and comment on others’ posts (Huang & Miao, 2021; Wang, Nie, Li, & Zhou, 2018). As of December 2020, WeChat had approximately 1.23 billion monthly active users, ranking first among the most popular Asia-based mobile messaging apps (Statista, 2021b). Growing recognition of the appeal of a comprehensive suite of app services has motivated other ICT corporations to strategically build on their business models and augment their existing apps. As a result, more aspiring super apps seek to cater to different needs rather than being singularly focussed. This is exemplified by food delivery apps. When online food 129

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delivery first started, it was a niche service that was selectively used by a small group of users (Google et al., 2019). In 2021, it was estimated that the size of the online food delivery sector in Southeast Asia would be worth $23 billion by 2025 (Google et al., 2021). Of course, in the wake of the pandemic, this projection will likely rise as more people are ordering food online due to social distancing measures. The pandemic has even spurred food delivery apps to venture into grocery deliveries (Chia, 2020). Foodpanda is a prime example of a food delivery app that could be on its way to becoming a super app. It has grown into the biggest food delivery app in Asia, excluding China (The Business Times, 2021), and currently operates in 12 countries in Asia and in over 400 cities (Foodpanda, 2022). Foodpanda diversified into online grocery delivery by launching Pandamart in 2019. It serves as Asia’s largest network of cloud grocery stores selling various items, including daily essentials and fresh produce from SMEs and local grocers, all delivered within 25 minutes. It has since been introduced in 40 cities across eight markets in the region (Foodpanda, 2021a). It also recently launched pandapay, an e-wallet-like feature built into the platform which simplifies the refund process. If customers cancel their orders, the money will be sent straight to the pandapay balance (Foodpanda, 2021b), which can be used to order food in the future. While pandapay can now only be used within the platform, it has the potential to transform into an e-wallet service like GrabPay. With more such innovations in the pipeline, Foodpanda could well be joining the ranks of Asia’s top super apps.

With benefits come trade-offs As the preceding sections reveal, the adoption of mobile communication in Asia is fierce, powered by the ubiquity of smartphones, a thriving market of versatile, multi-functional super apps and a vibrant ecosystem of apps catering to every aspect of daily life. With a relatively young and technophilic population, coupled with state support for technologisation in many countries in Asia, it stands to reason that mobile communication has been adopted and domesticated to a great extent as evidenced by the high penetration and usage of these super apps. This is where the technology domestication framework can be highly illuminating in enabling us to appreciate the full significance of mobile communication and its shapeshifting possibilities, especially within micro-settings such as homes and workplaces. There is already considerable research within Asia on how mobile communication has been domesticated and incorporated into users’ quotidian routines in all facets of life. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognise that the growing reliance on mobile communication has unleashed both possibilities and risks. In particular, the emergence and intense usage of super apps calls into question issues of publicness, dependency, privacy, work-life balance and digital divides. With almost everyone digitally connected through a panoply of social media platforms, expectations around online self-presentation and social networking have raised the issue of emotional labours. A study of transnational households of Chinese women living in Singapore with their children and connecting with left-behind family and friends in China examined their use of WeChat and other social media platforms. It found that WeChat in particular provided them with a viable link to their acquaintances and loved ones, facilitating the maintenance of relationships, family ties and access to material resources. However, these women also became more burdened with the pressures of ‘life archiving’ where they had to take, upload and share photographs, videos and status updates of their lives on WeChat and Facebook for their disparate network of family and friends (Wang & Lim, 2020b). Such intensive identity work was by no means a trivial exercise, but often required careful 130

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calibration to ensure acceptance and status in mediated groups and in accordance with group norms. The same study also found that gender norms and power hierarchies that exist in the household are replicated online and introduce a form of technologically charged emotional burden. These women who were living apart from their husbands were often weighed down by ‘expectation asymmetry’ (Lim, 2016) where their left-behind husbands could call or message them at will and expect an instant response, whereas they themselves could choose to ignore their wives’ calls or messages (Wang & Lim, 2020a). Although mobile communication helped these couples keep in constant contact, such ceaseless connectivity impinged on these women’s autonomy over their personal time. Indeed, there is emerging evidence to suggest that such pressures accompanying the intensifying use of mobile communication are leading people to de-domesticate technologies. One study of WeChat Moments showed how people temporarily or even permanently reject social media. It found that the app conditioned in people habitual use that they found time-wasting and made them feel ‘kidnapped and controlled by it’ to the point of being ‘disruptive and oppressive’ (Huang & Miao, 2021). Beyond the social realm, the use of WeChat had also changed the institutional logics of workplaces with persistent connectivity becoming the norm and employees expected to be instantly and constantly contactable via WeChat at all hours and days of the week. To resist such adverse trends, the respondents ‘re-objectified’ the Moments app by moving it to a less prominent location on the phone screen, setting time limits on its use, reducing usage frequency and even disengaging from the app through cycles of ‘using it and stopping and reusing it and stopping again’ (Huang & Miao, 2021). Fundamentally, this process of rebooting their usage of the app was their bid to regain a semblance of work-life balance and agency, even as they recognised that they could not uninstall the app because of its paramount importance in their lives. This was certainly the case with the families interviewed for my book on parenting in the digital age. Using the technology domestication framework, I argue elsewhere that the mobile communication era has heralded the practice of transcendent parenting, enabled and intensified by the multitude of apps, channels and platforms that link parents to their children and the major institutions in their lives (Lim, 2020). At every stage of their children’s development, commencing at infancy and culminating in their entry into adulthood, the mobile-enabled parent seeks to transcend every realm of their children’s lives – the physical distance between them and their children, their children’s offline and online social interaction milieus and the ‘timeless time’ that makes parenting seem ceaseless and relentless. This creates a conundrum for parents because they become overwhelmed with tasks such as managing online learning platforms and gradebook apps, parent-to-parent WhatsApp chats, SMS communication with their children’s teachers and reviewing their children’s social media activity so as to provide the necessary guidance. Parents may then feel increasingly burdened and buckle under a parenting time famine, while children can become over-reliant on parents and have fewer opportunities for fostering independence and autonomy. Parents must thus negotiate such challenges in an age of intense mobile communication. However, shifting from a situation of excess to one of access, research on the domestication of mobile communication in less technologically advanced countries exposes a rather different set of difficulties. An intriguing study on Myanmar’s fledgling mobile phone market interviewed phone shop operators in Yangon to understand how people acquire and use apps (Leong, 2017). It found that new phone adopters face budget constraints for device and internet plans, limited access to apps and poor English language proficiency. Borrowing from the concept of ‘warm experts’ (Bakardjieva, 2005), these new adopters depended on ‘warm gatekeepers’ – tech-savvy friends who could share their technical expertise, knowledge of 131

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the latest apps and even to share their app downloads. These gatekeepers used an app such as Zapya that rides on smartphones’ private wireless hotspot capabilities to facilitate peer-topeer sharing that circumvents mobile data fees and Wi-Fi requirements. Mobile phone shops also stepped in to plug digital gaps, offering phone setup and app installation services for a fee. These shops tend to be located in urban areas and cater to customers who lack personal networks that they can tap for app downloads and advice. While in mature markets phone users easily download apps onto their own phones in a mundane and unremarkable fashion, resource-poor users in emerging markets must engage the help of these gatekeepers. This has implications for which apps gain popularity and how they influence individuals’ online access and subsequent engagement with their smartphones and the online space. Indeed, the findings suggest that many of these new adopters lack a fundamental understanding of the internet ecosystem and seem to regard Facebook as the internet, mistaking it for a search engine and using it as such. In contrast, they found Google too complicated and present a deluge of information. It was also only mentioned for work-related search purposes, international news and technical information. These users’ skewed understanding of the online information landscape has implications for the kinds of information they then access through their smartphones and the quality of that information. The aforementioned studies have taken the domestication approach to capturing the incorporation of mobile communication into the everyday lives of individuals and families in various Asian countries. The domestication framework, through its attention to individual processes of technology appropriation, and its focus on the moral economy undergirding relations within social networks, helps to shed light on the gratifications people have derived from mobile communication, but also exposed the inherent tensions. These pertain to the avid use of mobile communication in private and professional lives that has forged a culture of constant connectivity, rapid response and mutual reciprocity, thereby inducing stresses and strains in daily life that are not always well managed.

Conclusion In the face of technological advancements that offer impressive innovations, heightened connectivity and enhanced convenience, it is common for policy makers, investors, markets and consumers to be swept up in the wave of techno-optimism. The sheer utility of these technological innovations that are ripe with possibility can fan enthusiastic adoption and widespread deployment as we have witnessed in Asia’s embrace of mobile communication and its ecosystem of super apps and targeted apps. However, it also behoves us as academics to cast a critical gaze over these rapid technological developments and exercise circumspection about their implications for families and individuals in the throes of these changes, both shortand long-term. The equivocation some users hold towards these technological transformations, even as they recognise their virtues, is palpable as evidenced by the research. Taking on board these research insights, especially those adopting the domestication approach, we would like to put forward market, policy or public education interventions that will help to ensure that mobile communication grants people benefits with minimal costs. Precisely because mobile communication is so inextricably intertwined with our daily activities and responsibilities, it is the platform through which the peaks and troughs of life are experienced. For smartphone users, the constant flurry of notifications about everything from work commitments to familial obligations to social interactions makes the device ever-present in their lives. It is simultaneously a fount of support, a conduit of convenience but also an overwhelming source of stress. Its multi-functionality compels incessant usage 132

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and constant connectivity that demand great energy, ultimately taking a mental toll that users resent. As the research presented above evinces, users may not welcome such pressures but nevertheless do not see a realistic chance of escape. It is in the thick of this dilemma confronting users that the big technology companies constructing our mobile communication architecture must exercise greater responsibility. They must actively undertake to introduce more features that support users in moderating their device usage. Over the years, leading smartphone companies such as Apple and Samsung have introduced more features to help users monitor their screen time, moderate their device dependency, manage their notifications and control their availability to others. Social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have also introduced features that promote self-regulation in users and introduce ‘speed bumps’ that help users to free themselves from endlessly scrolling and viewing. As welcome as such features are, the onus of such self-regulation is placed on users who must resist the allure of technology – not an easy task for a mere individual. Policy-wise, we must also consider the role that regulators can play in imposing more obligations for technology companies to fulfil with regard to data protection and privacy. Technology companies have virtually unbridled abilities to amass and extract mountains of data from smartphone users, granting them the power to track user behaviour, activities, transactions, preferences and sentiments to a high degree of resolution (Lim & Bouffanais, 2022). This data already includes everything from financial history, health information, personal photographs, voice recordings and social media posts. Such data is then mined and exploited for consumer trends that companies use to refine their products and services. However, consumers remain uncompensated for their free ‘digital labour’ and must often contend with more intense surveillance and control (Abeele, De Wolf & Ling, 2018). To correct this inequity, regulators should introduce more levers to require that technology companies set limits on their data collection, establish protections for the digital rights of users and impose curbs on all forms of consumer surveillance. Because the companies behind super apps also wield control over a disproportionate amount of consumer information, data sharing must be mandated so that innovation by other players is not inhibited and academic research as well as public policy formulation can benefit (Lim & Bouffanais, 2022). Furthermore, another important policy intervention relates to the problem of the digital divide. Although mobile communication seems pervasive in Asia, there remain many communities that still lack access or only have access to a poor or passable standard as the aforementioned study of mobile phone app culture in Myanmar (Leong, 2017) highlights. With COVID-19 forcing a sudden shift towards digital services, including in education, health and commerce, the digitally disadvantaged have much to lose. Precisely because Asia is so heavily reliant on mobile communication, device support and affordable digital connectivity must be provided along with digital literacy training so that people across the socio-economic spectrum can function effectively in a digitalising environment. Only then can the playing field be meaningfully levelled in a region where mobile communication has been so extensively domesticated. Finally, a lifestyle of being always-on and always-connected via mobile communication may confer tremendous gains, but it also exacts a cost on individual and familial well-being. The unyielding norms surrounding publicness, contactability and reciprocity in the ongoing climate of mobile connectivity can adversely affect work-life balance and individual well-being. Civil society organisations must work in tandem with academics and public agencies to mount campaigns to educate the public on how they can use mobile communication in a manner that is manageable, beneficial and enjoyable. Smartphones need not be 133

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devices that remain untamed, unleashing unwelcome logics on their users. Instead, users should be taught ways to domesticate smartphones, apps and all mobile communication services in ways that align with their values and conform to their lifestyles.

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9 NUANCED DOMESTICATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA Intrigues of situated cultural affordances in Kenyan local ecologies of knowledge James Odhiambo Ogone

Introduction Older conversations about Africa with regard to technology have often painted a picture of a continent perpetually lagging behind the rest of the world. It is a fact that technological developments in Africa may not be at par with the advanced societies especially in the global North. However, contemporary discourse is gradually shifting towards contextual cultures and practices on the continent thus portraying a picture of societies keen on actively participating in the global technological discourse on their own terms. This has been clearly demonstrated in the intriguing adoption of technologies of communication in Africa. With the entry of social media, the African communication technologies scene is currently experiencing a boom that observers cannot continue to ignore. The meteoric rise in popularity of social media in Africa is attributed to the increased availability of internet connectivity on the continent. Over the last two decades or so, both government and private sector agencies have engaged in ambitious communication infrastructure projects, such as fibre-optic cables, as well as relevant sector reforms that have yielded significant positive results. This has been coupled with the availability of affordable smartphones that make internet connectivity a reality to many in unprecedented proportions. Available data show that by fourth quarter of the year 2022, the estimated number of internet users in Africa stood at 652,865,628 (Internet World Stats, 2022). The source further notes that Kenya’s internet users were 55,752,020 over the same period accounting for a penetration rate of 85.2%, which was the highest in Africa. Indeed, pundits have observed that Kenya is fast laying claim to the distinctive position as the major technology hub in sub- Saharan Africa since prominent firms, such as Google, IMB, Intel, and Microsoft, have opted for Nairobi as their continental or regional headquarters (Tully & Ekdale, 2014). Expanding Boyd and Ellison’s (2008) definition of social networking sites, Brunty and Helenek (2013) perceive social media as web-based technologies that encourage users to communicate with others within a network, creating, in the process, an environment for them to share content and/or connect through similar interests. In Africa, Kenya has one of the most robust technological communication sectors. This is evident, for instance, in DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-14

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mobile telephony where the country’s innovative mobile money transfer service, MPESA, has received global acclaim. On the social media front, Kenya ranks among the top countries in Africa, whose citizens are most active online. Indeed, Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) has built an extroverted reputation across the continent due to their aggressive engagement in online discourse. The Kenyan communication scene is currently awash with social media websites and applications whose popularities continue to rise by the day. Statistics availed by Wamuyu (2020) show that the most used social media among Kenyans are WhatsApp (89%), Facebook (81.7%), YouTube (51.6%), and Twitter (35%). In Africa, social media technologies often find themselves immersed in long-standing local socio-cultural dynamics whose comprehension is indispensable for a scholar interested in domestication. Indeed, the cultural contexts into which social media enter are not tabula rasa. On the contrary, the “offline everyday life” of the people is often characterized by activities that predate the advent of modern technologies of communication (Costa, 2018: 3643). By turning the spotlight on “older cultural idioms”, this chapter aims to demonstrate that the existing socio-cultural environment equally has a significant bearing on the successful domestication of social media technologies in Africa (Srinivasan, Diepeveen & Kerekwaivanane, 2019: 8). Coleman (2010: 488) argues in favour of the particularization of digital media in order to appreciate the “vernacular cultures” organized around, but not necessarily determined by, their properties. She adds that digital media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world. The understanding of the concept of “situated cultural affordances” adopted in this chapter enables the foregrounding of the dispensations, beliefs, and actions of the users that effectively serve as pre-conditions for the nuanced domestication of imported technologies. This draws attention to the user context cultures as opposed to technologies that are given prominence by the ordinary notion of affordance in technological adoption. This chapter intends to build a case for the critical acceptance and situated use of social media in Kenya in a manner that deconstructs the supposed stable architecture and logic of the new technologies.

Methodological procedures The current popularity of social media in Kenya calls for appropriate designs and methods of investigation to be adopted by researchers interested in making sense of the technologies and their use within the local contexts. This study adopts a descriptive design to enable an in-depth understanding of the phenomena of situated cultural affordances that guide the use of social media in Kenya. Since the data for the study is available online, digital ethnography was adopted as the appropriate method of data collection. Digital ethnography is ethnography mediated by digital technologies (Murthy, 2011). It engages in social enquiry in digitized spaces such as those availed by social media. Digital ethnography is therefore a suitable method for research on the rich existence of cultural life and representation taking place on digital platforms as is the case in this study (Kaur-Gill & Dutta, 2017). For the digital ethnographer, akin to the traditional ethnographer, interaction with the context of research remains key in making sense of the people’s lived experiences. However, it is distinct in its use of intensive mediated interaction with participants rather than direct contact (Hine, 2000; Pink et al., 2016). In the process, “complex connections” are technologically established to bridge the spatial dislocation of the researcher (Hine, 2000: 64). This study owes its success to the technological affordances of digital ethnography having been carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic when restrictions on face-to-face interactions were in force worldwide. 138

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Facebook and Twitter were selected for this study based on the criteria that they have a wide user-base in Kenya and that their content is largely publicly accessible. The researcher used online participation, virtual participant observation, and online focus groups derived from existing groups on Facebook and Twitter hashtags. The posts and discussions in these forums were purposively sampled with the criteria for inclusion being relevance and the level of intensity to which the text in question exhibits features of the phenomenon of cultural affordance. After the first relevant text was identified, iteration was used to obtain more texts to the point of redundancy. A collection of texts was made by means of exploiting the downloading, screenshot, and saving affordances of the various media.

Towards a situated cultural affordance perspective With the rapid development of the necessary infrastructures for computer-based technologies in Africa, social media have become among the most popular technological applications on the continent in recent times. As foreign technologies, their current widespread acceptance in the continent is largely attributable to the intriguing process of domestication at play in the host cultures. Domestication has been framed as the taming of the wildness of technologies to better suit the “home” environment and the daily routines of people’s lives with the intention of making them one’s own (Haddon, 2011; Hartmann, 2013). Domestication is indeed a useful concept for analysing the sense-making process behind the integration of media technologies into everyday life (Quandt & von Pape, 2010). However, this interesting theoretical framework could do with a more decisive focus on the local knowledge ecology of the user as a crucial variable in the successful adoption of new technologies, especially in the African context. The concept of “affordance” has recently emerged in discourses on the domestication of technologies. In the original sense in which it was used in the field of ecological psychology, affordance implies what the environment “offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either good or ill” (Gibson, 1977: 127) [emphasis in original]. The concept of affordance has since made its way into the domain of technology adoption where it is perceived as “action possibilities and opportunities that emerge from actors engaging with a focal technology” (Faraj & Azad, 2012: 238). This understanding of the concept of affordance is quite informative to this study as it gives room for the appreciation of the agency of the users of technologies who exploit the available “action possibilities” to express their creativity in the process of doing things with technology. However, it is significant to note that this position downplays contexts whose roles are reduced to the limits of the opportunities afforded to them by the technologies. Inspired by Courtois et al. (2011), this study turns the spotlight on context, especially its communal dimensions, as a way of gaining a comprehensive understanding of social media domestication in Kenya. Considering the peculiarities of technological domestication in the global South, there is need to avoid a narrow understanding of the concept of affordance. This chapter is drawn towards the more elastic sense in which some scholars use the term to encapsulate possibilities of going beyond the confines of the materiality of technologies. Indeed, affordances of technologies are “not reducible to their material constitution but are inextricably bound up with specific, historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life” (Bloomfield, Latham, & Vurdubakis, 2010: 415). This implies that affordances are “broader than the buttons, screens, and operating systems” of devices (Schrock, 2015: 1233). A reductive perception of affordances as mere “bundles of features” of technologies is thus inept as it fails to appreciate the fact that technologies “have social values and norms attached to them” (DjerfPierre, Ghersetti & Hedman, 2016: 2; Faraj & Azad, 2012: 255). 139

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Indeed, Morley (2009) adopts a critical stance against media studies approaches that are media-centric. As Pink et al. (2016) posit, focusing primarily on media has potentials of detracting attention from the specific contexts in which media practices take place. A media-centric approach therefore runs the heavy risk of constructing an unrealistic monolithic picture of social media use across the globe. Following Morley, Costa (2018) argues for the need to shift focus from the architecture and algorithms of social media to practices of usage within situated environments. As such, premium is bestowed upon “the varieties of practices of social media uses, which largely differ across social and cultural contexts” (Costa, 2018: 3643). The value of context as underscored here is in sync with the concept of “triple articulation” (Courtois et al., 2011; Hartmann, 2006) which calls for the understanding of media as object, text, and context. This chapter acknowledges that the socio-cultural context of the global South is distinct from that of the North; hence, care needs to be taken to unravel its intricate interaction with social media technologies. It is therefore necessary to adopt a nuanced domestication approach that takes into account the dynamics of the local cultural environments of technological adoption. This takes cue from Costa (2018: 3651) who proposes the term “affordances-in-practice” in recognition of the fact that affordances take shape only through specific material and social practices. Further inspiration is drawn from the notion of cultural affordances proposed by Ramstead, Veissiere, and Kirmaye (2016) in reference to the kind of affordances humans encounter in the niches they constitute. Against the backdrop of the forgoing theoretical debates on the concept of affordances, I seek to change the discourse radically to a decisive focus on the situated contexts within which social media technologies are domesticated by the Kenyan users. In the process, the focus will not be on the affordances availed to the users by the technologies but rather on how the contexts themselves give room for the domestication of the imported technologies. I therefore propose the term situated cultural affordances to refer to the unique dynamics of the environment provided by local cultures which create room for the domestication of social media technologies. I advance the argument that as enabling features for technological adoption, situated cultural affordances create the necessary fertile ground in the absence of which domestication may be difficult, if not impossible. Situated cultural affordances therefore make it easier for users of social media to infuse the technology into their daily lives, thus making it at home within the ambiance of local practices and ecologies of knowledge. Should situated cultural affordances not favour a given technology, its domestication would most likely prove to be a challenge with the possibility of outright failure. Indeed, a new technology “has to fit into diverse existing orders”, hence invalidating any assumptions to the effect that social media have an enduring stable architecture and logic regardless of context of use (Costa, 2016; Smits, 2006: 499). As a perspective “from below”, the concept of situated cultural affordances exhibits political overtones, thus effectively laying the ground for the nuanced domestication of media technologies in the Kenyan context.

Communal ethos and domestication Describing musical performance in traditional African societies, Kofi identifies a communal ethos that he relates to a sense of “primal togetherness” explaining that “every domain of performance is conditioned by a desire on the part of the participants to join, rather than divide, to bring together rather than set apart, to unify rather than splinter” (2007: 1). This spirit of communalism runs through the fabric of African societies not just in performance spaces, but also in their very existence as people. In contemporary African societies, huge 140

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import is still bestowed upon strong kinship networks that spring from families into clans, villages, regions, ethnic groups, and eventually nations. Even in the modern context, where members of these micro-networks may be geographically dispersed across the nation or globe, strong translocal networks often come into play to feed the communal ethos cherished by members of the societies in question. The notion of communal ethos echoes the Ubuntu philosophy in Africa, which comprehends the individual existence as being inseparable from the collective through interdependence, mutuality, inclusivity, and compassion (Twinomurinzi, Phahlamohlaka, & Byrne, 2010). With the advent of interactive technologies such as social media, the notion of community must be understood as being in a state of flux. Communities are no longer groups of people permanently tied to a specific geo-spatial location but rather more dispersed, yet bound up together courtesy of technologies of communication. This chapter benefits from Kozinets’ (2010: 10) expanded definition of community as “a group of people who share social interaction, social ties, and a common interactional format, location or ‘space’- albeit, in this case, a computer-mediated or virtual ‘cyberspace’”. It is therefore plausible to conceive of online communities among Kenyan users of social media. Although the medium is different, such online communities continue to operate very much along the principles of the traditional offline communities. This chapter advances the argument that domestication, as it plays out in African societies, is a communal process that involves the concerted mutual efforts of members of the society as it seeks to contextually interpret foreign technologies. As new technological appliances and applications enter the Kenyan market, they land into a vibrant socio-cultural ecology with a strong communal disposition. Evidently, the existing cultures and beliefs within the local communities play a leading role in preparing the ground for the integration or otherwise of the new technologies. Therefore, domestication tends to take a communal dimension as opposed to its manifestation elsewhere, especially in cultural contexts in the West. The notion of communal domestication advanced here is thus at variance with the original understanding of domestication which domiciles it in the activities of either individuals or small groups of people such as households. In the Kenyan case, the individual and the family are heavily affiliated to the wider communal unit to the extent that their overall perception of the imported technologies is subject to prevailing common worldviews. In the domestication of social media in Africa, the communal ethos of the people plays a crucial role as it provides the particular cultural space in which the technologies find a home. As a situated cultural affordance, communal ethos provides certain contextual possibilities to the imported technology, thus making it usable as it easily gets integrated into the already existing habits, attitudes, and philosophies of the people. In these circumstances, the technologies that get successfully domesticated are those that find an enabling environment in the local cultures. For instance, social media technologies easily strike a chord with the vibrant social demeanour characteristic of the African cultural context as observable in Kenya. In their study on the introduction of e-government in South Africa, Twinomurinzi, Phahlamohlaka, and Byrne (2010) note that once associations were made between the ICT innovations and local traditions and cultures, the ICTs were enthusiastically embraced. This implies that in the process of domestication, the host cultures have a higher affinity to technologies that resonate somewhat with existing local cultures. It is therefore the local cultural environment that affords the technology the opportunity to thrive and not vice versa as perceived by the media-centric understanding of the concept of affordances. African users of technologies thus, in the words of Tully and Ekdale (2014: 68), “situate new phenomena 141

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within old ways of thinking”. However, the term “old” as used here has connotations of conservativeness that is potentially at odds with the domestication process. It should instead be contextually understood in the sense of the word “familiar”. As is the case in many other African cultures, communal ethos characterizes public administration in Kenya. In the indigenous setting, leaders hold regular public forums with their subjects. Currently, governance practices in Kenya at the local level rely on the baraza to harness public participation of the citizens in leadership. The baraza is Swahili for an administrative forum, convened by a chief in his/her area of jurisdiction to communicate government policies and directives among other issues. Omanga (2015: 2) describes how an innovative administrator in Kenya turned to Twitter use in the course of discharging his duties in a manner that amounts to an “extension, or refashioned form of the baraza” that Brunotti (2019: 18) terms “cyberbaraza” due to its online nature. In Kenyan baraza culture, frequent interaction is sustained especially through word of mouth. This situated cultural affordance gives room for the adoption of social media applications such as Twitter. This is a clear case of situated cultural affordances operating as a pre-condition for the domestication of social media technology. Facebook has found a ready home in Kenya and currently functions as an active online village. Due to the contemporary pressures of modernity, a significant number of Kenyans have found themselves drawn from their original villages to other areas of settlement. In the process, people become disconnected from their networks of relations and acquaintances. Nevertheless, a combination of technological affordances and situated cultural affordances make it possible to talk of Facebook villages in the Kenyan social media landscape. In a typical Kenyan village, nearly everyone knows their neighbour and a remarkably friendly disposition characterizes relations among people. Members are often willing to mutually help each other in times of need and expect reciprocation. People communicate freely with each other without perceived barriers and knowledge is seen as communally owned. This is the pre-existing communication environment that Facebook technology encounters during its adaptation as a new technology in Kenya. Users easily immerse it into the already available communal ethos of the people with hardly any serious adjustments to the philosophies that undergird the domestication of technologies within local knowledge ecologies. The technologically mediated friendship on Facebook has been described as “algorithmic friendship” or “programmed sociality” (Bucher, 2012: 480, 491) [emphasis in original]. As much as this new kind of friendship is midwifed by the technological affordances of Facebook, it interestingly builds on the understanding of friendship within the local Kenyan communities. Although a friend, in the original sense of the term, is generally one known to an individual personally, notions of friendship within the village setup are often elastic enough to accommodate people one barely knows at a personal level as well as proxy friends. Moreover, engaging a stranger in a conversation is never considered completely out of the ordinary in Kenyan interactional etiquette. Therefore, when sending and accepting friend requests from other Facebook users, Kenyans tend to go beyond the usual considerations of familiarity and commonalities. In a manner akin to bumping into a stranger in the village path and starting a conversation, users send and accept friend requests rather generously. In fact, some Facebook users tend to accept friend requests indiscriminately owing to some sort of prestige that comes with having a wide network of friends. However, it must be understood that online friendship sometimes serves as the foundation for enduring offline friendships in the Kenyan communication culture. In assembling a network of friends on Facebook, the user intentionally constructs a community of people who make up an “imagined audience” (Marwick & Boyd, 2011: 117). 142

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To conceive of the Facebook audience as imagined is not to imply their fictional existence but rather to come to terms with the fact that a significant number of them may not be personally known to the user who merely imagines their existence. This virtual group often serves as an interpretive community with certain shared commonalities that afford the mutual construction of meanings in the course of online interaction. Indeed, as Szabla and Blommaert (2017) maintain, members of a community often exhibit shared assumptions and meaning frames that make communication possible. Commenting on a Champions League match in August 2020 between Bayern Munich and Barcelona football clubs in which the latter suffered a humiliating 8–2 defeat, Orwenjo (2020), a Kenyan Facebook user, made the following post on his wall: “Even the deep state and the system could not help Barcelona!” A non-Kenyan audience may not make much sense out of this post. However, the Kenyan interpretive community share the same political knowledge ecology in which the phrase “the deep state and the system” has gained popularity in reference to shadowy powerful forces within the state that often pull the strings behind the scenes to influence major government decisions, policies, and actions. The intention of the user here is to portray Barcelona’s fate as sealed beyond redemption by this loss. The Kenyan society characteristically operates in communal units within which social media have become entrenched. In Facebook groups, the Kenyan communal ethos plays out more overtly. A case in point is the popular group known as Kilimani Mums and Dads Original (n.d.) where members pose all sorts of questions and share experiences as they go through their everyday lives. In this case, Facebook is used as a communal encyclopaedia where people seek general and specific information on a broad range of issues of concern to them. Facebook significantly steps in to fill in the vacuum created by the lack of functional institutions that offer public information to citizens. The adaptation of Facebook to local cultures in this manner is facilitated by the communal demeanour of local societies where social interaction is key and engaging strangers in the public space is not considered awkward. These local practices thus prepare the ground for Facebook to take its place as a technology that pervades the online interactional public space in Kenya. The trend of mutual concern for each other’s welfare is a common thread that runs through most Kenyan Facebook communities. In the group Buyer Beware-Kenya (n.d.), members have constructed a community whose main agenda is consumer protection from the grassroots side. It must be understood that such a group is founded within the context of absence of effective public mechanisms for consumer protection in Kenya, thus leaving people at the mercy of unscrupulous entrepreneurs bent on taking advantage of them. In Buyer Beware, consumers of products and services countrywide come together to name and shame rogue business entities, service providers, and individual business operators. Although this practice is currently manifested in social media, its roots are deeply entrenched in local traditions of oral referral systems in Kenya. Whenever one seeks a service or product, it is a common practice to get recommendations from friends or acquaintances rather than visiting the formal yellow pages or websites. Although many companies advertise their services in various mediums, the issue of trust makes oral referrals the system of choice. Customers often want an assurance that the person they hire has a proven track record to deliver quality and timely services. It is common to see posts asking for recommendations for good masons, carpenters, painters, and landscapers among other service providers, thereby demonstrating the successful integration of Facebook into the local referral system. Novena Prayer Group, with more than 700,000 members, is a vibrant online village for Kenyans in need of a spiritual family network. It gives members an opportunity to bare their souls out to others in order to gain emotional support in times of need. As much as it is a 143

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prayer group whose intentions are to enhance spiritual fulfilment of the members, the posts often feature a vast range of real problems experienced by members of the Kenyan society as they go about their everyday lives. These include joblessness, bereavement, family problems, and ill health among other issues for which members need spiritual intervention. Those who have overcome misfortunes and challenges in life also narrate their stories in order to motivate others currently undergoing hardships in life. A troubled member makes the following post on the Novena Prayer Group page: My brothers and sisters, please pray for me. My landlord is at the door for rent arrears. He is threatening to lock my house if by evening I will not have paid. I have no job. Let’s pray that God may bless me with a job. As much as this post is framed as a prayer request, innuendoes of a desperate appeal for material help from well-wishers are evident. In this case, Facebook feeds into age-old African practices of mutual concern for the welfare of members to facilitate interactions that enable emotional and material support for each other in the community.

Whimsical interactive culture In many African cultures, social interaction especially among peers is usually characterized by a marked quality of verbal playfulness. In conversations between individuals, elastic local conventions tend to give room for speakers to engage each other in jocular talk with little or no offense to the parties involved. This is the case in Kenyan societies where contemporary conversational practice, informed by a solid indigenous playful interactive tradition, remains vibrant. The advent of social media and its attendant technological affordances thus finds a thriving oral culture to build upon. I use the term “whimsical interactive culture” in reference to the light-hearted engagements that evidently play out in Kenyan social media. A closely related term, “playful engagement”, had been proposed by Tully and Ekdale (2014) to refer to online spaces that serve as meaningful sites of interaction, enjoyment, and expression. I argue that whimsical interactive culture provides the situated cultural affordance for the domestication of social media technologies in Kenya. In the transition from the oral to the mediated whimsical interactive culture, certain fundamental differences emerge. Although they offer myriad affordances, the interactive technologies of Facebook and Twitter largely tend to favour written texts and images. To institute domestication of the technologies within local cultures of expression, the written word is thus slightly reconfigured to take on oral qualities as a means of enforcing familiarity. In addition, the context collapse phenomenon brought about by social media obviously challenges the homogenous audience anticipated by local whimsical interactive culture. Context collapse is perceived as the flattening of multiple audiences into one (Marwick & Boyd, 2011). Kenyan social media users thus strive to construct an interpretive community in the target audience in the hope that their messages will be contextually decoded for relevance. An outstanding quality of the Kenyan online whimsical interactive culture is the ability of users to make fun of almost everything. However serious the situation is, Kenyans often see the lighter side of things, hence earning the reputation of a laughing nation. Therefore, playful interaction on social media does not merely amount to an end in itself. On the contrary, there are often more serious underlying concerns being addressed beyond the jocular disposition of the online discourses. Stemming from local cultures of politeness in social 144

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discourse and the need to maintain cohesion in society, speakers frequently opt for figurative expressions to temper their biting criticism. This is not to say that the severity of the criticism will be reduced as the interpretive community still ends up getting the intended message. Kenyans are notoriously extroverted and social media avails to them the affordance to actively participate in global discourses. The US presidential elections in 2020 featured prominently in Kenyan whimsical interactive culture on social media. Since the rise of Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, to the office of President of the US, Kenyans have always taken a keen interest in American elections. In the wake of the then US President Donald J. Trump’s claims that the elections were being rigged in the Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden’s favour, Juma (2020) directs a tweet to the US Ambassador to Kenya thus: The Democratic Republic of Kenya urges all American citizens to vote peacefully, exercise restraint and embrace dialogue in resolving their issues before and after the 3rd November 2020 polls. Kenya is worried over recent utterances and actions by supporters of the leading candidates, which could potentially lead to Post Election Violence (PEV). We are disturbed by allegations of rigging by the incumbent and his unwillingness to concede defeat if he loses. Kenya is ready to assist the USA in ensuring the polls are free, fair & credible. We will work with the International Community to ensure that the polls are free from illegalities and irregularities. We will be watching for any undemocratic practices by the leading candidates. Choices will have consequences. The ludic spirit of this post can only be fully comprehended when the disparity between the two nations in terms of their positions within the global political arena is put into consideration. The author plays on this irony by cheekily crafting his message using the very same words the US government, through their diplomatic agents, habitually use towards Kenya whenever disputes arise following the frequently contested presidential elections. The patronizing tone and obvious satire in the text serves the intended purpose which is to give the US, the self-appointed global watchdog on issues of democracy, a taste of its own medicine. In the wake of delays in the announcement of the final results of the US presidential elections, Private Figure (2020) tweeted: USA [electorates] should make up their mind. Kamba artists are glued to CNN and BBC struggling to edit their lyrics… Is it laisi mupya Mbinde [new president Biden]? Or Tilambu Tena [Trump one more time]? In this case, the complicated American presidential electoral system that few outside the US seem to understand is satirized by the author for keeping the world waiting by the protracted process. He humorously trivializes the important political process by citing the inconvenience the delay causes to local Kenyan musicians, particularly from the Kamba community, notorious for their timely release of songs commenting on current topical issues. In the phrases “laisi mupya Mbinde” and “Tilambu tena”, the typical fluidity of the text in local knowledge cultures is evident in the corruption of the names of the presidential contenders to fit within familiar local phonological realizations. This flexible mentality makes the domestication of social media technologies both necessary and possible. When it became apparent that Kamala Harris was on course to being the first woman as well as first woman of African-American and Asian extraction to get elected as the Vice President of the US, Kenyan social media users went into a frenzy. Coincidentally, the name 145

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Kamala sounds Kenyan as it is quite common among members of the Luhya community. An interesting Facebook post regarding the American Vice President reads: I hope wahindi wa Kenya wameona [Kenyan Indians have recognised] what possibilities abound if we mix seeds. It is about time! Katumani hybrid. (Wa Kiama, 2020) Other than celebrating the election of Kamala Harris, this post goes ahead to criticize the Kenyan Indians for their apparent failure to integrate with local communities after more than a century of settlement in the country. This kind of alienation has led to their lack of visibility within the nation’s political leadership. The word Katumani (a local hybrid maize variety) is used here to playfully imply that the chances of Kenyan Indians ascending to national leadership in Kenya lie in intermarriage with the locals. The ease with which international and local issues are dovetailed in this post betrays an indigenous tendency that serves as the situated cultural affordance that enables the fusion of social media into the everyday lives of users. As evident among KOT, a vibrant expressive culture characterizes debates on local issues in Kenyan social media. However serious the topic under discussion is, contributors usually add a humorous twist to their arguments and narrations, thus making Twitter one of the most lively online spaces in Kenya. Ensuing is an extract from a conversation on Twitter sparked off by a post by a human rights activist in the country: Activist Hey @Safaricom_Care @SafaricomPLC I lost my best friend four years ago. Imagine my shock when I received a notification that he has joined Telegram? Called the number and whoever has it, said he bought it from Safaricom. Stop selling phone numbers of dead people @Peter Ndegwa Selected Replies Reply 1 You raise a valid issue about being and memories in this era of technology. We’re here coz of our memories. I think it’s time numbers of the departed are treated as “digital tombs”. Reply 2 How I wish @SafaricomPLC and AIRTEL_KE stop degenerating numbers. It’s sad especially for the ones whose owners died. I bought a line only for the deceased[’s] relative to call back hoping that he would hear from his dad again by trying the number. It was really heart breaking. Reply 3 Thank you Boniface. For me, I bought a number of someone who is still alive. Him and his people have been harassing me day and night asking where I got the phone… Not even the line. Yesterday, they added me to a WhatsApp group for a funeral of a person I don’t even know. Stress tupu [too much]. Reply 4 Same here. I had two @Safaricom_Care lines but when I abandoned using one of the lines for a year, Safaricom sold it to some pretty young girl. When my wife who lives

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in Mombasa (while me in Nairobi) saw that girl’s profile picture on that my abandoned number? @Peter Ndegwa In the forgoing conversation, it is evident that the cultural value bestowed upon interpersonal interaction between friends and relatives gives Twitter an easy grounding within Kenyan communication practice. It emerges that the domestication of technologies of communication, such as mobile phones and WhatsApp, is governed by local cultural beliefs surrounding identity, death, and grief. This explains why people get irritated upon realizing that service providers eventually re-allocate the phone lines of their departed relatives and friends to other subscribers. This amounts to dishonouring the deceased by erasing their traces in a world in which they remain posthumously relevant in line with local worldviews that uphold belief in life after death. Through its use in the organization of funerals, WhatsApp is embroiled in Kenyan cultural beliefs of mourning where friends and relatives gather together physically or electronically to condole with bereaved families and raise funds to cater for funeral expenses. Such flexible situated cultural affordances thus give room for the easy domestication of social media among Kenyan users. In Kenyan societies, moral standards are at the core of societal existence and daily operations. Acceptable standards of behaviour are usually inculcated in children through socialization. KOT have arrogated themselves the responsibility of moral oversight in the society and the whimsical interactive culture is integral to this. This is illustrated in a case where Standard and Chartered Bank found itself in trouble with KOT over allegations of failing to account for 1.37 million shillings (about 13.700 Euros) pension savings belonging to a 70-year-old woman. Twitter users trolled the bank via hashtag tweets, retweets, and replies that called out the undesirable behaviour against a vulnerable member of the society. See the ensuing excerpt of the engagement between Twitter users and the officials of the bank: Standard Chartered Amazing run! Our CEO @Kariuki_ngari completes his 10km in our Home Run challenge where staff and our previous marathon partners, are running to raise funds for post-COVID relief measures. (Standard Chartered, 2020)

Selected Replies Reply 5 The wicked run when no one is chasing them #PesayaShosh. Reply 6 This is how they ran away with Cucu’s money. Reply 7 Pornhub doesn’t steal from old people, they pay them when they act, they have better ratings at the moment. Pay up guys @StanchartKE #PesayaShosh ilipwe. Reply 8 Is that how you run away from problems?

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Reply 9 I hope he will be able to complete the 1.37m fraud against a 70 year shosh #rudisha pesa ya shosh. Reply 10 Shame on you.. You can run but you can’t hide…You thugs.. Return that grandma’s money…You shall run amok soon. Nansenz!!! #PesayaShosh. Reply 11 #PesaYaShosh but why @StanchartKe led by @Kariuki_ngari allow evil staff steal from an old lady. The curse that will follow your generations will be recorded [in] history books because of the evil things your descendants will be doing in this land of the living. The conversation above should be understood within the context of athletics being the most prestigious sport in Kenya having brought the nation much glory and honour on the global stage. A tweet about a corporate race organized by the Standard Chartered Bank for COVID-19 charity purposes is ordinarily expected to meet a warm online reception. On the contrary, Twitter users literally hijack the post and use it to poke holes in the corporate image of the company regarding an unrelated incident. Using the hashtag #PesayaShosh (old woman’s money), ordinary citizens gang up in typical Kenyan online mob justice culture to convict the corporate institution in the court of public opinion. In this court, the ordinary people always take the side of the downtrodden, irrespective of who is on the wrong. The word “run” is cheekily punned around with to introduce other creative semantic implications. In Reply 11, the user even draws from indigenous socio-cultural beliefs and pronounces a curse on the management of the bank. The user in Reply 7 totally debases the reputation of Standard Chartered by comparing it to a pornographic site. Twitter therefore seems to continue fostering the existing whimsical interactive culture in Kenya. In Kenyan oratory culture, a lot of premium is invested in the art of conversation especially within the public context. A wide variety of styles are evident with popular catchphrases being prominent in contemporary everyday conversation. There is evidence of an emerging practice of social media fuelled popular catchphrases that have gained currency in everyday online discourse. This new generation of sayings draw from the original philosophy of traditional aphorisms with their characteristic compactness and allusion to some general truths. Contemporary Kenyan catchphrases may originate online or offline but their common denominator is their being hinged on the aesthetic conveyance of popular wisdom emanating from shared experiences and/or knowledge of the citizens. The place of rhetorical aesthetics as the quintessence of communication in local cultures amounts to a cultural affordance that drives the domestication of social media in Kenya. The technological affordance of shareability of the social media, in turn, makes the popular catchphrases go viral, hence gaining currency of usage. A considerable number of the catchphrases that feature in Kenyan online conversations engage with the reality of the technological invasion of the everyday lives and how people cope with this. Facebook user Caesar (2020) posts: In [these] streets of Facebook everyone is rich, everyone is living a perfect life, everyone is having a glowing face, everyone is beautiful courtesy of Oppo, everyone is a motivational speaker, but wait kwa ground vitu ni different. 148

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The Sheng (Swahili-English slang) catchphrase “kwa ground vitu ni different” used here contextually implies that social media users often paint a rosy image of themselves online; yet, the reality could be a stark contrast. This adequately captures the contemporary Kenyan reality of social media posturing that enables people to adopt desired identities, even if only temporarily, to satisfy their egos. Oppo is a Chinese smartphone brand quite popular among Kenyan youth for its good quality camera that enables the curation of images of the self on social media as desired. It is therefore evident that social media easily lends themselves to the cherished culture of popularizing whimsical catchphrases in Kenyan conversation culture, thus endearing the people to technology. In the process, social media technologies become nearly invisible as they get immersed into local cultural practices and ecologies of knowledge.

Conclusion It has emerged from the discussions in this chapter that while existing perspectives on domestication acknowledge the role of context in the domestication of technologies, they tend to restrict their perspectives to the individual and small group environments observed by the theorists especially in Western societies. It is however apparent that African societies exhibit a unique type of domestication that operates within a communal network of affiliations. I term this communal domestication: the adoption of technologies into existing socio-cultural contexts of a given community in line with its philosophies and functional needs. Further, in previous research, the input of users is usually acknowledged but only within the limits of the affordances availed to them by the infrastructures of the very technologies. This understanding of domestication in a manner that fails to account for the unique knowledge ecologies and their potentials in facilitating the adoption of the imported technologies in the global South thus tells only half the story. The notion of communal domestication attempts to cure this oversight by elevating the cultural context of new technologies in Africa to a status higher than a mere backdrop. This chapter concludes that only a nuanced sense of domestication is capable of recognizing the inherent possibilities within the intriguing dynamics of local socio-cultural contexts. By advancing the concept of situated cultural affordances, the study significantly turns the attention of the domestication debate towards the communal context in which social media technologies are domesticated within African societies. Indeed, situated cultural affordances dictate the path and pace of the domestication of technologies in Africa. As evident in social media domestication in Kenya, vibrant communal ethos and whimsical interactive culture serve as cultural affordances situated within local knowledge ecologies to effectively lay the ground for the acceptance and immersion of technologies into everyday practices of communication. Therefore, social media adaptation takes place in situ with situated cultural affordances serving as a pre-condition for domestication.

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10 THE DOMESTICATION OF SMARTPHONES Lessons from case studies in Africa Hans Peter Hahn Introduction: conceptual reflections The past decades, often labelled as the ‘age of globalization,’ have brought with them a previously unknown wave of homogenisation of cultural, political and economic phenomena. In addition, many everyday forms of mass consumption known since the late 18th century and becoming established in the course of the 19th century led to the availability of similar or even identical consumer goods on all continents. At the same time, the worldwide spread of markets ensured that in the late 20th century, these goods can be acquired everywhere as ‘commodities.’ Since its beginnings, the humanities took up the theme of culture as a concept opposed against or separated from mass consumption. In these lines of thought, culture was resisting consumption, by strictly separating it from phenomena such as religion and kinship. However, during the last 20 years of the 20th century, a different conceptualisation gained more and more resonance. The new cultural theories assume a dominant trend of societal acceptance for the new and ubiquitous consumer goods and, in a second step, highlight how the so-called ‘local cultures’ have an ability to produce local orders of value, specific practices and, last but not least, a spectrum of different local-specific meanings with the help of the domestication of mass consumption. When it comes to the empirical testing of the persistence of cultural diversity in the context of global influences and the aforementioned cultural theories, the acquisition and use of smartphones and other technical goods play a central role. The global presence of mobile phones and their impact on societies are seen as key factors of understanding globalisation. In sharp contradiction to the opinion of various authors on this topic (Friedman, 2005; Ritzer, 1996), numerous studies show the specificity of cultural ways of dealing with these new objects (Harmsen, 1999). In this context, the term ‘domestication’ is only one variant of the concepts used in research on cultural change. In addition to this key term, there are other terms such as ‘hybridisation,’ ‘creolisation,’ ‘cultural melange’ and, last but not least, the term ‘nostrification’ (Hahn, 2008a). These terms aim at similar things: they stand for the sensitisation to local micro-tactics and to politics of cultural change and for the active character of the engagement with cultural innovation. Against the theories of adaptation and against older diffusion research, these concepts provide arguments for the cultural assimilation of innovation as an intentional and discursively negotiated activity. 152

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The object treated in more detail here as a case study, namely the smartphone, is of outstanding importance for the debate between homogenisation on the one hand and the persistence of cultural diversity on the other in two respects. First, the smartphone can legitimately be seen as the media device that follows the most widely used device in media history up to that point, i.e. the radio. If at a certain point in the course of the 20th century all nations worldwide had their own radio stations and the possibility of using the radio was possibly (and current practice) to a majority of the world’s population, precisely these characteristics apply in intensified form to the mobile phone in the 21st century. Over 5 billion headsets are in use on the planet today.1 Although many people in some countries have several such devices, and inequality in the distribution does persist, the fact is that this technology has thus become virtually ubiquitous and has made a place for itself especially in countries with a significant proportion of people living in absolute poverty (Hahn & Kibora, 2008). The uniformity of the basic technology – the GSM protocol – corresponds to the uniform technical requirements that are available everywhere today as a ubiquitous infrastructure. The author is not aware of any country in the world where there is no smartphone. However, it would be a truncated view to consider the smartphone exclusively as a ‘media device.’ Although the conceptual basis of this handbook draws on the ideas of ‘domestication’ and ‘cultural appropriation,’ first developed in media studies, the implications of the smartphone go beyond this field in significant ways. Even if, from a certain point of view, the smartphone is primarily a multimedia device that integrates sound, image, video, radio and television, the investigation would be one-sided if the material side of these devices were not also considered. Smartphones are material objects embedded in their own material structures, whose forms and features make them suitable objects of distinction, which deeply intervene in the household economy of the owners and users of the devices, and which, last but not least, pose a permanent challenge with regard to maintaining functionality, appropriate repair and the available time span to the end of use (Hahn, 2015). All of these diverse properties linked to the materiality of a technically complex object will be at least briefly touched upon in the following. The central subject of this chapter is therefore the ways of dealing with the smartphone as a multipurpose media device and a popular gadget (Lanier, 2010). The focus will be on the local specificity of use as well as on how people in the area overcome the material challenges associated with access to and use of the smartphone. In response to these challenges, as will be explained here, the need arises to re-evaluate innovations in local cultural contexts and to adapt them for local value orders. The central argument of this chapter is that smartphones are undergoing a process of domestication. At the same time, however, the domestication of the smartphone produces new ambivalences. These devices are equally capable of satisfying some particular needs for many people in society – thus making everyday life easier – as well as influencing other social features in a more or less controlled way, undermining or threatening them. Thus, and this is the second side of the ambivalence, domesticating the smartphone can only be partially successful. In part, it remains an object of mistrust, a challenge for users and ultimately an object of dispute. Moreover, in most societies around the world, very different assessments coexist.

Smartphones in places‚ beyond the West: incoherent prognoses From the very beginning, the spread of mobile telecommunication intertwined with immense expectations, especially with regard to the economies of the so-called ‘developing 153

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countries.’ New scientific journals were founded with a special focus on this field of research (e.g. ‘ICT4D’). Numerous articles with case studies provide ample evidence for the seemingly positive economic effects of the new media technology in less developed economies.2 From the beginning, expectations of smartphones as a driver of development were embedded in diffuse imaginaries about the role of technology as a driver of economic advancement. Against the backdrop of theoretical models such as the ‘information economy,’ the decreasing cost of obtaining information via mobile phones was seen as a significant economic advantage.3 These optimistic or even euphoric models shattered in the years after 2010, and it became clear a little later that falling information acquisition costs did not automatically mean a competitive advantage for certain participants in the economic arena (Choudhury, 2015; Kwami, 2016). Smartphones are not merely generators of new prosperity for all (Alzouma, 2005, 2019). In fact, their contribution to overcoming poverty and equalising social injustice is much smaller than expected in the first years after the introduction of the new technology (Helsper, 2021). Paradoxically, the experts’ fetishisation was destroyed by the users’ pragmatism (Keane, 2018). The short and meandering history of mobile phones in Africa thus perfectly reflects the theoretical innovation with regard to consumption: the mobile phone had not been rejected in Africa, but rather subjected to local orders of value, specific practices and meaning. The producers’ intentions, the engineers’ designs and functions were only of secondary importance, whereas the users’ practical priorities actually dominated the usages. Nevertheless, it is true: smartphones are extraordinarily attractive and the rapid spread in the so-called developing countries was a surprise for both economists and telecommunications experts. It had not been expected that it would be possible in these countries to dispose the necessary resources to acquire these devices in large numbers within a very short time. As it turned out, however, the motives for acquiring smartphones were other than purely economic and they were much more closely linked to the pre-existing value systems of society than the presumed focus on questions of profitable information acquisition would have suggested.4 The actual use of smartphones worldwide differs significantly from what had been predicted by experts, and it is only partially in line with what had been assumed, based on the experience in Western countries. Undoubtedly, the impact of smartphones on societies and on forms of communication has been substantial. The existence and everyday use of these devices led to a profound change. At the same time, however, practices and norms of interaction emerged from within society, which, in turn, significantly changed the smartphone. In every country of the world, the smartphone is something different in terms of its shape, its use and its contexts; it differs from the versions of other societies. At the same time, it should be emphasised how much better than ‘diffusion,’ for example, the concept of domestication explains how much the smartphone can become a locally accepted and valued object: through changes of a material nature, through new economic strategies, through new practices and not least through new contexts.5 The smartphone as a personalised good is different from the commodity offered by multinational corporations worldwide. Domestication therefore falls into the realm of cultural change studies. Another term that is often linked to such changes is that of ‘transformation’ (Rata, 2002). Smartphones – like many other goods of mass consumption – are drivers of the transformation of society. This is true in many fields, not only with regard to media use and consumption (Stearns, 2000). Much of the criticism of social change as a whole focuses on the smartphone as a prominent or emblematic object of this change (Hahn, 2021). Consequently, this means that the smartphone has not infrequently been made a ‘scapegoat’ and effects

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have been attributed to it that would undoubtedly have led to controversies in society even without this one device.

Domestication of the smartphones: a multidimensional process The following outline of the domestication in some West African societies is based on empirical data collected in the context of qualitative ethnographic field research in Togo and Burkina Faso in the years before 2010 (Hahn & Kibora, 2008). For the purpose of a short sketch, these data are summarised and presented in a sequence ranging from acquisition to everyday use and specific contextualisations. In addition to earlier evaluations, the data presented here has been embedded in findings from other case studies from other parts of Africa and can thus claim a certain validity that goes beyond a single location. In principle, some of these elements can be found in any social situation, in any place. Nevertheless, the phenomena described here are not a recipe; they should not be expected to be found in every domestication process. So what motivates people to acquire a smartphone? Surprisingly, it is often not about the individual desire to acquire that item as a commodity, but about observing its use by others in the social environment, or the possibility of using such devices specifically only when they are lent or shared ( James, 2011; Verne, 2017). In fact, it should be emphasised that the norm of owning such a device often precedes actual ownership. Many who could never afford such a device receive a used smartphone from the previous user, who has in the meantime purchased a new model for himself. In such cases, the device that is no longer used is given away as a permanent loan, or it is given away as a gift. In other cases, it is possible to borrow such a device temporarily because the owner has no urgent use for it at the moment. In order to actually use a smartphone, the so-called ‘airtime’ must also be purchased. This includes charges for calling time, SMS or mobile data. Particularly with the latter type of use, shared use is not uncommon: some users join forces and purchase a large package with mobile data at a beneficial rate, which is then credited to a smartphone but used jointly, for example, to watch videos. Others hand over a device, on which numerous minutes of talk time are currently available, to someone to enable him/her to make one or more phone calls. This aspect of socialising of usage as part of material appropriation is at the same time a form of domestication. This has also been described for cars, for example. With regard to the mobile phone, a villager in southern Burkina Faso gave the following explanation: only after the smartphones became comparable to the ‘donkey carts,’ owned by a few wealthy families in the village, the new media technology became a relevant item in the public perception. Acquiring a donkey cart demands a high economic investment. At the same time, there is a clear expectation to make this vehicle available to other inhabitants of the same locality for the transport of heavy loads.6 Exactly, this pattern applies to the first mobile phones: if people were ready to share it, social acceptance could be gained. One technical hurdle is the ongoing functionality of the smartphone. Regular battery charging is essential, but becomes a difficult task in an environment where electricity is not available or few households have access to it. Solar panels, car batteries and shopkeepers at markets who offer charging as a service for a small fee provide a remedy. Technically, however, this service is not trivial, as many devices also require the right voltage converter and charging plug. In addition to acquisition, the costs for the network service provider and the power supply, there are other practices that are significant as components of domestication. These include,

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for example, technical maintenance: for the repair of mobile phones, there are specialised technicians who maintain their workshops on the outskirts of the markets and can carry out numerous repairs with on-board resources. In these workshops, old mobile phones that can no longer be repaired are kept in order to extract spare parts from them to be used in other devices. This recombination of defective devices with used spare parts leads in many cases to a significant extension of the time of usage. It is no exaggeration to speak of a ‘second life’ of mobile phones (Goodman, 2005). Domestication also includes certain rules of interaction: it is common to ring people (‘to beep,’ ‘to flash’ or ‘bipage’) in order to obtain a recall (Taiwo & Igwebuike, 2015). There are certain rules for this: for known numbers, this request is almost always granted, for unknown numbers rather not. But even with known numbers, there are significant differences: if this option is used too frequently by certain people, or if the call comes at the wrong time, the called party is more inclined not to call back. In some countries, national telephone companies have responded to this practice by establishing a feature that allows free text messages to be sent with the simple and short message: ‘Call me back’ (Taiwo & Igwebuike, 2015: 75). This last observation is significant in that it points to how domestication is not only relevant on the way from a global commodity to a personal good, but also works in other directions: towards the provider of the devices and the network operators. This is not selfevident, but is part of the multidimensional character of this process. Ultimately, this also has implications with regard to the concept of ‘information economy’ already mentioned. Users have found a way to obtain information that is subjectively relevant to them without having to pay for it. As Taiwo and Igwebuike (2015: 76) point out, this particular practice may result in increased costs for operators, in many cases even in temporary network congestion. In a sense, users have developed a subversive tactic of extracting a profit from the network that forces network operators to incur significant additional effort without receiving direct compensation.7

Societal ambivalences of the smartphone It would be a one-sided perspective to describe domestication merely as a set of practices establishing themselves in a particular place and coming to a final point somewhere and sometimes. Undoubtedly, such processes are about more than that. These processes should rather be considered as a ‘mixed bag’ that contains new options for action as well as new complications of everyday life. For example, while in Europe the early phase of use was accompanied by significant concerns about the radiation from the headsets (SAR levels), and a tenacious fight against the installation of mobile phone masts can still be observed today, in other parts of the world, the concerns are more focused on the social consequences of mobile phones. In Ethiopia, for example, Setargew Kenaw (2012; see also Kenaw Fantaw, 2016) has observed the increasing control of individuals by the smartphone. New asymmetries are emerging: men control their wives’ contact directories and chat histories, without allowing women the same practice regarding their spouses’ smartphones. Further sanctions occur when illicit conversations are discovered. Kenaw describes two opposing tendencies that both can be attached to the new media technology: on the one hand, the possibility of fostering social cohesion by enabling social contacts over long distances; on the other hand, however, new restrictions and social tension, as every conversation leaves a trace in the smartphone. This can lead to new mistrust or make certain conversations impossible. Roos Keja and Kathrin Knodel (2019) argue similarly on the basis of two case studies in Togo and Rwanda. According to their observations, there is a clear bias in local society in 156

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favour of conversations between people sharing the same social milieu and societal ranking. This means that this form of communication is not used to order to get in contact with higher-ranking people, for example. People do not feel comfortable using their smartphones to inform the head of an administrative authority, the mayor or the head of an international project about important developments. According to the local value order, such conversations require the personal presence of those involved. At the same time, however, this creates a dangerous blind spot: critical voices are muted. In some cases, there is the suspicion that shortcomings and problematic developments have been concealed. The smartphone calls into question the trust in public dialogues, or, in other words: with the smartphone, lies seem to spread. This is exactly what users interviewed in Togo said about the new media technology (Keja, 2022). The ambivalence triggered by these devices is even more evident in other situations, such as when it comes to new forms of crime. The possibility of the precise preparation of a burglary is just one such practice (Dibakana, 2006). Rumour has it that there is also clandestine cooperation between police and robbers when it comes to street robbery (Hahn, 2012). Such clandestine arrangements about where to set up a roadblock, as well as information about individual passengers in long-distance transport vehicles where large amounts of cash are expected, make this form of crime quite lucrative. At the same time, it is in the interest of the police that buses with armed escorts are not attacked in order to avoid shootings. Naturally, there are no quantitative data on such uses of the smartphone. But the firm belief that such arrangements are made, the idea that smartphones would be particularly suitable for this purpose, and not least occasional reports in the daily newspapers about arrests of police officers who are charged with such arrangements are strong indications of the plausibility of this type of crime. So, while the everyday use of the smartphone in its domesticated form seems to offer a number of practical benefits, a closer look at the broader context reveals ambivalences of various kinds. New forms of social control, new mistrust in conversations and, last but not least, new forms of criminality are linked to this media technology and prove the existence of uncontrollable effects on society and the social sphere in particular.

The domestication of the smartphone beyond the logic of action This chapter has used the example of smartphones to demonstrate how domestication can be understood as a multidimensional set of facets. While not all of these ‘facets’ occur in every historically and geographically specific situation, this set provides an excellent methodological framework for empirical investigation (Hahn, 2005: 102). Extending a concept presented by Silverstone and colleagues as early as 1992, this extension identifies different aspects of transformation, following material acquisition (Hahn, 2012: 22; Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992). This involves different practices, some of which take place simultaneously, others consecutively. These include modification, objectification, incorporation and, last but not least, transformation, for example, with regard to social embedding. It should be underlined that the diagram does not represent a sequence but rather a simultaneity. The ‘facet’ shall be explained briefly in detail here (Figure 10.1): 1

Modification: This refers to the material transformation that can often be observed in smartphones: it is about decoding, i.e. overcoming the restriction implemented by certain mobile phone companies to not use sim-cards from other companies. Modification furthermore deals with more ephemeral aspects such as decoration, which gives the 157

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Figure 10.1

2

3

4

Schematic sketch of the different aspects of appropriation (c) Hans Peter Hahn, line drawing by the author

smartphone a different shape and outer appearance. Finally, the ‘reassembling’ of a defective device with parts from other smartphones should be subsumed here. Objectification and naming: This refers to giving a local name to new and previously unknown objects, which are thus assigned to a class of known things in the local language. The things are thus also classified or categorised in a certain environment. In the German language, for example, the term ‘Handy’ has become current usage in order to designate smartphones. Thus, a certain objectivity is achieved. Incorporation: This means the development of a specific bodily behaviour, which is then perceived in the local context as the correct, appropriate behaviour. In West Africa, for example, this means putting a smartphone on the table during a social gathering. In societies where many women wear headscarves, this can mean clasping the smartphone somewhere close to the ear with the headscarf. Every familiar object demands a certain kind of use and defines in a certain way the time spent in proximity to the object. Other bodily practices refer to carrying the mobile phone in the pockets of the pants or wearing it with a necklace (Fortunati, 2013; Weilenmann & Larsson, 2002). The perception of one’s own body also changes through the use of the (now no longer new) object. Cultural transformation: This refers to the establishing of a close association of the new objects with practices and social values. For the example of the smartphone in West Africa, reference should be made here to ‘socialisation’ mentioned above. It is only through lending and the possibility of free use that the device has gained a certain recognition. This transformation can also mean the association to certain object areas, or the assignment to a gender, to an age group or something similar. New meanings are assigned. From a local perspective, they then appear as something local.

These simultaneous aspects eventually lead to the emergence of a new local tradition, which is also a group of norms regarding use. It is crucial to understand this as a swarm of practices that are always subject to public evaluation and sometimes controversy (Hahn, 2011). On the one hand, it is worth recalling here that the metaphorical expression of James Carrier, who coined the term ‘work of appropriation’ (Carrier, 1995: 106), highlights the intentional aspect of assigning usages and meanings. It remains, however, an open question, whether domestication and appropriation are always intentional or whether there might not be also ‘non-intentional’ effects. Is there an ‘objective’ in proceeding to transformation and making an object available locally via domestication? Such a perspective would also correspond to the ‘organic model’ 158

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of domestication highlighted by Quandt and von Pape (2010: 334). With the concepts of modification and transformation, the model used here goes one step further by dispensing with the hypothesis of a constancy of ‘device characteristics’: as shown here, smartphones are also transformed in a technical manner. On the other hand, domestication is always embedded in an environment of contested value orders (Hahn, 2011, 2022). A contested value presupposes that to begin with any value is associated with the object of domestication or the institution or norm to be domesticated. Without the attribution of values, to paraphrase this second fundamental connection, there is no domestication (Hahn, 2019). However, a wide range of options can be relevant here: thus, people ask themselves what the positive aspects are, what conflicting valuations might be relevant here, how the unequal access to the domesticated good can be mediated, etc. All these questions may find different answers in each case. It is also important not to focus only on the so-called ‘micro-perspective.’ Even if at first glance it seems as if the agency to domesticate primarily comes from local groups or certain social groups in societies, it has a substantial influence far beyond that. At the macro level, it is not only the aforementioned adaptation of mobile phone providers that can be observed, but also the question of the design of smartphones as a whole (Hahn, 2021).

Conclusion Nowadays, domestication is an indispensable concept for understanding cultural change in the context of global influences. At first glance, it always describes an asymmetrical relationship, a local society – or even a group of media users – unfolds a perspective and different ways to evaluate cultural influences. The result is a ‘domesticated good,’ be it a social institution, a commodity or a norm. The asymmetry mentioned concerns first of all the availability of the object or phenomenon to be appropriated. At the same time, domestication is a process of valorisation or at least recognition of a value. Worthless or meaningless things would not be appropriated. The asymmetry further concerns the activity associated with the process of domestication. It seems as if agency, creativity and strategies are on the side of the local actors, without characterising this group more closely. In this chapter, it was shown by way of example that the relationships are more complicated: the object of appropriation itself also contains an agency, for example, through certain preconditions of its use or also through the necessary transformation of the object to be appropriated itself. This conceptual specification is significant because it undermines the apparent asymmetry. In its place, it would be better to refer to the property of universality: in the context of global interdependence, there is no society without domestication! Basically, no individual, no social group, no society exists without being constantly involved in processes of domestication. Making the world one’s own is a condition of one’s own existence in the awareness of persisting cultural differences. It does not matter whether we are talking about media devices, other consumer goods, social institutions, legal norms or abstract values: domestication always enables an ‘in-between.’ The domesticated thing changes through this process, just as the domesticating group changes. At the same time, this process makes it clear that there are no sharp boundaries between societies. Every way of life is ultimately a mixture of the results of domestications that have taken place a long time ago or more recently.

Notes 1 https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-october-global-statshot 2 https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/titd20

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The domestication of smartphones Hahn, H.P. (2022) ‘Values and Value: Some Approaches to the Concept of “Values in Things”,’ in H.P. Hahn, A. Klöckner and D. Wicke (eds.) Values and Revaluations: The Transformation and Genesis of “Values in Things” from Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives, Oxford: Oxbow, 3–27. Hahn, H.P. and Kibora, L.O. (2008) ‘The Domestication of the Mobile Phone. Oral Society and New ICT in Burkina Faso,’ Journal of Modern African Studies, 46 (1), 87–109. Harmsen, A. (1999) Globalisierung und lokale Kultur. Eine ethnologische Betrachtung, Münster: Lit. Helsper, E. (2021) The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities, London: Sage. James, J. (2011) ‘Sharing Mobile Phones in Developing Countries: Implications for the Digital Divide,’ Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 78 (4), 729–735. Keane, W. (2018) ‘Cell Phone Antinomies: A Commentary,’ in J.A. Bell and J.C. Kuipers (eds.) Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones, London: Routledge, 264–279. Keja, R. (2022) Political Silence of Youth in Togo: Mobile Phones, Information and Civic (Dis)Engagement, Berlin: De Gruyter. Keja, R. and Knodel, K. (2019) ‘Mistrust and Social Hierarchies as Blind Spots of ICT4D Projects. Lessons from Togo and Rwanda,’ Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis, 29 (2), 35–40. Kenaw, S. (2012) ‘Cultural Translation of Mobile Telephones: Mediation of Constrained Communication among Ethiopian Married Couples,’ Journal of Modern African Studies, 50 (1), 131–155. Kenaw Fantaw, S. (2016) Technology-Culture Dialogue. Cultural and Sociotechnical Appropriation of Mobile Phones in Ethiopia, Münster: Lit. Kwami, J. (2016) ‘Development from the Margins? Mobile Technologies, Transnational Mobilities, and Livelihood Practices Among Ghanaian Women Traders,’ Communication, Culture & Critique, 9 (1), 148–168. Lanier, J. (2010) You Are Not a Gadget, New York: Knopf. Quandt, T. and Von Pape, T. (2010) ‘Living in the Mediatope. A Multimethod Study on the Evolution of Media Technologies in the Domestic Environment,’ The Information Society, 26, 330–345 Rata, E. (2002) ‘The Transformation of Indigeneity,’ Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Studies, 25 (2), 173–195. Ritzer, G. (1996) The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life, Revised Edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Rogers, E.M. (1995) Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed., New York: Free Press. Silverstone, R. (1989) ‘Let Us Return to the Murmuring of Everyday Practices. A Note on Michel de Certeau, Television, and Everyday Life,’ Theory, Culture and Society, 6 (1), 77–94. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 15–31. Stearns, P. (2000) Consumerism in World History. The Global Transformation of Desire, London: Routledge. Stotz, G. (2001) ‘The Colonizing Vehicle,’ in D. Miller (ed.): Car Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 223–244. Taiwo, R. and Igwebuike, E. (2015) ‘Mobile Phone Beeping,’ in Z. Yan (ed.) Encyclopedia of Mobile Phone Behavior, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 71–81. Touré, H.I. (2013) ‘Empowering Communities: How Mobile Is Transforming Development,’ Harvard International Review, 34 (3), 33–37. Verne, J. (2017) ‘The Mobile Phone - A Global Good? Modern Material Culture and Communication Technology in Africa,’ in T. Hodos (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, London: Routledge, 157–170. Verrips, J. and Meyer, B. (2001) ‘Kwaku’s Car: The Struggles and Stories of a Ghanaian Long-Distance Taxi-Driver,’ in D. Miller (ed.) Car Cultures, Oxford: Berg, 153–184. Vokes, R. (2018) ‘Before the Call: Mobile Phones, Exchange Relations, and Social Change in SouthWestern Uganda,’ Ethnos, 83 (2), 1–16. Weilenmann, A. and Larsson, C. (2002) ‘Local Use and Sharing of Mobile Phones,’ in B. Brown, N.  Green and R. Harper (eds.) Wireless World. Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, London: Springer, 92–107.

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11 DOMESTICATION THEORY Reflections from the Kalahari Jo Helle-Valle and Ardis Storm-Mathisen

Introduction The background for this chapter is that we have used domestication theory in research projects on media use in Norway for many years. In 2014, we got funding for a project researching how the spectacular media revolution that has taken, and still does take place in Africa, has affected socio-economic development. The project took a comparative approach to the issue. Fieldwork was conducted in South Africa, DR Congo, Zambia and Botswana. As we (the authors) have had solid, long-lasting fieldwork experience in the latter country, the idea was to continue our fieldwork efforts there but with special attention to media practices (we will return to this later in this chapter). When the editor approached us about writing a chapter for this book, we were a bit hesitant to accept. We felt that it was an honour to be asked; our scepticism, however, was based on the fact that we had not explicitly used domestication theory in our work in the project. Knowing that we had used it in our research in our native Norway, the editor asked us why not. Why not indeed? The fact was that we had not really thought it through thoroughly. We had not actively rejected domestication theory, just proceeded with our research with other tools. The editor’s question therefore forced us to reflect on this. This chapter is our answer to the editor’s question. It is not so that we feel a strong urge to defend ourselves – we believe that the analytical strategies we followed were right for our project. It was more that we found her question, and our ‘amnesia,’ so interesting that we believe that our intellectual quest had relevance for others engaged with domestication theory. We are fundamentally open to the domestication approach, but we had our – at that time relatively unreflected – analytical reasons not to apply it. These are what this chapter is about. As the foundation for these critical reflections is our fieldwork in Botswana, we start by briefly introducing this fieldwork and specific place. We then move on to point to some of the analytical premises of domestication theory that do not really fit well with the empirical reality of the village where we did most of our fieldwork, illustrated throughout by some exemplary cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Our discussion is centred around three issues: ethnocentrism, media-centrism and insufficient ethnographic fieldwork. First, we argue that what has been a central premise of the domestication approach, namely the clear distinction between the domestic and the public, does not reflect Botswana reality, and that this 162

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assumption constitutes an ethnocentric bias. As an extension of this, we emphasise the crucial i mportance of being clear about exactly what we mean by domestication; that we should be thinking of domestication as taming, not as ‘homing’1 (Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008). Second, we hold that there is a media-centric tendency in domestication theory. By this, we mean that although the socio-cultural context of media practices is emphasised in this approach, there is nevertheless a tendency to place media at the centre of the analysis. In our view, this tends to downplay the wider historically formed socio-cultural framework, which often disappears from our analytical gaze because it is easily taken for granted. Our data, which stems from a radically different social framework than what domestication theory usually engages with, demonstrates this bias. We believe that a clearer nonmedia-centric approach will rectify this bias. Third, and related to this, that although the domestication framework advocates a thorough ethnographic approach, we find that the actual empirical analyses that base themselves on this framework do not go far enough in this respect. Rather, we argue that taking this central methodological-analytical point sufficiently far requires what Morley has termed a non-media-centric media approach. And just as importantly, we argue that proper, solid fieldwork is a requirement for realising the full potential of domestication theory. Finally, we will sum up our arguments, concluding not that the domestication approach should be scrapped as an analytical approach but that it needs some revisions in order to serve as a globally relevant model for how to understand media practices and its significance for social change.

Background The background for our reflections in this chapter is, first, that we had applied domestication theory in several research projects on media use in our native Norway for almost two decades before we changed our attention to Africa (see e.g. Helle-Valle, 2003a, 2010; Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008; Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen, 2008; Storm-Mathisen, 2014; Storm-Mathisen & Kjørstad, 2015). Second, in 2012, we decided to change our focus to combine our competence on research on media practices with our vast ethnographic knowledge on Africa, and specifically Botswana (Helle-Valle, 1996, 1999, 2003a, 2004). In 2013, we landed a comprehensive, comparative research project, titled New Media Practices in a Changing Africa (from now on called mediafrica), financed by the Research Council of Norway, lasting from 2014 to 2020 (see its website www.mediafrica.no). Its design was comparative, doing fieldwork in Botswana, South Africa, DR Congo and Zambia, involving 12 researchers from Oslo Metropolitan University, University of Oslo, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Cape Town, University of Botswana, Harvard University and University of Birmingham. It started from a simple and concrete set of facts: at the time statistics suggested a consistent economic growth in most of Africa since the turn of the century. During the same period, a veritable media revolution had unfolded on the same continent. Our main research question was therefore to what extent and in what ways the two were connected. In Botswana, we conducted altogether nine months of multimethodological fieldwork (between 2015 and 2019) in two sites – Gaborone, the capital of Botswana (population approx. 200,000) and a fast-growing semi-urban village (population approx. 8,000) situated in the Kalahari Desert. The broad scope of this fieldwork was – by studying people’s everyday concerns and practices – to investigate how people related to, and used, new media and what effects it had on local sociality. 163

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The fieldwork was case-based (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Helle-Valle & Borchgrevink, 2018) and used participant observation – learning from ‘being with’ people and taking part in activities as the core method. The fieldwork design was informed by, and is in part a re-study of, fieldwork conducted in the village site in the early 1990s (Helle-Valle, 1996) and built on prior experiences with studying people’s new media use in the everyday (cf. Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen, 2008; Storm-Mathisen, 2016). To learn from people in different ways, a wide variety of complementary methods were applied: surveys,2 formal interviews (with household members, students, business owners and employees in business and government), focus groups, written and video-accounted diaries from participants, essays from primary and secondary school pupils on their futures, digital ethnography and reviews of various documents and reports (Storm-Mathisen, 2018, 2019). Still, most time was used on participant observation and included people of all ages and both sexes.

Domestication theory’s troubles in the Kalahari So back to the question of why we did not make domestication theory central in our project. In retrospect, we find that there are three aspects of the theory that did not fit well with our research intentions and the social reality of the field.

Ethnocentrism A central theoretical point made in the domestication framework is that media use is influenced by people’s moral evaluations. The point being that individuals do not simply purchase and use whatever they can afford. Media are both technologies and meaningful content that affect people’s lives and hence need to fit into their life worlds. This also implies a need to make them morally acceptable. Moreover, as Silverstone et al. (1992) point out, such moral frameworks are contextually formed. Thus, morality is not uniform within every sphere of a society’s sociality but is moulded by culturally agreed-on contexts. A crucial area of interest in domestication is the home, or household. There are lengthy discussions on ‘the moral economy of the household’ (see e.g. Haddon, 2016; Hartmann, 2020). This is characterised by ideas about what is a proper conduct, and interaction, for household members. For instance, taking part in online gambling can well be morally unproblematic if it takes place in a non-household setting, but highly immoral within the family context– especially if the media activity involves children. The latter are seen as vulnerable, not yet responsible persons who need to be socialised – or perhaps better: culturalised – by parents into proper social beings. This implies learning what we choose to call familism (Helle-Valle, 2003a, 2009; Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen, 2008). Familism, as an ideology, is a set of ideas about the importance of the domestic unit as the site for the emotional, close bonds that have supreme existential worth. The family, usually living under the same roof and ideally consisting of mother, father and children (and having room for grandparents, too), is linked to ideas about blood (kinship), which again denotes solidarity and romantic love (cf. e.g. Campbell, 1987; Shorter, 1975; Stone, 1990). Thus, the term ‘the moral economy of the household’: it is a moral economy because it is an material-economic unit, and it is a moral economy because culturally formed notions about what a home should be make the household economy operate in ways that are significantly different from the market economy (Silverstone et al., 1992: 16; also Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008: 53).

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In other words, what emerges as a fundamental analytical point in the domestication approach is that there is an important distinction between a domestic and a public sphere, and that this distinction is fairly clear.3 That is why the domestication of media is necessary in the household: the latter is a home; hence, very different evaluations surround media there than in the sphere in which it is produced and from where it is promoted as a commodity. As physical objects, media devices need to find their acceptable places within the space of the household, but perhaps more important is the peculiar quality of ICTs, namely that they are materiality as well as mediating cultural content. Hence, what has made ICTs especially controversial in homes is that they can be threatening to proper familism; their quality of double articulation (Silverstone, 1994: 29ff ) easily prove to be Trojan horses in that what appears as innocent entertainment, when unpacked, can have the potential for smuggling in destructive cultural stuff (Helle-Valle, 2003a). Thus, seemingly tamed – i.e., domesticated – objects can threaten what is considered to be the right kind of family sociality. Seen from a village in Kalahari, there are obviously some historically specific EuroAmerican premises contained in domestication that underlie the existence of (the alleged) morality of the home. To make the general point first, Euro-American conceptions of ideal family sociality are not a universal phenomenon at all. It has grown out of Western modernity and contains a great many contingent historical developments (Goody, 1976; Stone, 1990). Let us illustrate this by providing descriptions of households in the village. For one, the typical household (lolwapa) in the village is a collection of small huts made of mud or brick, and with thatched or corrugated iron roofs. The dwellings are made for sleeping (and sex). Food is made outside, in a kitchen area demarcated by a low wall of sticks. Moreover, the climate makes the inside too hot for comfort during the day for most of the year. Thus, the result is that almost all wake hours are spent outside, in the semi-public area of homestead. This precludes the establishment of a clear distinction between the private and the public. Think of it: in our typical European homes, we spend a considerable part of our lives within the secluded space of our houses. There are thick, opaque walls and a door which can, and often is, closed and locked. We take these trivial, yet important material conditions for granted, simply because that is the reality we know. In contrast, in the Botswana village, the inter-family talks – including intimate, private matters, quarrels, etc. – actually take place in spaces that are not secluded. This means that the assumption inherent in the domestication approach – that we have a clearly demarcated socio-cultural sphere that is qualitatively different from the public – is simply not the case in large parts of the world. It requires some material factors which are in fact not present. This is not to say that people in the village talk freely about personal and intimate issues. They of course feel the need to have some parts of their lives concealed from their fellow villagers. However, the idea of the home – as we know it from Western modernity – is not found in the village. These material conditions are also reflected in traditional village practices. To raise children is much more of a kin group and neighbourhood responsibility (the two largely overlap) than in the individualised West, so are marital concerns. Typically, if a couple are considering leaving each other, it quickly becomes a matter for the couple’s family groups (including uncles, aunts and grandparents). Thus, the point we are making is that yes, there are definitely ideas about privacy, but these ideas are fundamentally different from what we Western academics envision as universal. The border between the public and the private is porous and weak, and hence also the two speres’ cultural contents are not clearly different. This leads, we contend, to other types of media-related practices than we typically find in the West (cf. case below, on how TV is used in Botswana).

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It is in relation to this non-Western setting that we clearly see the unfortunate ambiguity surrounding the idea of the domestic. As Helle-Valle and Slettemeås (2008) have argued, the term is sometimes used as ‘taming’ and sometimes as ‘homing’ – i.e., sometimes it is about what takes place within the home, and sometimes it refers to the act of taming, making it culturally acceptable. This does not constitute analytical problems if two conditions are fulfilled: that the empirical focus is on homes and that these homes belong to a late modern Western tapping. Both these conditions formed the empirical foundation for domestication theory’s original version, and still seem to be (with a notable early exception in the Norwegian contributions published in Lie and Sørensen, 1996). In their paradigmatic usage, taming was homing. It was tamed as it was brought within the confines of the family and it was not ‘homed’ if it was not considered ‘tameable.’ In the above-mentioned article, it was argued that it would be analytically fortunate to rid the theory of this ambiguity and confine ourselves to defining domestication as taming, leaving ‘homing’ to the empirical realm. The Botswana setting illustrates this point’s significance: as we have pointed out above and will elaborate on below, we find that domestication processes are rarely linked to the home and the family, more often to the individual or to the larger kin group/local network. Before we proceed in our argument, a note of conditionality is needed: the village does not longer consist only of traditional hamlets, nor are family groups to the same extent involved in domestic matters. There have been enormous changes during the three decades that we have had first-hand knowledge of the place. These are both of a material-practical nature (increase in wage labour, increased monetarisation, the introduction of electricity in the village, a sewage system layout, etc.) and socio-cultural (the weakening of kin relations, increased individualisation, increased bureaucratisation, etc.). So obviously, the village is not ‘traditional.’ In many ways, it is surprisingly modern. But what we can state with certainty is that sociality – and in particular ideas about what is private and what is public – is much the same as they were 30 years ago. One type of practice which demonstrates this is precisely within the realm of media use. For instance, while no households had televisions in the 1990s (because there were no TV signals), more than 50% of the households in the village had one in 2016. Since 2015, we have during our four field trips lived in the homestead of a medium wealthy family that has two TVs and two mobile phones. The household consisted of three houses, two of them lived in and with television sets. The couple who owned the household stayed in one of them; the other was for us but also a son who irregularly stayed in the household. What surprised us was that often when we returned home, there were strangers sitting in our (?) living room, watching TV without the presence of the host family. They could sit there for hours, watching (mostly religious programmes) and left when they had had enough, sometimes not even informing us or the owners. Nor did they feel any need to explain their presence to us. We observed this practice in several homes; it was obviously a common practice (see also AbuLughod, 2005 for comparable practices in Egypt, and Winther, 2008: 133 for Zanzibar). Our surprise was of course linked to our own, late modern European background, and expectations about how to relate to other people’s homes, and how to behave when visiting. We found these liberal conventions about privacy challenging, but at the same time they were illustrative of a differently formed sociality, one which clearly challenged our taken for granted assumptions about what a home is. And more importantly and to the point: it challenged the very idea central to domestication theory that there is a clear distinction between the domestic and the public, and that this affects in fundamental ways how media are treated in the two realms of sociality. 166

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Another contention in the domestication theory framework is the importance of moral evaluations of media use. It is no doubt true as a general observation, but our ethnographic experience from Botswana suggests that it might be interesting to focus on what kind of socio-cultural conditions enhance the moral dimension. We find that in the Botswana village, there is relatively little moral concern with media; it is considered much more as a morally neutral tool that people can use or not. We have two tentative explanations for this. First, if we assume that it is media’s double articulation that makes it potentially dangerous in Western sociality – as it can serve as a Trojan horse, smuggling ‘bad’ cultural stuff into the sanctity of familism – then the vague and porous border between the home and the public, and hence the private and the public, that we find in this village does not easily accommodate for connecting strong moral qualities to media. Moreover, the same vague borders reflect and perhaps partly explain why we do not find familism as a quality of Botswana homes. They do of course have families, and warm, intimate emotions are often part of family life, but the Western ideology linking love, romanticism and existentiality to the family (Stone, 1990) is alien to most villagers. Second, it is not unreasonable to assume that the moral evaluations of media in the West are related to affluence. It is when the affordability exceeds the minimum need for various media devices that the moral dilemmas kick in. In the village, ‘too much’ is rarely an issue. Most people cannot afford media that they consider to be (near) necessities. Especially the mobile phone is an important tool for keeping in touch, which is crucial in a society where mobility is high and transport is scarce and expensive. In other words, it is an essential tool for building social capital (cf. Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen, 2020: 24).

Media-centrism The perhaps most important factor in explaining our reticence in using the domestication approach as the theoretical framework for our analyses is our fieldwork experience, previous and current. As pointed out, we have conducted long stays in the village and the first author of this chapter did in fact his first fieldwork there as early as 1990. Our experience with village sociality therefore started before mobile phones, or TVs, even existed in the village. Doing fieldwork for almost a year in the early 1990s led to an intimate and extensive understanding of village life, a reality where media (in the conventional sense of the word) played only a very marginal role (only radio and one newspaper that very few people read). Thus, when we arrived in the village (and the capital) for the first part of fieldwork for the mediafrica project in 2015, it implied coming to a known sociality, but studying a new phenomenon: new media. As all research is, in one sense, to move from the known to the unknown, this created a type of reasoning and research strategy in which the question was not so much how media shape people, as how people make use of media. We knew much about people’s concerns and ways of thinking and feeling and as we found that they had not changed significantly during the last quarter of a century we saw that the way forward was to see how media affected and played a part in villagers’ pursuit of their concerns. Moreover, previous research suggested that the best way to understand their life worlds was to see practices as anchored in different language-games (Helle-Valle, 1996; Wittgenstein, 1968). This type of understanding aligns well with domestication’s emphasis on understanding media via the contexts in which they are part. However, our objection is that the typical domestication analysis starts (and ends) with the media and that this media-centrism tends towards a view of media as the determining factor in social reproduction. 167

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In 2009, David Morley published the very short article For a Materialist, Non-Media-Centric Media Studies. We find the perspective presented there as something of a Copernican Turn in that he argues for a shift of our analytical focus. In the same way that an experienced hunter knows that the best way to detect game is to not visually search out specific objects, but to take in the totality (because movement is best observed when objects are related to their surroundings), the best way to understand the socio-cultural significance of media is when they are not the centre of attention but seen as (more or less important) parts of wider social processes. Without putting a too fine point to it, we need to grasp the social totality before we can see the social significance of media. This is also in a sense what the founders of domestication theory highlighted when emphasising the crucial role of socio-cultural contexts for understanding media in society, but our contention is that in actual analysis, this goal is not achieved due to an inherent media-centrism in the approach. In other words, the social significance of media is first of all found by focusing on the practices in which the media are a part, not by starting with media and map its surroundings. A farmer calling a veterinary officer for help with vaccinating his goats connects very different people and generates entirely different effects than a young man flirting with a girlfriend-to-be. It is one technology – it can even be the same phone – but the difference the phone makes sociologically is worlds apart. Morley’s point has both a methodological and an analytical aspect to it. Analytically, it is about letting media become one factor among many in an analysis which focuses on the social totality. This ‘totality’ is then approached by providing a historical depth to the practices we observe, and understanding how media, as one element within a much bigger and more complicated whole, is one factor, sometimes important, sometimes not. Methodologically, the point is to provide as thick descriptions as possible (Geertz, 1973). From the analytical point, it follows that we need to grasp the social totality, and we also need to understand how people reason and what drives them in various social settings. Ideally, it requires a multimethodological approach, and it should, in our view, involve serious ethnographic fieldwork – simply because without it, a thorough understanding of what drives people’s practices is unattainable.

Insufficient ethnographic methodology Thus, a point made repeatedly by Silverstone and other leading proponents of the domestication approach is the necessity of doing ethnographic studies in order to grasp the meaning actors place on media, hence to understand their social significance. This is a point that we – being social scientists ourselves, with solid qualitative competence – fully endorse. The arguments presented in the previous sub-section are, obviously, about the importance of fieldwork: insisting on solid, thick descriptions of the context in which media practices take place is for us doing prolonged, detailed ethnographic fieldwork. However, our impression is that in reality, such fieldwork is the exception rather than the rule in research conducted in the name of domestication theory. This is not surprising as the domestication concept is almost exclusively applied to socialities in the Global North. As we pointed out in our discussion about the private-public issue above, the privacy of the private/domestic is much more pronounced in the Global North than in the Global South. This means that getting access to the everyday of the private is undoubtedly more difficult in the former setting than in the latter. No doubt, conducting solid fieldwork is laden with challenges and problems (practical as well as ethical) in the Global South as well: a lot of the interesting things that are going on are backstage situations and a great deal of secrecy and avoidance is of course 168

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found all over the world. However, the ability to keep private issues private is so much more difficult when most things that are happening with people take place within a listening and observing range of others. Thus, this point is not so much a criticism of domestication theory as such; it is more to explain why we did not have this theory upfront in our minds when leaving for fieldwork in Botswana. With our already acquired ethnographic knowledge about Botswana, our minds were set on continuing gathering such data, an activity we did not naturally associate with domestication theory. Let us provide two examples of the importance of prolonged fieldwork for getting a proper understanding of how media practices actually affect sociality. The first is focused on uses of SIM cards. In Botswana, there were 1.6 SIM cards for every subscriber in 2016 (ITU, 2017). The common, established explanation for this high number is due to the price profile in Botswana. There are three providers (Be, Mascom and Orange) in the country and all have extremely complex pricing profiles. Prices for making phone calls differ from using data bundles and the prices vary both with the time of day and whether it is a weekday or weekends. But their profiles are not identical, meaning that for some uses, at certain times, one provider is the cheapest, while in other situations another provider is the cheapest. Thus, although we never managed to get a solid grip on this complex pricing landscape, it seems that most Batswana do, and therefore money can be saved by having SIM cards from two or all three providers and changing between them depending on what you are doing with your phone at what time. While this is no doubt a very important explanation, it is not the full story. A thorough ethnographic contextualisation helps us to see that the issue is more multifarious – and ethnographically more interesting – than what it appears at first sight. A first clue is the relative poverty we find in the village. This means that very few have mobile phones that are exclusively private. As all villagers belong to a household, it follows that except for the few wealthiest, all must share their phone with other members of the household. Thus, to the extent they need to hide their phone use from other users of the same phone, the best way to do it is to have a SIM card that no one else is allowed to use. In that way, a person can lend his/her phone to others without them seeing who that person has phoned or what the airtime has been used for. What such private use is about will, of course, vary but one important type of usage is to be in contact with lovers. There are two forms of love relationships that are important to hide from others: when a man or woman has several lovers simultaneously, and when s/he is married. Both are very common, but of course difficult to reveal as a researcher. The reason we know about this is our long, solid fieldwork. Due to complex, socio-cultural conditions existing in Botswana, and most of the rest of Africa, marital links are weak (Goody, 1976; Guyer, 1995). Moreover, sexual relationships in Africa are explicitly linked to material strategies in a very different manner than we know from the Euro-American cultural tradition (Helle-Valle, 1996, 1999, 2003b, 2004). Thus, our meticulous fieldwork gives us insights into intimate, interpersonal lives we could otherwise not have accessed. In short, what we find is that for reasons of discretion and fast, effective communication mobile phones are extensively used in lover relationships4 (see also Pype, 2020 for similar practices in Kinshasa, DR Congo), but our long ethnographic engagement also tells us that these sexual practices are not something that has come with the increased communicative networking that digital, social media provide – as might easily be hypothesised – but is an old, historically embedded practice. In fact, our data’s historical depth informs us that in this case, as well as in other types of practices, new media do not seem to have changed 169

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people’s strategies and ways of thinking significantly, but that the mechanisms and dynamics surrounding these areas of interest have changed (Helle-Valle, 2019; Storm-Mathisen, 2020). The second example we will present is about the use of RFID tagging of cattle. RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – is perhaps not commonly understood as media technology, but it is. It mediates information of the Internet of Things (IoT) type. It consists of a small chip which serves as a unique identification tag, and a reader, which is a receiver of the information on the tag. In a sense, it is an advanced barcode; only that every RFID tag has an individual identity. The tag is clipped on the ear of the cow and information about this cow is then fed into a database: when it was born, its breed, who owns it, whether it is vaccinated, etc. The purpose of this technology is to contain the recurrent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease that have plagued Botswana for more than a century. The major export value of the Botswana cattle industry went to the EU and the outbreaks threatened to jeopardise Botswana’s trade agreement with the EU. This technology complex fulfils two vital needs: effective vaccination and mapping. The authorities provide free vaccines for tagged cattle and the system gives them reliable control and documentation. Thus, it was seen as the best response to the outbreaks and was introduced as early as at the turn of the century by the national veterinary authorities (Oladele, 2011). The RFID system represents major advantages also for the cattle owner: free vaccination and more efficient veterinary services, and tagged animals get a better price than untagged when sold. In addition, the tracking system has radically lessened the risk of cattle theft. Still, we found that a great deal of the more traditionally oriented cattle owners, who own the great majority of the cattle in Botswana, were reluctant to vaccinate and to insert RFID tags on their beasts. From the outside, this reluctance seems rather irrational but getting to understand their points of view gave sense to their practices. To take the view of one such farmer: he told us that, for one, the services are not entirely free, even though the authorities say so. There are small costs here and there. For instance, the RFID tags have to be bought and paid for by the farmer himself. And for some unexplainable reason they are not purchasable in the village. He has to travel to the capital to get them. This means that he will have to take into consideration the expenses (in time and money) when he makes the decision to tag his cattle. He acknowledges that vaccinating his cattle lessens the chance of sickness among his animals and also makes it easier to sell at a good price. However, to understand his practices, two factors are important. For one, his relationship to his cattle is typically traditional. He does not see them as commodities that shall be sold at optimal moments. Thus, he does not want to sell if he is not forced to; to him, cattle are first of all central cultural tokens of wealth, masculinity and a good life (Schapera, 1984). Moreover, he fears that the authorities will use the information they get through the services to tax him for his wealth (a not entirely unreasonable suspicion). Thus, avoiding the veterinary service is also a way to elude state control (Helle-Valle, 2020). What our fieldwork gave us was to see how a technology brings a poor, traditionally oriented farmer into global economic, power-laden networks, and illustrates the ‘glocal’ nature of globalism: the cow wandering in the Botswana veld looked after by an illiterate herd boy becomes connected to a global economic system. Thus, the global is not a macro phenomenon, while the farmer represents the local – they are seamlessly connected in various types of networks (cf. e.g. Latour, 2005: 191ff.). These networks are capitalist in their nature and their logic is dominated by a typical ‘zweck-rational’ reasoning. But we also saw a farmer with limited knowledge about the system he becomes part of and hence reacts with scepticism. Thus, the resistance he in a sense expresses through his actions do make sense.5 170

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But all this being said, it is important to highlight how the analytical views that support such a quest for understanding the farmer’s actions are fully on par with the fundamentals of domestication theory. In contrast to both quantitative analyses of media, which gives very little room for understanding local points of view, and also in contrast to various gratification perspectives that tend to focus on the ‘rational actor,’ disregarding the social environment that all deeds take place within, the domestication perspective rightly emphasises the importance of understanding the complex relationship between actors, media and social contexts. In hindsight, we might say that we had ‘domesticated’ this perspective already – first of all through having done solid ethnographic fieldwork, but also by way of having read and used the perspectives inherent in domestication theory.

Reflections Thus, we do in no way consider the domestication framework to be obsolete or irrelevant. Quite the contrary, we find it to be as relevant as ever and that it is a perspective that a great deal of developers of new media in the Global South – bureaucracies, development projects and businesses – would have greatly benefited from heeding. We, too, in our research in Botswana, although partly unreflected, were inspired by domestication theory. In fact, although we have used this chapter to criticise central tenets of the theory, we did use it quite explicitly in one of our methods, namely our surveys. We did three surveys in relation to the mediafrica project – one in the capital, one in the village and a web survey. In the first two, we had two main parts: one which sought to map non-media variables (like types of households, income and education) and one which was media-centric: the latter set of questions were informed by the four original dimensions or aspect of domestication: adoption and ownership of various types of media devices (appropriation), where media was situated (objectification), money, routines and concerns related to media use (incorporation) and attitudes to various media usages (conversion). The idea was to get numbers that might provide patterns of use, but our intention was also to get types of information about relationships between the technical and cultural. Our plan was to combine the quantitative data from the surveys with ethnographic data to see how media are always cultural. This multimethodological approach (combined with other methods, such as video diary, interview, essays – cf. Storm-Mathisen, 2018, 2019) was fully in line with domestication’s insistence that to understand media use one needs to understand both the general and the specific socio-cultural contexts in which these uses take place. In fact, we would like to take this insistence a step further, referring to Latour: things play crucial roles in constituting the social. The old, die-hard assumption that the ‘social’ is separated from the material is plainly wrong. Materiality, including media technologies, is always social, and the social is nothing without materiality. According to Latour, the idea that ‘the social’ have any existence outside its material manifestations is a false fiction: There exists no relation whatsoever between ‘the material’ and ‘the social world,’ because it is this very division which is a complete artifact. … There is no empirical case where the existence of two coherent and homogeneous aggregates, for instance technology ‘and’ society, could make any sense. (Latour, 2005: 75–76) The insight that technology is social and the social is material is perhaps even rarer applied in the Global South than in the Global North. As Don Slater (2013) has pointed out, the 171

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typical approach to introducing new media for development purposes treats media in a onedimensional way, as a tool only. From this premise, the development effort is to educate people about the instrumental and technical aspects of media, ignoring the double (and triple) articulation of media, namely that it is material and transmits meaning, which is always cultural and hence moral (Hartmann, 2006). The result is often that such efforts flop (Slater, 2013). The global network ICT4D (ICT for development) is a typical example of such an approach. The value of domestication theory (with the discussed modifications) might thus be even bigger in the South.6 Before we end, we need to qualify, as well as clarify, the relevance of our arguments. We have used data primarily from one village in the Kalahari Desert, yet at times talked about Botswana, Africa and the Global South when we reflect on our arguments. What grounds do we have for such generalisations? Obviously, one village does not represent half the world. The South and Africa are as diverse as Europe. But some historical factors and some present-day conditions nevertheless give grounds for generalisations. For one, different levels of affluence: Africa and the Global South are on an aggregate level poorer than the Global North. This implies that mechanisms related to use and morality are different there than here. Development, also in the sense of smooth workings of state apparatuses, human rights, industrialisation and urbanisation, is wanting in relation to the Global North. This is not to say that Africa is a kind of late coming blueprint of Euro-America but that there are certain qualities contained in modernity – first of all linked to migration, the anonymisation of urban life, material changes and modern ideology – that all societies transforming more and more into thoroughly capitalised societies experience. Issues such as ideas about the individual and interpersonal relations differ as a result of differences in modern, capitalist-bureaucratic changes. The points made in this chapter are to a large extent linked to the extent to which society is what we commonly term late modernity (Giddens, 1992). As we also have a great deal of ethnographic data from Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, including its rapidly growing middle class, we see that several of the mechanisms that we point to are becoming increasingly irrelevant. For instance, ideas about the private vs. the public, about familism, levels of affluence, etc., seem to move closer to what we Northerners know from home. In other words, the factors that can be labelled cultural are closely tied to socio-economic change. With growing urbanisation, affluence and exposure to hegemonic Western ideas, more domestication theory-related factors become relevant also in Africa. However, that does not affect the arguments we have presented and the contention that there is an ethnocentric bias in the domestication approach. To sum up and end on a positive note: we criticise domestication theory for being ethnocentric in some of its theoretical assumptions; we also find its tendency to media-centrism unfortunate. This we find to be linked to its practitioners’ often insufficient ethnographic practice. However, we also hold the view that the domestication framework is analytically fruitful and serves as a good template for solid social scientific research on media in society. Thus, we believe that we conducted our research in the mediafrica project along the lines of domestication theory’s ideals: we held the view that the technological can never be separated from the socio-cultural, that the context for media usage is crucial for understanding what is going on and what effects the practices have and we have applied multimethodological approaches – ranging from surveys to ethnographic fieldwork – to understand media practices. Irrespective of what other domestication theory practitioners have done, we acknowledge that we are lucky to have been in a position to actually realise the sometimes impossible ideal of doing thorough ethnographic fieldwork and have the resources and the time to properly map the landscapes in which media practices unfold. 172

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Notes 1 “Homing” in the sense of belonging to the domestic sphere. 2 These included a web survey open to all Batswana and two enumerated stratified door-to-door surveys that included questions both with the household and with individual as units, one in the capital and one in the village. Both surveys included photo documentation. 3 Of course, within the domestication framework, the private-public dichotomy is an analytical distinction – and as such it is obviously clear as day. When we use the qualifying term ‘fairly,’ it is linked to the realm of the empirical: for any analytical term to be of worth as a tool, it needs to – at least in some sense – reflect qualities of what we study. It goes without saying that reality is always more varied than the tools we use to grasp that reality. In this case – analysing a public-private dichotomy – it is a type of practice we are naming. Human practices are always formed by, but never identical, with our ideas about ourselves and the world. What we – in line with how we understand domestication theory – claim is that people have ideas about there being a significant moral-cultural difference between the home and what is outside it, and that these ideas affect how people act. However, people act from a varied, broad set of assumptions, values and concerns. Therefore, acts cannot be reduced to one specific organising principle, nor do perspectives and motives always translate into clear patterns of aggregated practices. What we say, therefore, is that we find that the distinction is easily detectable in what most people say and do although not without exceptions. 4 For most villagers, that means phone calls and SMS. However, for those with smartphones also WhatsApp and Facebook are important platforms for this kind of communication. Many young individuals operate with several WhatsApp and Facebook accounts, sometimes with fake names, in order to keep the identity of different lovers (and prospective lovers) hidden from one another. 5 The case also exemplifies a bias that is connected to media and the Global South: the typical approach to introducing new media for development purposes treats media in a one- dimensional way, as a tool only. From this, the development effort is to educate people the instrumental and technical aspects of media, ignoring the double articulation of media, namely that at its core is a medium for meaning, which is always cultural and hence moral. The result is often that such efforts flop (Slater, 2013). The global network ICT4D (ICT for development) is a typical example. 6 What this line of argument also should warn us of is that what we have been focusing on is a social science perspective on media. That is, our interest is on the relationship of media (both as materiality and as meaning mediator) and our social world. This means that we do not see media as a representation of something, but as a material-cultural, in-the-world practice in itself. In the phrase of Nigel Thrift (1996), we approach media as a non-representational practice (see also Moores, 2018). We are not saying that it is not legitimate to study representations, i.e., media as tokens or metonyms for some kind of abstract cultural totality, but it should not be confused with social science and the study of actual, everyday life.

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Jo Helle-Valle and Ardis Storm-Mathisen Hartmann, M. (2006) ‘The Triple Articulation of ICTs: Media as Technological Objects, Symbolic Environments and Individual Texts,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K. J. Ward (eds.), The Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 80–102. Hartmann, M. (2020) ‘(The Domestication of ) Nordic Domestication?’ Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2, 47–57. Helle-Valle, J. (1996) Change and Diversity in a Kgalagadi Village, Botswana, Doctoral thesis, University of Oslo. Helle-Valle, J. (1999) ‘Sexual Mores, Promiscuity and “Prostitution” in Botswana,’ Ethnos, 64, 372–396. Helle-Valle, J. (2003a) Familiens trojanske hester? En kvalitativ undersøkelse av bruk av digitale medier i norske hjem, Research report 2003–1, Oslo: SIFO. Helle-Valle, J. (2003b) ‘Social Change and Sexual Mores: A Comparison between Pre-20th-Century Norway and 20th-Century Botswana,’ History and Anthropology, 14 (4), 327–347. Helle-Valle, J. (2004) ‘Understanding Sexuality in Africa: Diversity and Contextualised Dividuality,’ in S. Arnfred (ed.), Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa, Uppsala: NAI, 195–207. Helle-Valle, J. (2009) ‘“Si aldri nei til å gå ut med venner fordi du spiller på WoW”: Om nettspill, disiplinering og kommunikative kontekster,’ in K. Asdal and E. Jacobsen (eds.), Forbrukerens ansvar, Oslo: Cappelen, 171–198. Helle-Valle, J. (2010) ‘Language-games, In/dividuals and Media Uses: What a Practice Per-spective Should Imply for Media Studies,’ in B. Bräuchler and J. Postill (eds.), Theorising Media and Practice, New York: Berghahn, 191-–211. Helle-Valle, J. (2019) ‘Advocating Causal Analyses of Media and Social Change by Way of Social Mechanisms,’ Journal of African Media Studies, 11 (2), 143–161. Helle-Valle, J. (2020) ‘From No Media to All Media: Domesticating New Media in a Kalahari Village,’ in J. Helle-Valle and A. Storm-Mathisen (eds.), Media Practices and Changing African Socialities: Nonmedia-centric Perspectives, London: Berghahn Books. Helle-Valle, J. and Borchgrevink, A. (2018) ‘Household Histories and Methodological Triangulation,’ Forum for Development Studies, 45 (2), 191–215. Helle-Valle, J. and Slettemeås, D. (2008) ‘ICTs, Domestication and Language-Games: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Media Uses,’ New Media and Society, 10, 45–66. Helle-Valle, J. and Storm-Mathisen, A. (2008) ‘Playing Computer Games in the Family Context,’ Human IT, 9 (3), 62–82. Helle-Valle, J. and Storm-Mathisen, A. (2020) ‘Introduction: A Social Science Perspective on media practices in Africa – Social mechanisms, Dynamics and Processes,’ in J. Helle-Valle and A. StormMathisen (eds.), Media Practices and Changing African Socialities – non-media-centric perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn, 1–32. ITU (International Telecommunications Union) (2017) Measuring the Information Society Report 2017, 1, Geneva: ITU. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lie, M. and Sørensen, K. H. (1996) ‘Making Technology our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life,’ in M. Lie and K. H. Sørensen (eds.), Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1–30. Moores, S. (2018) Digital Orientations: Non-Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-Representational Theories of Practice, New York: Peter Lang. Morley, D. (2009) ‘For a Materialist, Non-Media-Centric Media Studies,’ Television and New Media, 10, 114–116. Oladele, O. I. (2011) ‘Determinants of Constraints to Livestock Identification and Trace-Back System use for Disease Monitoring among Cattle Farmers in Botswana,’ International Journal of Applied Research in Veterinary Medicine, 9 (2), 143–153. Pype, K. (2020) ‘Bolingo ya face: Digital Marriages, Playfulness and the Search for Change in Kinshasa,’ in J. Helle-Valle and A. Storm-Mathisen (eds.), Media Practices and Changing African Socialities: NonMedia-Centric Perspectives, London: Berghahn Books, 93–124. Schapera, I. (1984) [1953] The Tswana, London: KPI. Shorter, E. (1975) The Making of the Modern Family, New York: Basic Books. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge.

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Domestication in the Kalahari Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming Technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 15–32. Slater, D. (2013) New Media, Development & Globalisation, Cambridge: Polity Press. Stone, L. (1990) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, London: Penguin. Storm-Mathisen, A. (2014) ‘RFID in Toll/Ticketing – A User Centric Approach,’ Info – The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications, Information and Media, 16 (6), 60–73. Storm-Mathisen, A. (2018) ‘Visual Methods in Ethnographic Fieldwork – On Learning from Participants Through Their Video-Accounts,’ Forum for Development Studies, 45 (2), 261–286. Storm-Mathisen, A. (2019) ‘New Media Use among Young Batswana – On Concerns, Consequences and the Educational Factor,’ Journal of African Media Studies, 11 (2), 163–182. Storm-Mathisen. A. (2020) ‘New Ways of Making Ends Meet? On Batswana Women and Their Uses of the Mobile Phone,’ in J. Helle-Valle and A. Storm-Mathisen (eds.), Media Practices and Changing African Socialities: Non-Media-Centric Perspectives, London: Berghahn Books, 148–169. Storm-Mathisen, A. and Kjørstad, I. (2015) Barns bruk av smartmobil og nettbrett – en kvalitativ undersøkelse av reguleringens idealer og praksiser [Children’s uses of smartphones and tablets – A qualitative study of ideals and practices in parental regulation], Research report No. 2, Oslo: SIFO. Thrift, N. (1996) Spatial Formations, London: Sage. Winther, T. (2008) The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires and Dilemmas, New York: Berghahn Books. Wittgenstein, L. (1968) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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PART III

Technologizing and designing domestication

Technologizing and designing domestication Introduction Marianne Ryghaug

This introduction to the section ‘Technologizing and Designing Domestication’ builds on five chapters, which highlight both how the concept of domestication relates to other theoretical concepts and approaches (such as socialization, actor-network theory (ANT) and practice-based theories) and how domestication can be extended in new ways, both empirically and methodologically. Thus, the different authors of this section of this book ask us to not only focus on single commodities and objects of domestication but to also focus on systems of commodities, evolving networks and efforts to embed technologies in society. The authors offer diverse analyses of a variety of objects of domestication, ranging from the quite typical media associations, such as television and Netflix, to less studied technoscientific objects such as the heart rate monitor. They thereby illustrate the material diversity which may be fruitful for thinking about and analysing domestication. Even the afterlife of domesticated objects is incorporated in these analyses. The five chapters also highlight the methodological and empirical diversity of domestication processes that may be studied and analysed. This is illustrated by the use of methods such as design fiction, participant observation and using thick descriptions, in addition to more typical qualitative interviews, which have often been used to study domestication processes in the past. An interesting extension to previous studies of domestication is the way some of the chapters in this part strive to broaden the sites where domestication and related processes may be studied, going beyond the typical consumer, user and everyday life setting to also encompass ‘liminal spaces,’ where technoscientific objects can be nurtured and protected, such as universities, laboratories and demonstration projects. The first chapter, Chapter 12 by Knut Holtan Sørensen, does exactly this, as he analyses the socialization of new technoscience and processes of incorporating and embedding such objects into society, labelling it coproduction. In doing so, he demonstrates how the socialization of new technoscience supplements domestication theory. Socialization, instead of focusing on individuals or small groups, takes into account the sets of activities that are intended to pave the way for domestication, such as the development of technological frames, the construction of publics, suggestions of practices and the creation of spaces where future users may experience and learn about innovation. Such activities, according to Sørensen, take place in science communication, newspapers, demonstration and pilot projects as well as in

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marketing – sites where socialization actors often offer sense-making around technological objects, which therefore may be seen as places aiding domestication processes. The next chapter by Vera Klocke (Chapter 13) also goes beyond simple appropriation processes often traced by domestication approaches. Klocke looks at how the different devices that are used for watching television affect the processes of media appropriation and the living spaces. By building on ANT and detailed documentation practices and methods, Klocke is able to show the alliances between different devices to examine power hierarchies between devices, the way they relate to each other and consequently what television entails in the shaping of media appropriation processes. Chapter 14 by Iohanna Nicenboim goes even further in experimenting with different axes of understanding the relationship between the way people may relate to different devices, such as sensors, in their everyday life and how re-positioning data about the environment within human and non-human relations may aid to that. By fabricating a series of provocative design fictions, often with pet-like qualities and a limited time-span, Nicenboim is able to show how people will need to work actively to interpret the data and to connect home and sensor technologies to the home, infrastructures and the environment. The chapter may be read as a creative and skilful attempt to both criticize and make more transparent the often-ignored work that goes into relating sensor technologies and data produced by sensors and algorithms to everyday life and the environment. Nicenboim presents this work primarily through images from the designs she has created. Chapter 15 by Mika Pantzar deserves some extra attention as the chapter discusses the way practice-based approaches are useful in examining not only the integration of material objects and meanings attached to them (as is often the case of domestication studies), but also their maintenance, reproduction and sometimes evolution of new patterns in daily life and in society. Thus, this chapter does a thorough job of explaining the origins and developments of the domestication framework and how these developments relate to developments within practice studies that either focus on social practices and the conditions for action and performances (Schatzki, 2001) or theories of arrangement (networks, apparatus and assemblage) foregrounded in ANT. The chapter takes on more of the latter view focusing on the conditions for various integration processes (of, for example, ideas, material objects and competences), and less on the very act or practice itself, which in this case is heart rate monitoring. The chapter shows that the shift from ‘proto-practice’ to an existing practice takes place when the links between various elements increase, stabilize and are strengthened. Pantzar does a good job in highlighting that the mechanisms that lead consumers to repeat their early choices must be studied in the same depths as those which made the consumer make the choice in the first place (as the latter has often been the focus in domestication studies). Thus, he highlights the importance of shifting the perspective from single commodities and needs to systems of commodities. In Chapter 16, Ignacio Siles draws on domestication theory to offer a supplement to studies of datafication while paying particular attention to the ‘mutual domestication’ of which users incorporate Netflix in their everyday life, while at the same time Netflix attempts to turn users into ideal consumers by the use of algorithms. This brings us back to the classical studies of domestication that underscore the cyclicity of domestication dynamics and processes (Silverstone, 1994) and see this movement as important for understanding future developments and engagements with algorithmic platforms. Interestingly, several of the chapters seem to lean more on the science and technology studies (STS) approach to domestication than the typical media studies approach. Most articles deal with the way technologies and technology users mutually shape each other in 180

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technology production and in everyday life. It is, however, interesting to note that probing technology production, design or deployment through the way technology and system designers imagine publics and script technologies and via this build assumptions about technology users into technology design, systems or policies (Sovacool et al., 2020), is less salient in many of the chapters, as they mostly focus on user-engagement with technoscientific objects. Later works within STS that deal with technology use tend to focus more broadly on the way people may participate in processes of sociotechnical change (for example, seen as material participation) and have called for the need to understand participation as more open-ended processes that are orchestrated across different arenas of society when studying processes of sociotechnical development (Chilvers & Kearnes, 2015; Skjølsvold et al., 2018). This type of understanding is reflected in the chapters by Sørensen and Pantzar, which show how such newer developments within STS and practice studies sit well with the domestication tradition. Another striking feature to be found in many of the chapters of this part of this book (and especially the chapters of Nicenboim, Siles and Klocke) is the way new digital media technologies and their increasingly networked qualities require researchers to have deep engagements with digital material environments, processes and objects as stressed within design anthropology and digital ethnography, as well as the importance of focusing on the entanglements between and beyond the digital, material and human (Pink, Ardèvol & Lanzeni, 2020). This requires sensitizing researchers to new methods and new sites of study, as skilfully demonstrated here.

References Chilvers, J. and Kearnes, M. (2015) Remaking participation: Science, environment and emergent publics. London: Routledge. Pink, S., Ardèvol, E. and Lanzeni, D. (2020) ‘Digital materiality’ in Pink, S., Ardèvol, E. and Lanzeni, D. (eds.) Digital materialities, London: Routledge, pp. 1–26. Schatzki, T. (2001) ‘Introduction: Practice theory’ in Schatzki, T., Knorr-Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The practice turn in contemporary theory, London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Skjølsvold, T. M., Throndsen, W., Ryghaug, M., Fjellså, I. F. and Koksvik, G. H. (2018) ‘Orchestrating households as collectives of participation in the distributed energy transition: New empirical and conceptual insights’ Energy Research & Social Science, 46, 252–261. Sovacool, B. K. et al. (2020) ‘Sociotechnical agendas: Reviewing future directions for energy and climate research’ Energy Research & Social Science, 70, 101617.

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12 PROCESSES OF INCORPORATION. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIALISATION AND DOMESTICATION OF TECHNOSCIENCE Knut H. Sørensen Introduction – bringing new technoscience out of liminality New technology and new scientific and scholarly knowledge – in brief new technoscience – tend to be made in liminal spaces where the development of such objects can be nurtured and protected. Universities, laboratories, demonstration projects, and social experiments are examples of such spaces. The challenge with liminal objects is to get them incorporated in society, which may be quite demanding. Some technoscience objects may even remain liminal for a very long time or never be incorporated (Suboticki & Sørensen, 2021b). This chapter proposes the concept of socialisation to clarify what kind of efforts that may be undertaken to incorporate and embed new technoscience in society. It should be emphasised that socialisation efforts may be controversial and they may fail, completely or partly. Incorporation of new technoscience objects is definitively not without friction. In the social sciences, the concept of socialisation is used for several purposes. The most common is as a label for the learning processes individuals go through when they adapt to society or particular institutions. It may also be used to describe social interaction; people may socialise when they meet. Finally, the concept is employed to describe changes in ownership, from individual to governmental or collective. Here, the concept is used differently, inspired by Bijker and d’Andrea, who employ the term “socialisation of scientific and technological research” to explore how science-society relationships may be managed more fruitfully. Their aim is to improve “the capacity of science and innovation systems to adapt to a changing society and to manage and steer the transformations affecting them” (2009: 223), thus giving the concept a normative twist. In a different vein, this chapter analyses the socialisation of new technoscience objects empirically. The aim is to identify and describe existing efforts to incorporate such objects into society, to co-produce the new technoscience contribution with society, without assessing the effects of the efforts or seeking to improve them. Thus, we define socialisation efforts as co-production activities, which may include modifications of the particular technoscience as well as social changes that may emerge through the incorporation process. In this sense, the socialisation of new technosciences is interactive (Wyatt, 2009). This chapter 182

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analyses some empirical examples to study the substance of concrete socialisation efforts with respect to new technoscience objects, to highlight the features, the scope, and the diversity of such activities. Moreover, I want to show how the concept of socialisation of new technoscience supplements domestication theory. Domestication theory is concerned with the efforts that users of a new technoscientific object make in order to develop suitable practices, to make sense of the object, and to learn about new ways of employing the object to expand the scope of use and/or make it more efficient (Sørensen, 2006). The initial focus of the approach was on households, studying domestication to analyse how the entry of ICTs into the home is managed, how these technologies are physically (and symbolically) located within the home, how they are fitted into our routines and hence time structures and how we display them to others, and by so doing give out messages about ourselves. (Haddon, 2007: 26) Later, the locus of domestication studies has been expanded, for example, by exploring national actors’ engagement with multimedia (Brosveet & Sørensen, 2000), guilds playing World of Warcraft (Ask & Sørensen, 2019), automated milking systems (Finstad, Aune & Egseth, 2021), an elevator for cyclists (Suboticki & Sørensen, 2021a), and gender balance policies in academia (Lagesen, 2021). Thus, domestication theory has proved to be a fruitful tool to study enactments of new technoscience in many contexts. Domestication efforts could also be seen as socialisation achievements through use. However, socialisation is fundamentally a collective effort of many actors, while domestication usually is done by individuals or small groups. Thus, we restrict the analysis of socialisation to the work done by actors engaged in developing and deploying new technoscience, in brief, to get the technoscience object incorporated in society. Accordingly, Skjølsvold (2012a) focuses on three main kinds of socialisation efforts: (1) framing endeavours, (2) embedding work, and (3) innovation practices. Framing is a way of providing new technoscience objects with meaning. Embedding means to situate the new object in new collectives of users, to construct a public for the object. The analysis of the practices of developing new technoscience objects targets the strategies, the tools, the resources, and the modes of action mobilised by those advocating the new technoscience. When we consider socialisation as a set of activities that implicitly or explicitly are intended to pave the way for and facilitate domestication, this implies that socialisation efforts need to address the three main dimensions of domestication (1) practices: how the technoscience object may be used, (2) sense-making: providing the object with meaning, and (3) cognitive issues or learning: how users may learn about the object (Sørensen, 2006). While these concerns may be managed through the assembling and re-assembling of human and non-human elements that constitute a new technoscientific object (Latour, 2005), we expect socialisation efforts to be mainly discursive. This is due to the often-prominent role of the development of promissory scenarios (Callon, 1987) or expectations (Borup et al., 2006) that aim to situate a particular technoscience object in an attractive future. Such imaginaries are needed to mobilise the actors necessary for the development of the object, but also to prepare its intended future audience and facilitate incorporation. In this sense, socialisation is related to the concept of technological frames, which according to Bijker (1995: 191) comprises the elements that shape the interactions within relevant publics (social groups) and provide meaning to the new technoscience: “Technological frames provide the 183

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goals, the ideas, and the tools needed for action. They guide thinking and interaction.” Thus, a technological frame is a script for the socialisation of a given technoscience. Consequently, socialisation may involve • • • • •

The development of a technological frame that includes a framing of the technoscience and other forms of sense-making of possible applications, benefits, and risks. The construction of a public, which may be co-produced with the framing. Suggestions of use practices. The creation of spaces where future users may experience and learn about the innovation. Adaption of the technoscience object to make it more relevant and acceptable to its public(s).

To analyse such activities means to identify sites where socialisation is performed, the kinds of efforts that are undertaken, and the actors that make the efforts.

Sites, actors, and performances According to Bijker and d’Andrea (2009), the most important site of socialisation is research and development, which means that they see scientists and engineers as having a major responsibility for such efforts. Such thinking is also at the backbone of a set of policy initiatives that has been implemented in the EU Horizon programmes and many national research councils under the label of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). RRI measures require scientists to address several issues that we may recognise as related to socialisation, such as (1) anticipation – the provision of ideas about future effects of their research and innovation activities, (2) inclusion of stakeholders and the public in these activities, and (3) responsiveness towards stakeholder and public values (Stilgoe, Owens & Macnaghten, 2013). However, RRI includes a host of other concerns as well, such as gender equality and science literacy and does not really address the implications of what needs to be in place to facilitate domestication of new technoscience objects. Moreover, policymakers may themselves be important socialisation actors. Thus, innovation or technology policy is another important site to scrutinise (Sørensen, 2013). Innovation policies are measures that stimulate innovation. They may be conceived broadly as including the processes of conception of new ideas and their eventual implementation (Edler & Fagerberg, 2017). This resonates with Branscomb’s (1993: 3) definition of technology policy that it “must include not only science policy … but also all other elements of the innovation process, including design, development, and manufacturing, and the infrastructure, organization, and human resources on which they depend.” However, the framing of such policies is primarily economic and institutional, which means that they ignore the relationship between design, development, and domestication. In turn, this limits the ability of technology and innovation policies to guide and perform socialisation. This chapter assumes that there are many sites of socialisation and consequently a diversity of actors that may be involved. Clearly, research, development, and innovation as well as related policy arenas are important, but we see the identification of interesting sites and actors of socialisation as an empirical issue. Thus, we need to study a diversity of sites and technoscientific objects to better understand the scope and diversity of socialisation efforts in order to highlight what we expect to be a heterogeneous set of achievements. The argument so far hopefully has made it clear that the study of socialisation is different from showing that technoscience is sociotechnical, that such objects are co-productions of 184

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knowledge and social circumstances. The latter insight is at the core of science and technology studies and should not require further elaboration. Rather, socialisation designates efforts intended to bridge the gap between new technoscience objects and the domestication of such advances by making the activities involved in the making of new objects more transparent and by clarifying benefits and risks. Moreover, as we shall see, socialisation may result in modifications of, even resistance towards, a new technoscience contribution. Thus, socialisation efforts are not always successful from the perspective of scientists and innovators. A new technoscience object fails to be deployed or is deployed only scarcely when the socialisation fails to provide positive imaginaries of future use or even results in unwanted scenarios. In a broad sense, we may consider socialisation efforts as activities intended to realise public goods through new technoscience. This aspect of the provision of public goods from technoscientific work tends to be neglected; such provision is usually taken for granted. The main exception is the occasional emphasis put on science communication, broadly understood to include public engagement or participation in research, but without clear ideas of what public engagement initiatives should result in, beyond the pursuit of democratic values. Thus, there may be a considerable potential in giving more attention to socialisation to improve the realisation of public goods from research and development, achieving benefits and avoiding risk of new technoscience objects. Moreover, socialisation may be considered a prerequisite of democratisation of social change. Such normative aspects are highlighted by Bijker and d’Andrea (2009). However, the purpose of this chapter is mainly analytical. What are socialisation efforts? There are few empirical studies that explicitly apply a socialisation approach. When the rest of this chapter explores instances of socialisation efforts, this is mainly based on a review of publications that highlight such activities without necessarily labelling them as socialisation (some do). I have selected studies that are helpful in illuminating particular types of efforts due to the lack of research that covers a broad spectrum. However, I argue in the conclusion that this provides an inventory of possible socialisation efforts that demonstrates the potential scope of such activities. Much of the socialisation efforts that are explored in this chapter have unclear effects with respect to the public appropriation of the sense-making efforts and the assessments of benefits and risks. Effects are difficult to judge, not the least because much socialisation has low visibility and there may be a multitude of parallel activities involved. I will return to this issue in the conclusion. Again, I want to emphasise that socialisation efforts also may be critical or dismissive, providing negative sense-making that counter the efforts to promote a new technoscience object, by raising suspicion that it will have harmful effects or be without clear benefits. Like with domestication, socialisation does not have to end in incorporation. Nuclear power in Norway is an example. Considerable efforts to produce attractive sociotechnical scenarios for the employment of nuclear technology led Norway to become the sixth country in the world to build a nuclear reactor in 1951 and to invest large sums in nuclear R&D throughout the 1950s. Still, no nuclear power plant was ever built, and in 1975, the Norwegian Parliament decided that no such construction should be undertaken. This was the result of nuclear power’s ambiguous socialisation where promissory discourses were countered by widely shared claims that this was a risky and thus unwanted technology that should not be incorporated. In the rest of this chapter, the following socialisation sites are explored: • •

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• •

Demonstrations and pilot projects Marketing

The analysis is based on a review of research conducted by my colleagues and myself. The sites have been chosen because we should expect that socialisation will happen there. However, it is not obvious how this will take place and who will be engaged.

Science communication: hesitant socialisation efforts to explain context and future effects Science communication is a label that has changed from being a description of one-way dissemination of insights to signifying more comprehensive activities, based on dialogue and participation (Davies & Horst, 2016). The Research Council of Norway (RCN) states it like this: The Research Council has a national responsibility for science communication. We work to make research more accessible, relevant and interesting across groups in society, and to promote implementation of research results. To achieve this, we organise everything from open breakfast meetings to a science festival.1 The quote shows that RCN itself initiates science communication activities and includes schools and regional science centres as partners. However, the main responsibility is placed with researchers who are seen to be deficient in their communication efforts (Åm, Solbu, & Sørensen, 2021). This is in line with science communication scholarship that finds that many researchers are reserved to engage in such activities for many reasons, including lack of skills and time pressure (Davies & Horst, 2016). Still, quite a few are active, but how do they contribute to socialisation? In her study of researchers involved with developing offshore wind technology, Heidenreich (2018) found that the majority acknowledged that they ought to engage in the kind of activities we label as socialisation, as a response to policy requirements or a general feeling of obligation towards society. However, few of them did. They found outreach to be difficult or risky. They doubted their communication skills and were nervous that their message should be misunderstood. Time pressure was also an issue. Heidenreich identified three kinds of socialisation strategies. One was to engage with the relevant publics, like the fishing industry, at an early stage. The second was to provide the public with information about offshore wind technology. However, the scientists were less concerned with communicating facts about the technology, which they thought were too complicated to understand for lay people. Rather, they emphasised the need to inform about the context, the need for offshore wind power, and its role in a future Norwegian energy system. The third kind of effort was directed at the design of technology to counter what some researchers imagined could give rise to resistance, based on their beliefs about public attitudes. Klimek (2014) did a similar study among scientists working with the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS). These scientists also considered communication to be important, but they did not see such socialisation efforts as their responsibility. The public should be informed mainly about the need for CCS, with a main emphasis on the importance of mitigating human-made global warming. To provide such information was not within their core competence, so they pointed to politicians and the news media as those who should be responsible for the communication efforts. The CCS scientists were critical 186

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of Norwegian climate policy, which they saw as insufficiently clear about the seriousness of the ongoing global warming and the need for climate change mitigation. News media were criticised along the same lines. From these studies, we may conclude that scientists at best are hesitant socialisation actors even if they recognise the need for what we call socialisation. They see the gains from explaining new technoscience to the public or stakeholders, but mainly in terms of social needs and future implications. Thus, they consider other actors to be better suited to provide such explanations, like politicians, news media, or social scientists. The emphasis on politicians as socialisation actors was also evident in Åm’s (2015) study of solar energy scientists. They prioritised in their outreach to try to persuade policymakers that solar energy was a relevant renewable energy priority in Norway because policy interventions were needed to explain the attractiveness of solar energy to other actors in the energy field. Thus, it is the communication of “matters of concern” that scientists and engineers see as the reason that socialisation efforts are beneficial, not to explain “matters of fact” (Latour, 2004). The technoscientists engaged or wanted other actors to take part in sense-making regarding the context of and the need for the new technoscience object under development rather than to provide a public understanding of how it works. In the studies reviewed above, the scientists and engineers saw the public understanding of “matters of concern” as key to get the new technoscience object incorporated into society, but such socialisation efforts were mainly left to other actors. Moreover, “matters of concern” were mainly understood as supportive. They expected that activities to explain the context of and the need for the new object they worked with should facilitate its incorporation.

Newspaper articles: a site for heterogeneous efforts Newspapers are still the most important communication channel that scientists use for dissemination, even if new social media increasingly are employed also. Besides being a channel that scientists use to provide information about findings, newspapers also shape public opinion about new research and innovations. Thus, scientists increasingly depend on media to promote their work (Briggs & Hallin, 2016; Stroobant et al., 2019). How is this realised? Newspapers’ main contribution to the socialisation of new technoscience objects is sense-making, but in a more extensive manner than what we observed in the science communication studies above. This is due to the greater diversity of the content of newspaper articles. Moreover, they are not singularly aiming to contribute to incorporation. Skjølsvold (2012b) shows how newspapers in Norway and Sweden provided their readers with diverse but different interpretations of bioenergy. Swedish newspapers largely described bioenergy in positive terms as a mundane, beneficial technology, in line with the widespread use of bioenergy in the country. Norwegian newspapers tended to offer a more ambivalent view where bioenergy was compared to other renewable energy technologies and without much enthusiasm. In both countries, the newspapers occasionally also provided a critical view, emphasising issues such as the conflict between using land areas to produce food or to supply bioenergy. Heidenreich (2016) studied how Norwegian newspapers became an arena for articulating controversy regarding offshore wind. She identified four main arguments that were mobilised in the debates: (1) economic issues concerning cost and industrial development, (2) environmental issues regarding transition to sustainable energy as well as negative environmental impacts, (3) moral issues regarding export of energy, and (4) site-specific issues, such as whether moving wind power production offshore would prevent public opposition 187

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or area conflicts with fishery. Proponents’ socialisation efforts involved positive assessments of these issues, while those opposing offshore wind gave the issues a negative twist to impede socialisation. Thus, both parties contributed to the sense-making by explaining benefits as well as risks. Consequently, different interpretations of a technoscience object may provide for broader sense-making that allows for ambiguity. This is also evident from Klimek’s (2014) study of Norwegian newspaper articles about CCS. She identified two main supportive storylines in the articles, one emphasising CCS as a fascinating technological challenge, the other presenting CCS as a frustrating political challenge; CCS was not developed and deployed fast enough. A few critical articles noted substantial techno-economic challenges that CCS could be too expensive, while others worried about negative environmental impacts. Solbu and Sørensen (2022) analyse articles about bio- and nanotechnology and observe the use of four main technoscientific frames, which articulated different anticipations that shaped the modes of socialisation efforts. The first was a frame highlighting expected benefits and inviting public support, the second emphasised risks, the third implied a balanced view that invited ambivalence, while the fourth trivialised the two technosciences by framing them as already incorporated. Solbu and Sørensen claim that the three first-mentioned frames are recurring observations in studies of media engagement with nano- and biotechnology, while the fourth has been given less attention. Thus, they conclude that the three first-mentioned frames together constitute the main ‘grammar’ of public discourses about new technosciences and thus of socialisation efforts of sense-making. This also seems to fit with the findings of Skjølsvold, Heidenreich, and Klimek. The main thrust of the sense-making of new technoscience objects in newspapers tends to be either hopeful, critical, or ambiguous. Overall, we have seen how newspapers may be important sites of socialisation efforts from a multitude of actors, including technoscientists, policymakers, social movements, industrial associations, and so on. This means that the efforts are heterogeneous and consequently invite public reflection about new technoscience, rather than uncritical acceptance or quick rejection. Similar to the case of technoscientists above, we saw that newspaper articles mainly addressed “matters of concern,” although there were some articles trying to explain how the technoscience worked. In principle, this paves the way for what we could call a reflexive incorporation of new technoscience, given the predominant grammar of highlighting either benefits or risks or voicing ambivalence. In turn, this creates considerable space for subsequent domestication or non-domestication by relevant groups of users.

Demonstrations and pilot projects: public participation in socialisation of new technoscience The RRI policies briefly described earlier emphasise the value of public participation in the development of technoscience to help pave the way for a technoscience object to be incorporated into society. Thus, we should conceive such instances of participation as arenas of socialisation. Demonstrations and pilot projects are important examples of such arenas where a new technoscience object is moved out of laboratories and provisionally deployed in a part of society. Several issues are at stake in such projects, like upscaling, testing the technoscience under more demanding circumstances than those encountered in a laboratory setting, and learning about how people may engage with the technoscience object in terms of sense-making, risk perception, and use. Thus, demonstrations and pilot projects serve a threefold purpose: they allow for further technological development, for democratic 188

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input to this development, and for early stage socialisation through pioneering efforts at sense-making and use. In addition, the projects provide insight into infrastructural conditions for the incorporation of the technoscience. They combine innovation and socialisation (Ryghaug & Skjølsvold, 2021). What are the socialisation efforts in pilot projects and how do they relate to new technoscience? In principle, such projects are initiatives to deploy a new object or set of objects under conditions that are similar to those the technoscience will face when it is put to use for real. One example is the so-called Hydrogen Road project, which was an initiative to demonstrate the possibility of using hydrogen as a car fuel in Norway (Kårstein, 2008). The basic idea was to provide the filling stations that hydrogen fuelled cars needed to drive the 551 kilometres between the cities of Oslo and Stavanger. In addition, the project included experiments with different ways of producing hydrogen for transport purposes. Both purposes required innovation efforts. The socialisation was explicit in the public presentation of the project, which from 2006 to 2014 led to nearly 800 newspaper articles in 50 newspapers from all over Norway.2 Thus, the idea of using hydrogen as a transport fuel was presented to the Norwegian public, and the project also demonstrated the viability of hydrogen filling stations. Another example of a Norwegian pilot is an experimental deployment of self-driving or autonomous vehicles in several locations. Like the Hydrogen Road, these pilots received some media attention, but the general phenomenon of such vehicles has resulted in many more articles – a total of 6,300 between 2019 and 2021.3 The aim of the socialisation efforts through the pilots was not just to create attention. An important outcome of such pilots seems to be that they have provided policymakers with a better understanding of self- driving vehicles, including the need for policymakers to consider how they may contribute to further socialisation of such vehicles through revised plans for the future of transport and development of legal regulations regarding the use of self-driving vehicles (Haugland & Skjølsvold, 2020). Safety and risks involved with self-driving vehicles have of course been an important concern to address. Another observation from a pilot conducted in Northern Norway, where autonomous vehicles were linked to so-called intelligent transport systems, was the challenge when one tried to combine socialisation through engagement of local stakeholders with the development of appropriate infrastructures. Thus, the outcome was not so much socialisation involving future publics or stakeholders, but that the actors behind the pilot better understood the need for socialisation efforts through adjustments of their scenarios for future development (Ryghaug et al., 2022). Many pilots have been conducted with smart energy technologies, in particular smart metering. These technologies have been embedded in socialisation efforts resulting in promissory discourses that claim that smart metering will allow for more energy-efficient use of existing grids and potentially provide economic savings also for households. Throndsen and Ryghaug (2015) observed that the smart metering discourses affected the participants in the pilot they studied, but the participants did not uncritically accept the promises. When smart metering was introduced in their households, some participants engaged with it enthusiastically, others with relaxed moderation, and yet others voiced scepticism. Throndsen and Ryghaug interpret the findings to imply that the actors that develop and deploy smart energy technologies should revise their anticipations and imaginaries to provide the public with more diverse sense-making that would allow for more varied forms of domestication. This argument is enhanced by Skjølsvold and Ryghaug (2015: 889) when they observe from their analysis of four smart energy pilots that organisational and professional alienation from the processes of use “probably hindered successful socialisation of smart grid ideas.” 189

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The innovation and deployment focus of many demonstration and pilot projects tend to make them mainly engineering enterprises with little explicit concern for socialisation. However, the technoscientific objects themselves may be perceived as agents of socialisation. They take on such roles when they influence project participants to become more concerned with the broader context of the project and to be more reflexive regarding how the pilot objects may transform their practices. Ryghaug et al. (2018) describe this form of socialisation as material participation, which induces new practices and new outlooks. For example, the deployment of solar panels in households may lead to increased interest in the consumption of electricity and related environmental issues. In addition, it seems reasonable to conclude that many demonstration and pilot projects represent a proto socialisation of technoscience since they provide those running the projects and sometimes also policymakers with information about the needs for further socialisation efforts related to the technoscience in question. However, the effects of this information in terms of stronger engagements with socialisation are unclear because we lack studies of how information about the need for socialisation efforts is used. Demonstrations and pilot project may be considered steppingstones towards incorporation of technoscience in society. In this sense, as we have seen from the reviewed literature, such socialisation efforts are intended to produce positive sense-making. The initiators of the projects hope for positive user experiences with smart metering, hydrogen cars, and autonomous vehicles that may help to promote these technoscience objects. However, the projects were also intended to provide corrective feedback that could serve as the basis of improvements, and the user experiences were not singularly positive. Still, the newspaper coverage of the analysed technologies tended to focus on their benefits and their news value. Moreover, as socialisation efforts, demonstrations and pilot projects represent an early stage in processes that probably will expand in scope and maybe result in changes in the sense-making. We lack studies of this.

Marketing and beyond: socialisation by explaining practices through user instructions and regulations Marketing, in particular advertising, would seem to be the pre-eminent socialisation effort since it tend to propose positive interpretations of new technoscience objects to a wide audience of potential customers and users. Thus, marketing and related forms of persuasion are important to study because they appear as goal-oriented efforts to convince people to acquire and use the objects. Such socialisation activities may be adapted to specific audiences by employing flexible interpretations of the technoscience object. The object may be attributed different meanings to reach different groups of people and interact with their identity work. Advertising is often shaped to cater to such diversity. Car advertising is a pertinent example. Hubak (1996) shows, for example, how marketing people are concerned with the differences between men and women in their relationship with cars and design advertisements accordingly, to accommodate different preferences regarding aesthetic qualities and purposes of use. The advertising of cars may emphasise how different models may provide for different articulations of identity, such as ‘cool,’ ‘affluent,’ ‘sporty,’ or ‘thrifty.’ However, car advertisements work from the understanding that cars are already socialised to the degree that the public knows what cars are for and have pretty clear conceptions of the main meaning of cars as an object of mobility and modernity. With a historical perspective, we can see how this situation has been constructed, that present-day socialisation efforts are facilitated as the result of earlier endeavours. For example, 190

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car adverts from the 1930s and 1950s would explain how cars could be used (Sørensen, 1990). Similarly, to give another example, computer advertisements in the mid-1980s emphasised how computers could be used to support homework of school children. Moreover, the socialisation of cars was not only performed by car companies and their marketing agencies. Many other actors also participated, even governments. In the Norwegian context, the road administration institutions played an important role early on. Already at the end of the 18th century, the general manager of the Highway Directorate took initiatives to promote and explain cars and roadbuilding as key to the development of a modern society. For example, in 1901, he performed a demonstration project on his own by driving a car across the Norwegian mountains to prove the usefulness and abilities of this technology. Further, he sent some of his employees abroad, not just to learn about roadbuilding but also to study cars and driving (Sørensen, 1990). Additional governmental socialisation efforts to promote the use of cars included legislation and traffic regulation, the requirement of training to get a drivers’ licence, and sending highway engineers to the US to learn about the construction of highways. Private efforts beyond marketing by car manufacturers included the establishment of gas stations and car repair companies as well as their marketing initiatives. Indeed, the sense-making efforts were extensive over a long period of time. Not least, the comprehensive taxes and strict import quotas on cars introduced in the 1930s socialised cars as luxury goods. When the import quotas were set aside in 1960, this socialisation was modified. The history of the motor car illustrates well how socialisation efforts may be very comprehensive, involving many actors, and taking a long time. In the case of the car, it was at an early stage of its development by no means obvious what purposes it should serve, what benefits it could provide, and how it should be used. We may see the car as special, given its huge role in the transformation of mobility as well as in the physical reshaping of modern society, but similar stories might be told about the radio or the computer. The point is to observe the potential magnitude of socialisation when we analyse radically new technoscience. Moreover, the history of the car shows how over time there are dynamic interactions between socialisation and domestication, for example, through the way in which regulations of driving need to deal with the development of driving practices. This history shows that in many ways, socialisation and domestication of cars were co-produced at the national level. The car was socialised to make it become meaningful and a point of departure for the development of changing mobility practices by the public, while its domestication was observed to further the development of socialisation efforts (Sørensen, 1990). As late as in 1948, the “Information Council for Car Traffic” was established in Norway. The membership was an impressively broad alliance consisting of the actors of the motor trade, oil companies, the gas station owners’ association, insurance companies, and the car owners’ associations, but also including • • • • • • • • •

The Association of Asphalt and Tar Producers Askim Rubber Factory The Association of Auto Tariffs The Norwegian Association of Breweries The Norwegian Medical Association Norwegian Farmers’ Association Norwegian Taxi-owners Association The Norwegian Manufacturing Association Federation of Norwegian Commercial Associations 191

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• •

Association of Norwegian Bus Owners The Norwegian Cement Federation

Indeed, the socialisation actors were numerous (Sørensen, 1990: 115). In 1951, the “Information Council for Car Traffic” produced a pamphlet entitled Bruksbilen (The utility car), which described the different uses of the private car in quite enthusiastic terms. It states that “The private car has become a necessity,” and continues: It is a sign of our times that the youth has become car-minded, but the car is not only for sports or a toy which satisfies the child in us. Today, most car-owners conceive of the car only as an instrument of transportation which brings them where they want to go, when there is need for it, whether it is related to work or their private life. (Sørensen, 1990: 121) Even at this fairly late stage, the Council considered it necessary to frame the motor car as useful. They must have struggled hard, for what they came up with where the following applications • • • • • • • • • • •

the car in the service of the King transport of public servants transport of members of county councils transport of priests and teachers bringing ill people to hospitals transporting doctors and midwives forestry replacing the farmers’ horse industrial purposes: sale, transporting engineers and managers increasing the efficiency of construction work by transporting the architect, the mason, the plumber, and the electrician easing the work of housewives.

Leisure was also mentioned, but efficiency was the key concept. Typically, when the pamphlet described benefits for housewives, it emphasised the following: The housewife often has a long way to go to do all her necessary errands. She seldom has any help, and when she has kids from the age of babies and upwards, it is often impossible for her to get outside the home. Nevertheless, it is still only a few people in our country who understand how much help it would be to the housewife to have a car at her disposal, if only for a few times a week. (Sørensen, 1990: 122) Today, marketing is apparently the main socialisation effort regarding new technoscience products, but the history of the car as well as the other cases presented in this chapter show that socialisation efforts may be far more comprehensive and involve many actors, not only from industry but also from the government. Consider briefly the example of the smartphone, which has had a substantial impact on the way people communicate. Advertisements mainly make claims about aesthetics and technological quality. Newspapers, banks, a lot of different industries, and a host of public institutions perform socialisation efforts by introducing new 192

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services, new apps, that users need smartphones to access. Think also of the endeavours of the music and film industries that promote smartphones as media. Furthermore, the government regulates many aspects that help users to feel safe about their use. The provision of infrastructures is obviously also a socialisation strategy. The car has not retained an unequivocally positive image. Rather, ongoing debates about climate mitigation and traffic problems provide for considerable ambiguity. While socialisation efforts tend to be promotional, most of the cases reviewed above also show critical sensemaking. Thus, it is important to retain an understanding of the concept of socialisation as an analytical tool to understand better how new technoscience objects may get incorporated into society even retaining ambivalence rather than as a measure just to lubricate such incorporation.

Conclusion: socialisation as the making of technoscience citizenship The concept of socialisation of technoscience designates efforts to bring new objects out of the liminal spaces where they are created through research, development, innovation, and design to eventually become incorporated into (parts of ) society. As we have seen, many kinds of actors may be involved in this, operating on many kinds of arenas, and engaging in a diverse set of endeavours. Research and innovation policymakers have called for scientists and engineers to take a special responsibility for the activities we label socialisation, such as explaining the implications of new technoscience and the potential benefits and risks that are involved. However, this is a responsibility most scientists and engineers tend to resist. Arguably, policymakers conceive of the activities we call socialisation too narrowly and overlook how other actors and arenas than technoscientists and technoscientific institutions often are more active and effective in pursuing such ends. This is not an argument that science communication and related activities are unimportant, but rather that they should be considered only a part of a larger ecology of the socialisation of technoscience. From the reviewed research, sense-making appears to be the main aspect of socialisation efforts even if the development of practices may be important too. Thus, the main challenge is to explain a given technoscience object, but not with respect to making the public or sub-publics understand its scientific or technological content. What we learnt from the studies of Klimek (2014) and Heidenreich (2018) was that the interviewed technoscientists mainly emphasised the importance of clarifying to the public the context of the technoscientific development in question, why it was wanted or needed, and what could be expected in terms of benefits and risks. A similar accent was found in the studies of newspaper articles covering new technoscience. The analyses of demonstration and pilot projects also showed how socialisation may be a multi-step process. While carrying out the pilots, the actors initiating the projects were seen to observe issues with respect to the deployment and use of the particular technoscience that they report to companies, public agencies, or policymakers. The experiences from the pilots might be used to shape further socialisation efforts to better explain the meaning of and intentions with the technoscience under development or considered for deployment. However, as noticed, we do not know if this happens and to what extent. The sense-making efforts may be interpreted ideally to provide for what we may call technoscience citizenship. The term is related to concepts like energy citizenship and science literacy, but it is meant to be broader. Ryghaug, Skjølsvold & Heidenreich (2018) describe the development of energy citizenship as a move from passive users to active participants in the transitions towards sustainable energy. The development of technoscience citizenship is a similar move to induce an active and reflexive relation to new technoscience. Here, it seems 193

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pertinent to remind that one of the main points of departure of domestication theory is the critique of the widespread conceptions of users or consumers of technoscience as passive; the theory discursively empowers users of knowledge and artefacts to make them participants in the sociotechnical design of their everyday lives (Ask & Sørensen, 2019; Sørensen, 2006). The idea of supporting the development of technoscience citizenship thus potentially adds a moral dimension to socialisation. The point is no longer just to engage in processes of incorporation of new technoscience, of promotional or critical sense-making. It is to support the making of a mentality of moderate enthusiasm for new technoscientific objects where citizens are contextually informed and appraising users that engage with sociotechnical change for improvement of human conditions and not further erosion of them. They should develop responsibility and care. The importance of this may be most evident in the context of the need to mitigate global warming and the loss of biodiversity. Successful sustainability transitions depend on positive engagement with technoscientific achievements that facilitates such changes as well as critical sense-making of objects that involve increased greenhouse gas emissions and/or threaten biodiversity. Electrical vehicles illustrate nicely the potential for moderately positive outcomes (although all kinds of cars represent environmental challenges). In the context of Norway, the country with the most EVs per capita in the world, promotional socialisation efforts have been comprehensive, not the least on the part of the government that has reduced taxes, road toll, and parking charges for such vehicles (Ingeborgrud & Ryghaug, 2019). Lack of effective socialisation efforts to induce technoscience citizenship is a challenge to sustainability transitions. Socialisation and domestication are twin concepts. They both address issues of incorporation of technoscience, in particular sense-making, but with different actors and actions. Socialisation is performed by actors that engage with development and deployment of new technoscience, mainly to provide sense-making of new objects. The efforts are predominantly promotional to push incorporation, but as we have seen, socialisation may also highlight ambivalence and risk. Socialisation actors are active, but their actions are not always deliberate. Domestication on the other hand happens primarily in contexts of use, at arenas such as households, public institutions, and workplaces. This means that the development of use practices is at least as prominent as sense-making. Domestication does not require socialisation but may be made easier through such efforts. This is easy to observe with sense-making, where domestication actors often adopt the meaning provided by socialisation actors. With the development of practices, it is more complicated. With some technoscience objects – the case of the car is a prominent example – early socialisation efforts involved demonstrations of possible practices. Pilot projects may have a similar aim, but generally, public discourses about new technosciences focus on sensemaking. Why may the new objects be beneficial? Are there risks involved? Studies of domestication processes tend to avoid normative assessments whether some outcomes are better than others. Ask and Sørensen (2019) provide an exception since they study a competitive situation where some win and some loose. The concept of technoscientific citizenship offers a different platform that goes beyond the empowerment of users as active co-producers of their own practices to remind that domestication outcomes may count. Sustainability transitions are definitely such an occasion, but there are many others, for example, with respect to digital technologies, robotics, and machine learning. When socialisation provides for the development of technoscience citizenship, this may make domestication actors more careful and reflexive regarding harmful outcomes. This should be taken into consideration in further studies of domestication. 194

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Knut H. Sørensen Lagesen, V.A. (2021). ‘How heads of departments find it meaningful to engage with gender balance policies,’ Science and Public Policy, 48 (4), 582–591 Latour, B. (2004) ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern,’ Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–248. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryghaug, M., Haugland, B.T., Søraa, R.A. and Skjølsvold, T.M. (2022) ‘Testing emergent technologies in the arctic: how attention to place contributes to visions of autonomous vehicles,’ Science & Technology Studies, 35 (4), 4–21. Ryghaug, M., Skjølsvold, T. M. and Heidenreich, S. (2018) ‘Creating energy citizenship through material participation,’ Social studies of science, 48 (2), 283–303. Ryghaug, M. and Skjølsvold, T.M. (2021) Pilot Society and the Energy Transition: The Co-shaping of Innovation, Participation and Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Skjølsvold, T.M. (2012a) Towards a New Sociology of Innovation: The Case of Bioenergy in Norway and Sweden, Doctoral thesis at NTNU 2012: 209, Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Skjølsvold, T.M. (2012b) ‘Curb your enthusiasm: on media communication of bioenergy and the role of the news media in technology diffusion,’ Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 6 (4), 512–531. Skjølsvold, T.M. and Ryghaug, M. (2015) ‘Embedding smart energy technology in built environments: a comparative study of four smart grid demonstration projects,’ Indoor and Built Environment, 24 (7), 878–890. Solbu, G. and Sørensen, K.H. (2022) Incorporation work. ‘The socialisation of bio- and nanotechnology through newspapers,’ Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 10 (1), 17–29. Sørensen, K.H. (1990) ‘The Norwegian car. The cultural adaption and integration of an imported artefact,’ in K.H. Sørensen and A.J. Berg (eds.), Technologies and Everyday Life: Trajectories and Transformations, Oslo: Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities, 109–130. Sørensen, K.H. (2006) ‘Domestication: the enactment of technology,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 40–61. Sørensen, K.H. (2013) ‘Beyond innovation. Towards an extended framework for analysing technology policy,’ Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 1 (1), 12–23. Stilgoe, J., Owen, R. and Macnaghten, P. (2013) ‘Developing a framework for responsible innovation,’ Research Policy, 42 (9), 1568–1580. Stroobant, J., Van den Bogaert, S. and Raeymaeckers, K. (2019) ‘When medicine meets media: How health news is co-produced between health and media professionals,’ Journalism Studies, 20 (13), 1828–1845. Suboticki, I. and Sørensen, K.H. (2021a) ‘Designing and domesticating an interstructure: exploring the practices and the politics of an elevator for cyclists,’ Urban Studies, 58 (6), 1229–1244. Suboticki, I. and Sørensen, K.H. (2021b) ‘Liminal technologies: exploring the temporalities and struggles in efforts to develop a Belgrade metro,’ The Sociological Review, 69 (1), 156–173. Throndsen, W. and Ryghaug, M. (2015) ‘Material participation and the smart grid: exploring different modes of articulation,’ Energy Research & Social Science, 9, 157–165. Wyatt, S. (2009) ‘Science and technology: socialising what for whom?’ Journal of Science Communication, 8 (3), C03.

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13 SITTING ON THE SOFA, WATCHING TELEVISION Methodological reflections on the study of material articulations Vera Klocke When David Morley published his seminal study Family Television in 1975, the term television was clearly defined. It referred to a television set that had a fixed place in the living room around which family life took place. The portable TVs were an exception, but contrary to their design, they were hardly ever used outside the living room (Spigel, 2001a). Now television takes place on a variety of devices and has become spatially flexible. In this chapter, I examine how the different devices used for watching television affect the processes of media appropriation and the living spaces. Furthermore, I address the question of which methods are particularly useful for the study of these media ensembles. Historically, the television set has been closely connected to the furnishings of the living space. In a scene of the US Sitcom Friends, the protagonist Joey Tribiani asks a woman, who does not own a television set, where she would point her furniture. What follows is a long moment of silence in which Joey obviously cannot believe what kind of life this woman leads. In Joey’s living room, all the seating is oriented towards the television set, which is centrally located in a cabinet. TV sets have been an integral part of the couch corner since the 1950s. While the sofa and armchair previously took the coffee table as their focal point, the television set has blown up the couch corner, as Martin Warnke describes (Warnke, 1979). The result is a “home theatre” (Spigel, 2001b) that resembles the living room of the sitcom series’ character Joey Tribiani. Before people gathered around the television set, the radio represented a centre around which the inhabitants also gathered for a while. However, as a “passive medium,” the radio did not lead to lasting changes in the living space, as Warnke explains (Warnke, 1979: 685). James Lull, among others, has described in detail how television sets are staged as altars that are used to place souvenirs and personal objects (Lull, 1990). With various (mobile) devices used for watching television in the home environment, these forms of spatial staging – especially the living room – are also changing. To study television is always to look at people’s homes. Morley writes: We need to think carefully about those very complicated places called homes. And we also have to think carefully about this apparently rather simple thing that people do DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-20

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called ‘watching television’ (which might itself, perhaps be better described as ‘being at home’ or ‘everyday domestic life’). (Morley, 2006: 178) Building on this perspective, I ask how the various media technologies in their material articulation affect “being at home” and “everyday domestic life.”

How material articulations inform the practice of “watching TV” A crucial aspect of the domestication approach is the emphasis on a “double articulation” (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996: 62). ICTs are not only examined with a view to their media articulation, but also with regard to their material articulation. So far, this has been researched primarily with a view to the symbolic value of the devices and the appropriation of these by their owners. In Family Television, Morley describes the remote control as a “highly visible symbol of condensed power relations” (Morley, 1986: 148) and pronounces an “alienation” (Morley, 1986: 159) that women feel when operating the video recorder. The operation of the devices serves as an occasion to reflect on social power hierarchies. What has so far been researched less within the domestication approach is an investigation of the handling of the different media technologies and their role for the living spaces. In this context, it could be argued that the design of devices plays a crucial role in shaping the activity of watching television. I originally began to do research on this topic in the context of a performance piece.1 In the production, two levels of television – the materiality of the devices and the appropriation processes of the people – were brought to the fore. A key piece of the production was a video, showing individuals and groups sitting or lying in front of various devices. The orientation of their bodies and the social negotiation processes change, depending on the device and context. There is, for example, a group of young people bending over a smartphone together and there is the family looking at a television set that is centrally located in front of them (see Figures 13.1 and 13.2). These scenes were shot in extreme slow motion, which makes every movement seem monumental. The action of the boy at the front of the frame reaching into the bag to throw a cheese ball into his mouth takes just under two minutes. And the transfer of the remote control from one person to another takes 30 seconds. We did not establish these plot elements in advance, but worked them out in improvisations with the performers. In creating these images, it became clear that we did not need to give people instructions on how to use the equipment, as they automatically and instinctively knew how to arrange themselves as a group in relation to the devices. The performers, who did not know each other beforehand, quickly established a familiar relationship by looking at a screen together and instinctively assumed their roles with each other. The directing work then mainly consisted of defining and arranging the individual actions in a sequence and having the actors perform them in a set order and at a measured speed. Through the slow motion and the slow interlocking of the different actions, the sequences, which are also partly mutually dependent, become visible. In this chapter, based on a three-year study of five households, I have adopted the slowmotion mode described above as my way of looking at the field. I tried to give space to even the incidental actions in order to focus on the use and handling of the devices. In doing so, my aim was not only to analyse the verbalised views of the people, but to use different methods of observation.

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Figures 13.1 and 13.2 Screenshots from a video work of the performance piece “(16:9)”

Sitting on the sofa, watching In order to really understand the context of the devices and their material articulation, I conducted participant observations in households and wrote thick descriptions. Although participant observation has been understood as an important tool of the domestication approach, it has become an exception in the related studies. Instead, qualitative interviews and housing inspections are used most often. One notable exception is the research of Irmgard Karl, who conducted participant observations in living spaces over a period of eight years and even moved in with the persons for a period of at least one week each. Karl focused on households

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where only women (some of them queer) lived in order to investigate the influence of media consumption on the construction of gender and sexuality (Karl, 2007, 2009). In my study, observations and the descriptions have proven useful in understanding everyday routines and processes of appropriation. I have recorded the observations in thick descriptions, in which I also reflect on our relationship and the shared viewing, in order to address the subject-bound nature of the data acquisition. I was inspired to take this approach by Daniel Miller, who declared the home to be the most important field of contemporary ethnography: “But this is where and how life is lived, it is very hard to see a future for an anthropology that excludes itself from the place where most of what matters in people’s lives takes place” (Miller, 2001: 1). Miller understood the households he wrote portraits about as their own societies with their own rules (Miller, 2008). What is special about the texts is their literary ambition. He moves away from the idea of describing neutrally and instead explains that he has adapted his way of writing to the individual household. I have used this as a guide in my descriptions of media households. However, with a view to the materiality of media technologies, it has become apparent that I needed to add visual methods. In order to really understand the technical contexts and the processes, I carried out video-re-enactments. For this, I filmed the people operating the devices and had them simultaneously comment on their actions. In this way, actions that otherwise happen on the side and remain invisible could be better understood. This has proven to be particularly helpful, as people sometimes spend minutes setting up technology in order to be able to watch television. I was inspired by the approach of Sarah Pink, who uses this method to understand the everyday practices of people in everyday contexts (Pink, 2004) (Figure 13.3). In addition to these recordings, I also worked with the visual method of 3-D-renderings to show the relationships between the media technologies and the living spaces. They were developed collaboratively with filmmaker Jasper Landmann, who recreated the rooms in the programme Cinema 4D. I used them to explore the question of how the different devices

Figure 13.3

Tom explains how he uses his old screen to play Nintendo. Still from a videore-enactment (2020) ­

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Figure 13.4

Three-dimensional reconstruction of rooms can be created in the Cinema 4D programme. Own image (2021)

influence the design of living spaces. The special characteristic of this way of working is that not individual pictures, but entire rooms are reproduced in detail, from which various settings and directions of view can subsequently be extracted as two-dimensional images (Figure 13.4). Furthermore, the potential of the model layers is to deliberately hide or foreground individual things or furnishings in order to focus the view onto the essentials and to show connections between things, for example. This way of working serves in part to present results, but it is also an aesthetic practice that promises a knowledge gain. Thus, during the translation processes of the photos into the 3-D models, I noticed things and connections that had initially left no further impression on me during the observation in the living spaces. The 3-D renderings enabled me to move through the rooms again and at the same time to observe the arrangements from a certain distance.

The expansion of television Nicole2 routinely reaches into her work bag, which she put down next to the sofa as soon as she arrived, and takes out her MacBook. She places it in the left-hand area of the couch, where various cable ends converge. She flips open the laptop and with a wiping finger movement quickly switches from her work to her private desktop. There, Netflix from the night before is still open. The next episode of her series starts immediately. She connects the laptop to the TV set via an HDMI cable. From then on, the series runs on two screens. Nicole only looks at the television. This scene is an excerpt from a thick description I wrote about Nicole’s household. Nicole is a 47-year-old woman who lives alone. She comes home from work every evening around 201

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6 pm. Then, she usually eats in front of the TV to “come down” (“runterkommen”) and watches content exclusively through Netflix, which she accesses on her laptop. I have repeatedly encountered set-ups like this in my research. Connecting the different devices helps overcome a problem such as a TV that is not internet-enabled. In an age where watching television can take place on different devices, it raises the question of why people access a particular device for a particular activity. Nicole could also watch directly on her laptop. But she – and many other persons I visited – regularly use these set-ups in order to watch TV on their television sets in a familiar setting. The feeling of home and everyday life and free time materialises in these living spaces in the form of television sets and sofas. The HDMI cables provide a link between the already existing (sitting area) and new possibilities (streaming offers). Furthermore, the material attachments also influence the social practice of watching television. The reception is preceded by a construction that makes the users experts of their own media setting. Thomas, a 61-year-old man, connects his laptop to his TV set in a time-consuming process: Thomas turns on the power strip behind the TV, takes out the folded HDMI cable from behind the TV, plugs it into an HDMI input of the TV and pulls the cable to the laptop, which lies amidst orderly piles of sheets. Using the remote control, he turns on the TV, presses the button on the remote that is entitled ‘Input’ and selects ‘HDMI-3.’ The image of the laptop appears on the TV screen. On the laptop, Thomas sets the fullscreen mode, clicks on ‘Play’ and runs to his usual place in the corner. With the remote control for the TV set, he increases the volume and places it next to him on the blanket. Apart from the volume, from this moment on he can no longer intervene in what is happening on the computer without getting up. His television set has become a magnifying glass for the laptop. Since people can now no longer operate their television set, but only their laptops, the social practice of watching television also changes. This affects the process of programme selection. It is noticeable that they decide on a movie or a series and then watch it front to back. People prefer the television set because its static arrangement with the other pieces of furniture also makes it possible to repeat familiar and ritualised everyday practices without much effort. However, this preference is related to the special devices and features such as a special picture quality that people associate with “television.” When I asked my respondents why they watch on which devices and when, they mainly mention reasons related to the size of the devices and the picture quality. Tom, a 30-year-old man watching on a large flat screen, says that he wanted “the biggest [screen] that is possible at the moment.” Gabi, a woman watching on a beamer at home with her husband and two children, explains that she also sees the advantage of the beamer in the size of the picture: “… a total advantage of the beamer are the BBC documentaries […]. About whales and things like that. I found that very nice, that you had it on a larger format now than on the laptop, for example.” Others explain that the representation of black areas is particularly important to them (Tom says: “I find that horrific, for example, when you watch a dark film and then you have a screen where the black actually still shines”). And to Nicole it is important that the TV “really makes a good Hollywood picture.” Her priority when buying the set was that it should not change her “old habits from the TV tube, […] my TV habits. […] How it feels is important to me.” Nicole’s statements show that television can also come with a nostalgic charge. The television image is not necessarily supposed to be crisper, but above all to feel “right,” with the 202

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standard for this being set by devices of the past and her childhood. Not only the familiar setting of television set and couch, but also the television image itself can convey a sense of security. So in addition to his OLED flat screen, Tom bought a small old tube screen to play old Nintendo games, because he missed the image aesthetics of this device, which reminded him of his childhood and youth. This is my whole childhood here, basically. (Points to tube screen.) I can hum along to every melody. (Hums along with the melody.) […] Sure, the graphics are really bad by today’s standards, but that’s why I think the tube screen is so great, because it flows so smoothly. You have these black levels here that are so blurred. And you can’t see that it’s not so high-resolution. As a child, when you imagine yourself sitting in front of this TV, it all looked much more exciting to me. And I still really like it. I think even now you have more of an idea of how it would look sharp than when you actually see it in HD. The perspectives of Nicole and Tom show that television can also be nostalgically charged. This nostalgia relates both to the devices and a specific image and to the social practice they associate with these devices. The different devices serve specific tasks and therefore do not compete with each other, but make sense to their owners precisely because of their differences. In households whose inhabitants watch programmes together, television creates the framework for a ritualised communication in which the focus is not on content but on comfort. “We are like a family where the same impulses develop at some point.” This is how Tom describes his circle of friends, who regularly gather in front of his television set as part of a ritual. And in Nicole’s household, fixed rules of television consumption have become established: “It’s always like: Now be quiet!” In the households where watching television is a communal practice, it is noticeable that people often watch films that they already know. Tom and his flatmate Insa, a 27-year-old woman who is one of his best friends, often watch films they both already know. Here is a short excerpt from a thick description: Insa disappears from the room, only to come in a few seconds later with the Blu-Ray of Howl’s Moving Castle. ‘I haven’t watched it for a really long time,’ says Insa when I ask how many times each of them has seen the film. The answers are quick: Insa: five to six times, Tom: three times. The focus is not on the reception of new content, but on time spent together in a ritualised setting. Nicole says that she often watches films with her family that the majority of the group is not interested in: “[T]hen we make jokes all the time. If only my nephew wanted to watch it, then we make fun of him or something.” Tom, who watches TV every evening with Insa and two other friends, describes that the group is the most important part of this leisure activity: I’m not so keen on watching films on my own or have the patience or something. […] And even if you sometimes just sit there for hours and just say ‘hehe’ and stuff like that, it’s somehow, I don’t know, somehow comfortable, there’s something warming about doing it in company. The fixed setting creates a stage on which people assume and perform their social roles. These users perceive television as fulfilling primarily when it is a communal use of this medium. 203

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Even in the family with the children, the joint reception, for example, via the projector, is understood as valuable family time, whereas the individual reception of the children via a smartphone is regulated and implicitly considered less valuable. Depending on the devices used, the social roles and the arrangements and rules within the community can change. Thus, the decision for a certain device is not only related to the technical features, but also to the question of what kind of community people want to experience at a given moment.

The space of “proxemie” and the connection of work and leisure The different devices used for the social practice of watching television have a decisive effect on the closer environment of the individuals. A person balancing a laptop on their belly watches television differently than a person looking at a screen from far away. Roland Barthes has described the immediate environment of people, the space that is an arm’s length away from them, as “proxemie” (Barthes, 2007: 185). According to his definition, this space is characterised by the fact that the persons can blindly find their way within this sphere. Barthes cites a situation in bed as an example, in which he searches for a handkerchief in the dark and finds his way blindly around the space he is familiar with. While the remote control, which lies next to a person and within reach on the sofa, was an integral part of this direct environment of the recipients for a long time, it loses its meaning and task over a period of time. Instead, other devices can be found in this space, which go hand in hand with different ways of handling them and – together with the diverging media articulations – have an effect on the social practice of television. Hanna, a 49-year-old woman transfers her laptop, on which she works during the day, into “television” mode most evenings by carrying it into her bedroom and setting it up on the bed. Sitting down, she bends over the device and opens the internet browser to access the various streaming sites and find out which film or series she wants to watch. While Hanna opens the film page ‘imdb.com’ in a new tab and enters the film title ‘A Woman They Talk About’ in the search bar, the trailer in the old tab starts automatically. ‘That’s annoying,’ says Hanna. At imdb.com the film is rated 7.5 out of 10. ‘Okay,’ says Hanna, impressed. And: ‘The images are already very good.’ However, there are so many Japanese films on Arte right now that it is difficult for her to find out which one is the best. Hanna continues her search and reads out: ‘The Road of Shame,’ ‘The Legend of the Master of the Scroll Pictures,’ ‘The Festival Music of Gion’ and ‘Two Geishas.’ […] By now, so many research tabs are open in her browser that it takes her a moment to get back to Arte. Although Hanna found the study of the films interesting, she now seems a little tense. She wants to make, as she says, ‘the right decision.’ Again and again she switches between the tabs and reads and compares the vague descriptions. Since Hanna usually finishes watching the films, she is under a certain amount of pressure to make the right choice. This process of searching, while Hanna types and scrolls on her laptop, can take around 20 minutes. She invests this time because she cannot quickly zap to something else if she does not like a programme. The multitude of open tabs represents the manifold options she has on a visual level. The designer Gui Bonsiepe has described the design of the interface as a place where the user’s space of action is structured by products (Bonsiepe, 1996: 20). The interface becomes a medium of negotiation between the device and the user. This process of negotiation takes place in the context of the selection, for which Hanna uses the internet 204

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browser as a research tool, but also during the reception, during which she operates the laptop, which stands close to her: “Again and again she touches the touchpad to check how long it is still running. ‘Twenty-five minutes to go, […] nine minutes to go.’” At another moment, a quick movement of Hanna’s finger across the touchpad causes the timeline to be displayed on the laptop’s digital interface and the flow of the film to be interrupted. Heike Weber has described that the “cases and their interfaces determine […] how users deal with technology and what meanings are attached to it” (Weber, 2017: 122). She explains that changes in technical equipment are accompanied by changed interactions with technology and changed meanings of the technical. Even though Hanna sits back in the frame of reception, she is aware of the possibility to intervene in what is happening on the screen by touching the touchpad and thus change the mode of reception. After the first three minutes of the film, Hanna presses the space bar to pause the film. A message has come in on her mobile phone. The friend she had asked if she would like to have goat camembert on her next visit agrees. Hanna leaves the full-screen mode and calls up the supermarket’s online tab, where the shopping list is still open. She scrolls to the dairy products and puts the cheese in the shopping basket – ‘done.’ The tabs next to each other turn the parallel activities into equivalent occupations that can be switched back and forth between without much effort. Based on the quoted excerpt, it can be argued that Hanna remains in a wait-and-see attitude and can quickly follow up on inspirations and impulses by pausing the film in progress. However, this happens very rarely. Rather, Hanna remains in the mode of watching. This goes hand in hand with the search movement that took place beforehand. Since the decision-making process is timeconsuming, Hanna tends to watch the films to the end. At the same time, a mixing of work and leisure can be observed. This can mean – as in Hanna’s case – that one device is used for different activities. Furthermore, a dissolution of the boundaries of work also takes place through the connection of the different devices with each other. Warnke has argued that the couch corner in the living room came into being after work had moved out of the living space and left a “functional void” (Warnke, 1979: 675). Digitalisation has brought work back into the domestic sphere. This means not only that concrete areas of a room are declared as a work environment through, for example, a desk, but also that work is now present everywhere in the living space through mobile devices. Since the devices are used in many ways and are connected to each other, the world of work also invades the television practice. That this does not only refer to mobile devices is shown by Tom’s household, where the TV set – in addition to all the game consoles – is also connected to his work PC. VERA: Could you list everything that is on the bed? LUKAS (GUEST): My mobile phone. DINO (GUEST): My mobile phone. INSA (FLATMATE): My mobile phone here. TOM: Ok then. The remote control. Here is also a controller. Here is the Switch. This is the

computer mouse, the mouse for my PC. I have two different computer mice, so one is my wireless one here and a wireless one there, which I can use from the desk. The TV is my third screen, but when I’m working I also sit at the desk because there are two screens on it. Otherwise, there’s the wireless keyboard, also from the PC, PC controller, Playstation 4 controller, my iPad for drawing. 205

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The fact that work and leisure are not separate spheres can be seen in particular in the two computer mice Tom has – “my wireless one here and a wireless one there” – so that he can also operate his work PC from his bed via the TV. What is interesting about this set-up is that, despite the other media technologies, the television set is not relegated to the background, but rather connects them. “Everything comes together on the television,” as the residents themselves describe it. The television set could hold its position since it can also serve as a screen for computer games and represent an interface for the various devices through its many connections. The question of which devices are used is also a question of power: which device can assert itself in the media ensemble for the social practice of “watching television” – and why? In order to trace the competitions and alliances between the different actors involved in “television,” I have used the actor network theory (ANT) as a methodological tool. What is special about ANT, which was founded by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and others, is the premise that human and non-human actors initially meet at the same level and fight for their position in a network. With the assumption that networks are fragile and that the roles of the different actors can change, it is particularly well suited for an investigation of television, which is in a state of change both medially and materially.

The agency of things involved in “television” I have done research on a family of four, mentioned above, who watch television via a projector. In this household, where content is predominantly received from streaming platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+), the network “television” is stabilised by numerous actors. These include not only technical devices but also pieces of furniture such as the piano stool, which is crucial for the set-up. In order to understand the small-scale set-up and identify all the actors, I asked the person to re-enact and comment on the set-up in front of my running camera. In this context, Jan, the father, explained which devices and things belong to the arrangement and how the set-up process of the projector works: There’s a projector hanging up there and an HDMI cable and a power cable running through the cable channel that I’ve pulled down there at the back corner to the wall socket. And at the socket there’s just a little Fire TV stick where the HDMI cable ends. And from there, the audio cable runs once over the door – there’s the second cable duct – to the box under the screen. And then we sometimes connect the laptop to the HDMI cable when we want to watch something on DVD. […] The first thing I do when we want to watch something, is turn on the beamer. I press on the big button there [he stands on the piano stool], then I pull down the screen [pulls down the screen] and it hooks into the bottom. So that we still have a bit of sound here. [Note: the audio bar should still be visible under the screen so that it can be operated with the remote control]. And then [takes remote control from piano] I just have to turn on here [presses the ‘power’ button on the universal remote control] and then I have picture and sound. [A standard image of the beamer is displayed on the screen and he reaches for the mobile phone]. And then I have the controller on the mobile phone. This is an app that belongs directly to Fire TV and I can then select directly and control it with this. [The screen shows the Fire TV selection.] And I can go through the menu by really just using these giant arrow keys and either go into a sub-menu at Disney+, or if I swipe down here at the top [swipes down from the top of the touchpad with his finger and the microphone icon

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pops up], then I can just use the Alexa voice control. [Alexa starts speaking, Jan says the title of the film: ‘Bolt.’] Then I would use Alexa to go directly to the film. Otherwise there would be a search here, but I would have to go to each letter individually and the voice control is faster. Before the family can watch a film, the various actors must perform the tasks assigned to them. The screen must be rolled out, the smartphone has to connect to the Fire TV stick via the WLAN and the voice control has to correctly understand the film titles mentioned by the father. The large number of nodes makes the network fragile. Time and again, there are disruptions that cannot be classified by the users. But how could this private thing – the father’s smartphone – become one that has to be available to the group again and again? How did it come about that the tasks assigned to this device were expanded and it became a central actor in the network “television”? In ANT, the formation of a new network is called “translation.” The term translation refers to the processual character of network formation and the role assignments of individual actors that take place in the process. This processuality and the ongoing negotiations that go hand in hand with it are the reason why the process of translation is inherently fragile. The interests of the individual actors shift and change continuously (Latour, 2000: 381). The “projector network,” as currently used by the family, came into existence in the course of overcoming a problem. Over a long period of time, the father tried unsuccessfully to operate all the devices, such as the beamer and the audio bar, via a single universal remote control. However, this could not establish a connection to the beamer. Another actor was therefore brought into play to take over the task of the remote control. The smartphone was considered as a potential operating assistant because it can connect to the internet and thus to other technical devices. And it can be configured through apps, thus expanding its scope of action. After applications such as the Amazon app, thanks to which the mobile phone can access the contents of the Firestick, a remote control app that enables navigation through the programme, and the apps of the streaming providers Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube and Disney+ were installed on the smartphone, the beamer could be controlled via the device. Subsequently, this new role of the smartphone could be established. It was able to strengthen its alliances with other actors, thus conquering a new field of activity in everyday processes and becoming an integral part of the television practice. At the same time, the significance of this formerly private object has shifted. For the time of shared reception, it has undergone a reinterpretation towards a communally used device. According to the ANT, constellations of power in networks come about as actors need to remain faithful to their alliances (Callon, 2006: 170). Within this network, the beamer remains loyal to the smartphone, as this device has the potential to connect with other technical devices or to expand its own scope of tasks through the possible extensions, thanks to internet access and apps. The more alliances can potentially be entered into, the greater the potential of the actor to become a stable part of a network, within which other actors could also be interested in him. It can be stated that actors assert themselves in the “television” network if they can take on multiple roles. This can mean that they experience media extensions, such as the smartphone, through the addition of apps, or that they can connect different devices with each other, such as HDMI cables. These cables in particular, which are omnipresent in contemporary households, mark a special point because they seem to connect different eras with each other. They make it possible to watch content from the internet on TV sets that are not yet internet-capable. But the important role they had at the time of my

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research is fragile. With the advent of newer devices and wireless data transmission, they will eventually become obsolete. Other actors will join the television network and compete with each other for their roles and tasks.

The influence of media technologies on living spaces Given the variety of media technologies that can be used to watch television, the question is how the different devices used to watch television relate to the spaces in which they are located. Can we still observe classic home theatres or has television become spatially flexible due to the ubiquity of the internet? With a view to the entry of the television set into the living rooms of the 1950s, Warnke has argued that television as an “active medium” (Warnke, 1979: 685) has disrupted the enclosed nature of the couch corner. He argues that television was active because it attracted attention as a visual medium and opened up the corner of the couch to the devices. This structure can still be found in households with television sets: seating corners and pieces of furniture are oriented towards the set. The exciting thing is that in households without a television set, the decision for other devices on which television can take place is precisely accompanied by a rejection of this image. For some of these people who do not have a television in their living space, it is particularly important that the leisure modes of passivity and receptivity are not expressed in the furniture. Their media reception should remain invisible. Hanna, a woman who watches on a laptop, states that the devices would “quickly look altarlike” and she thinks it is good that television “doesn’t take up so much space” in her flat. Jan, the father who watches with his family via the projector, notes that he likes “that you don’t see a black screen.” At the same time, the people described hope that by not having a television set, they will also watch less. In this way, they identify themselves as members of a social group in which television is devalued as having little intellectual value and is implicitly regarded as a waste of time. In households where people watch on laptops, “television” is reconstructed each time by placing the device on bedspreads and coffee tables and opening it up at the right angle. The set-ups with laptops, can be described as a “mobile home” (Spigel, 2001b). Spigel emphasises that while the 1950s promised to bring entertainment into the living room with its static devices, the portable devices of the 1960s reversed this logic. Portable devices promised to bring the inner world outside. Even though the flexible devices continued to be used statically, they sparked fantasies about the possibility of leaving the house (Spigel, 2001b: 391). Although the reception via a laptop is a flexible setting that has no reciprocal relationship to the institution, the consumption here is also ritualised in the same place. Hanna, for example, transfers her laptop, on which she works during the day, into “television” mode by changing the room to the bedroom and placing it on the bed (Figure 13.5). Although she has consciously chosen not to have a television set, which for her is a “prestigious thing” with negative connotations, she has nevertheless internalised the furnishing practices that go hand in hand with the devices. Without a TV set – Hanna thinks – she does not know what kind of sofa to buy and how to position it in the room: The sofa would be aligned with the TV. The fact that I don’t have one makes it difficult for me. Do I put it there? Do I put it here? [Hanna points to different areas of the living and dining area] I have so much space and nothing to orient it to. I would rather do it in such a way that you can have a nice view out, but that’s probably one of the reasons why I haven’t made any progress with the sofa yet. 208

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Figure 13.5 Hanna rebuilds her setting with the laptop every day. Own image (2021)

Figure 13.6

A large picture hangs above the piano. This is covered by the screen when it is pulled down. Own image (2021)

It is not the television set (as described by Warnke) but its absence that has plunged Hanna’s sitting area into a crisis, which becomes visible as a void in her living space. Unlike the TV, which is interrelated with the seating furniture, the laptop did not result in any other furnishing decisions. In this household, but also in the one with the projector, the intention is to create a living space that functions independently of media technologies (Figure 13.6). 209

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The couch corner, whose parts face each other, is reminiscent of the sitting areas that were present before the television set entered the living rooms. Gabi, the mother, enjoys the fact that she is “sitting on the sofa, but looking outside” and not against a television set. Nevertheless, even in these households where there are no fixed arrangements, television is a ritualised everyday practice in which people ritualistically reproduce the same set-ups. The rituals associated with the room and the furniture are essential for the users, as it is precisely about watching television in a recurring setting and knowing how the armchair and the bed on which they are going to sit on the occasion of the next television ritual feel.

Figures 13.7 and 13.8

Many television sets represent centres for memories and gifts. Own images (2021)

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In the home theatre, the television set becomes an object to which the residents ritually gravitate. The decorative items that frame the fixed TV sets accentuate their centring effect, dictating the direction of view. In this, they are reminiscent of the brick mantelpiece in British households, which – after the inhabitants stopped heating with fire – was used as the centre of the living space to display objects that were linked to the identity of the residents. It is a “cultural point of orientation for those present in a room, seeing it as a case of how material culture may mediate interpersonal relations” (Putnam, 2002: 44). Something similar can be observed with these television sets. With the elimination of static devices, there is also a reorientation of these displays, which either fall away or shift to other storage surfaces such as bookshelves (Figures 13.7 and 13.8). Studies that emerged in the context of the domestication approach described that computers and televisions are staged very differently (Quandt & von Pape, 2010). Significant images documenting these different stagings of computers and televisions were taken as part of the study “Programme on Information and Communication technologies” (PICT) in Great Britain from 1985 to 1995 (Hartmann, 2013: 67ff.). While televisions were reminiscent of altars, computers would be hidden in untidy separate workrooms. In a weakened form, these stagings can also be found in the households studied. However, a strict separation between the design of “the television” and “the computer” cannot be maintained. The devices are connected to each other via HDMI cables, among other things, and have also moved closer to each other spatially (Figures 13.9 and 13.10). Furniture like the bed and the sofa thus also become places to work. The couch corner is not only being taken over by the working world, for example, by finding its way into offices. At the same time, working environments outside the home are also being transferred to the living room.

Figure 13.9

Although this television and the PC are in different areas of the room, they are connected to each other via an HDMI cable. Own image (2021)

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Figure 13.10

Thomas’s workplace is separated from the living area by a curtain. This is opened when he connects the laptop to the TV set. Own image (2021)

Conclusion At the beginning of this text, I mentioned a video that was recorded in slow motion and that shows people watching television. What attracted me to produce this video was the idea of being able to stop time and for once see each and every movement and facial expression, no matter how imperceptible. This sense of clarity led me to the various methods such as participant observation, thick descriptions, but also visual methods such as video re-enactments and 3-D renderings. With them, I wanted to capture and slow down the everyday happenings in the living spaces in order to be able to see the appropriation processes of television more clearly. I suggest that an ethnographic study is crucial not only with regard to the gestures and behaviour of the subjects, but especially with regard to the material diversity of television. I have argued that television currently comes with a great deal of material variety. Sometimes, there are so many devices that their relationships with each other are difficult to trace. A detailed documentation of these individual parts can help to understand what television currently entails and how they, in turn, also shape the media appropriation processes. In studies of the domestication approach, the processes of appropriation are the focus of interest. In my analysis, I additionally used ANT as a methodological tool to show the alliances between the different devices and to examine the power hierarchies between the devices. Since ANT is based on the premise of the instability of networks, it is suitable for examining television as a medium technology that is materially and medially in a process of change. Maren Hartmann in particular proposed the addition of a third articulation to the two already theorised articulations in order to be able to adequately examine the appropriation of media content (Hartmann, 2006: 96ff.). A similar extension would also be useful with regard to the material articulation, which has so far been studied primarily with a view to its symbolic meaning. The material articulation could then be split into two parts. While one part would refer to the symbolic meaning of the devices, the other would focus on the actual materiality and handling. This would be especially important at a time when 212

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a little thing like an HDMI cable has the potential to have a crucial impact on the social practice of “watching TV.”

Notes 1 The piece was developed collectively with Kristofer Gudmundsson, Lea Kissing as well as Jasper Landmann and premiered in September 2018 at the Berlin venue Ballhaus Ost. It has been funded by the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. 2 The names of the people I watched television with have been anonymised.

References Barthes, R. (2007) Wie zusammen leben. Simulationen einiger alltäglicher Räume im Roman, Vorlesungen am Collège de France 1976–1977, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bonsiepe, G. (1996) Interface. Design neu begreifen, Mannheim: Bollmann. Callon, M. (2006) ‘Einige Elemente einer Soziologie der Übersetzung: Die Domestikation der Kammmuscheln und der Fischer der St. Brieuc-Bucht,’ in A. Belliger, and D.J. Krieger (eds.), ANThology. Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, Bielefeld: Transcript, 135–174. Hartmann, M. (2006) ‘The Triple Articulation of ICTs. Media as Technological Objects, Symbolic Environments and Individual Texts,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 80–102. Hartmann, M. (2013) Domestizierung, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Karl, I. (2007) ‘Domesticating the Lesbian? Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making,’ M/C Journal, 10 (4). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2692. Karl, I. (2009) ‘Technology and Women’s Lives; Queering Media Ethnography,’ Reconstruction, 9.1., Special Issue on Fieldwork and Interdisciplinary Research. Latour, B. (2000) Die Hoffnung der Pandora. Untersuchungen zur Wirklichkeit der Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lull, J. (1990) Inside Family Viewing Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences, London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2001) ‘Behind Closed Doors,’ in D. Miller (ed.), Home Posessions, Oxford: Berg, 1–19. Miller, D. (2008) The Comfort of Things, Cambridge: Polity Press. Morley, D. (1986) Family Television. Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, London: Comedia Publishing Group. Morley, D. (2006) ‘Television. Not So Much a Visual Medium, More a Visible Object,’ in Jenks, C. (ed.), Visual Culture, Reprint, London: Routledge, 170–189. Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Putnam, T. (2002) ‘Mantelpiece Arrangement in the Modern British House,’ in G. Ecker, C. Breger, and S. Scholz (eds.), Dinge – Medien der Aneignung, Grenzen der Verfügung, Königstein: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 44–59. Quandt, T. and von Pape, T. (2010) ‘Living in the Mediatope: A Multimethod Study on the Evolution of Media Technologies in the Domestic Environment,’ The Information Society, 26 (5), 330–345. Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life,’ in R. Mansell and R. Silverstone (eds.), Communication by Design, the Politics of Information and Communication Technologies, New York: Oxford University Press, 44–74. Spigel, L. (2001a) Welcome to the Dreamhouse. Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Spigel, L. (2001b) ‘Media Homes: Then and now,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (4), 385–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/136787790100400402. Warnke, M. (1979) ‘Zur Situation der Couchecke,’ in Habermas, J. (ed.), Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit,” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 673–687. Weber, H. (2017) ‘Blackboxing? – Zur Vermittlung von Konsumtechniken über Gehäuse und Schnittstellendesign,’ in C. Bartz, T. Kaerlein, M. Miggelbrink, and C. Neubert (eds.), Gehäuse. Mediale Einkapselungen, Paderborn: Fink, 115–136.

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14 DATA DOMESTICATION Exploring sensors in the future everyday through design fiction Iohanna Nicenboim

This project explored how people might adopt sensors in their homes, by using the metaphor of pets in the design of speculative devices (Figures 14.1–14.3). The intention of this project was to provoke people to reflect on the ways in which they relate to the environment through highly mediated interfaces, and imagine new and intuitive ways to relate to data in everyday life. The fiction was based on the idea that animals shared practices of environmental measuring in the past, along with humans. For example, miners used canaries to measure

Figure 14.1 Air-quality birdcage: This pet-sensor measures the quality of the air in the room. In normal conditions, it whistles happily. As the air quality deteriorates, it whistles less often, alerting that something is going wrong

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Figure 14.2 Water-quality aquarium: The aquarium measures the quality of the water. The user has to pour fresh tap water every day, and as a response, the aquarium releases bubbles. If the water is polluted, the bubbles become more seldom

Figure 14.3

Noise-level leash: By taking it for a walk, the leash can tell which streets of the neighbourhood are polluted by high noise levels, especially of sound ranges that humans ­cannot hear

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air quality. Thus, this project re-positions data about the environment within the relations between humans and non-humans. The pet-like devices had animal behaviours and qualities, as well as a limited span of life. In opposition to common electronic devices, these devices offered subtle clues to changes in their environment, by changing their habits. Thus, in order to interpret the data, the user needed to know them very well. This allowed us to imagine a close relationship between people and environmental sensors. Furthermore, when the contamination levels were too high, the devices would ‘die,’ inviting us to think of the afterlife of domesticated objects.

Objects of research This project explored opportunities and challenges of adopting connected technologies in the home, through a series of provocative design fictions. More specifically, it explored domestication in relation to the ‘accidentally smart home’ (Edwards & Grinter, 2001). Thus, it highlighted the frictions and serendipitous connections that connected things could create for users in their everyday (Figures 14.4–14.7). By bringing the frictions from online platforms into everyday objects, the project offered a critical perspective into the design of smart technologies. The idea with these dystopian objects was to explore what the current models of our online practices could look like if translated into physical objects. By showing some of the challenges we might encounter in the smart home, this artefacts served as a tool to discuss the conditions in which we want to adopt this technology in our lives.

Figure 14.4 Spurious correlation display: This speculative device tries to find patterns by correlating data from all connected devices in a home with local and global data. In this way, the device allows users to find serendipitous connections, but also to position connected technologies within larger infrastructures beyond the home

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Figure 14.5

Terms of service printer: This speculative device is a printer that automatically prints the terms and conditions of every device that connects to the home network

Figure 14.6

A/B toaster: This speculative smart toaster tries to find the perfect toast for its users, by using a method typically used to optimize online services, i.e. an A/B test. Over time, the toaster learns from the user’s preferences, and eventually, when finding the perfect toast, it charges the users for it

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Figure 14.7 Motivation scale: This speculative object explores the idea that connected devices could do experiments with their users. By manipulating the weight shown to us, the scale analyses the user’s tendencies to gain or lose weight

Reference Edwards, K. and Grinter, R. (2001) At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges, available at: https://vdocuments.net/at-home-with-ubiquitous-computing-seven-challenges-w-keith-ed wards-and-rebecca.html (last accessed 04/04/2022).

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15 A JOURNEY FROM DOMESTICATION APPROACHES TO PRACTICE-BASED THEORIES Mika Pantzar

Introduction Rarely is a new commodity a simple response to some basic need (Basalla, 1987; Petroski, 1993). Typically, new commodities either replace older products, e.g., when modern household margarine replaced butter or new commodities enter into the life of consumers as objects with almost no practical purpose (Pantzar, 1997). In each case, normalization and diffusion processes require human labour and continuous care. The term “domestication” of technology fits well to the idea that there are commonalities between the ways new technologies get stabilized in daily life and the ways animals and crop were domesticated about 10,000 years ago: “The fundamental distinction of domesticated animals and plants from their wild ancestors is that they are created by human labour to meet specific requirements or whims and are adapted to the conditions of continuous care people maintain for them.” (Britannica, 2023) Domestication or market making of radically new technologies requires a lot of conceptual and institutional work, as when the first automobiles at the end of the 19th century (Basalla, 1988), the early computers in the 1940s and home computers in the 1980s (Ceruzzi, 1986), but also the first refrigerators in the beginning of this century (Cowan, 1983), entered everyday life. Less is written about the ways daily practices related to these novelties get activated in normalization processes and the ways better reproductive quality of new practices is stabilized in behavioural patterns, facilitating the emergence of new integrations and new combinations of existing elements. This chapter suggests that, from a domestication perspective, practice-based approaches are most useful in examining not only the integration of material objects and meanings attached to them, but also their maintenance, reproduction and occasionally evolution of new patterns in daily life and society. Importantly, practice approaches assume no definite end-point in domestication. Contrasting (comparing) domestication approaches and practice-based theories is certainly in many ways a subjective undertaking for this author, who has contributed to both traditions (see e.g. Hartmann, 2020; Pantzar, 1997, 2019). Another source of bias comes from DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-22

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the fact that a large diversity of views exists in each theory tradition. There is no such thing as one unified domestication theory, neither is there a single practice theory. This chapter uses these theoretical labels as sensitizing selective tools (Warde, 2014), characterizing changing academic views on society and everyday life. Outlines of the domestication framework (Silverstone et al., 1992) originated in part from anthropology and sociology of consumption at the start of the 1990s in the UK (Haddon, 2011). At the same time, related theoretical terms like “social shaping of technology” or “actor network” were introduced by various researchers1 (Bijker & Law, 1992; Latour, 1991). The ways consumption objects are introduced, appropriated, institutionalized and expanded, i.e. domesticated, reflect quite general human-related processes going on in modern market economies. Domestication studies tended to stress that characters and attributes of new commodities change in time. Many of the generalizations based on anthropology and social histories of technology (Cowan, 1983; Fischer, 1992; Silverstone, 1994) emphasize metamorphoses. Novelties move from “toys” to “instruments” (Levinson, 1977), from “luxuries” to “necessities” (Douglas & Isherwood, 1978), from “pleasure” to “comfort” (Scitovsky, 1976), from “sensation” to “routine” (Löfgren, 1990) or from “hot passion and fashion” to “rational choice and lifestyle” (Pantzar, 1997). Domestication studies has typically focused on changing meanings of goods and the stabilization of behavioural patterns. Practice-based theories, in their turn, see established habits and routines as a starting point for the emergence of new practices. For example, the proliferation and normalization of cold storage (fridge, freezer) in homes made the existence of nearby dairy and butcher shops unnecessary, while promoting the proliferation of shopping malls accessible by car. This chapter suggests that it is stabilization of behavioural patterns (predictability) that partly explains why recent practice approaches are so useful from the point of view of domestication theory. It is not only that technology provides ways of satisfying existing needs, but also that it creates novel needs and wants, constraints and practices through its diffusion.2 Domestication approaches corresponded closely (or fitted well) with the “cultural turn” that took place forcefully in the 1980s and 1990s. Anthropologists, historians and sociologists started to emphasize qualitative aspects of everyday life instead of a more positivistic view on human behaviour (Evans, 2020; Miller, 1987, 1995). There are important continuities, but also discontinuities, when a few decades later a philosophically heavy “practice turn” (Schatzki et al., 2001) or more empirically focused practice-based views (Magaudda & Piccioni, 2019; Shove et al., 2012) were introduced to academic research (Evans, 2021; Warde, 2014). It was in 2005 that Alan Warde in his seminal article Consumption and theories of practice stated: “it is strange that theories of practice have scarcely been applied systematically to the area of consumption” (136). After this testimonial, a real “bandwagon” of practice-based studies has emerged not only in consumer research, but also in related fields such as organization and marketing studies (Evans, 2020; Warde, 2014). The bandwagon has spread through pluralism of conceptual labels and ideas and different disciplines have their own versions of practice approaches: e.g. “Strategy as practice”, “Marketing as practice” or “Community of practice” (see Corradi et al., 2010; Wenger 1998). One of the main contributions of different practice approaches is stressing institutional and material aspects of change instead of individual choices and meanings. In the cultural turn, the emphasis was more on cognition and governing life with knowledge: “The material world exists only insofar as it becomes an object of interpretation within collective meaning structures” (Reckwitz, 2002: 202, quoted in Warde, 2014: 283). 220

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Current practice theorists give detailed attention to various integration processes t aking place when practices get accomplished (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2001a, 2001b, 2010; Shove et al., 2012). Theodore Schatzki, today probably the most influential representative of practice theory, defines practices as embodied, materially enabled sets of human activities organized around shared practical understanding. Practices are carried out by different body/ minds and they exist as sets of norms, conventions, ways of doing, know-how and requisite material arrays. Andreas Reckwitz (2002: 250) defines a practice as “a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood.” One of the key questions in practice-based theories is what the elements are integrating when practices get accomplished. Shove et al. (2012) provide a seemingly simple “skeleton model,” assuming that there are three elements integrating in each practice: material objects, skills (competencies of doings) and image (meanings, symbols and ideals). Patterns of daily life are outcomes of the synchronization of social practices that persist over time and space. Generally, practice-based views emphasize that technological and social systems exist only in and through their reproduction in various interactions. In abstract terms, practices are cyclic processes rather than stable entities. Emerging practices are limited and shaped by the intended and unintended consequences of previous social actions (practices). Seen this way, it is rather practices than human beings that constitute groups and organizations. The persistence of practices depends on their ability to recruit and retain cohorts of practitioners (Shove et al., 2012). Both practice-based theories and domestication views set traditional theories of consumption, technology and innovation in quite general frameworks emphasizing materiality, temporalities and multidisciplinary approaches. Accordingly, perpetual back and forth movement between empirical cases and conceptual frameworks is required. Practice approaches specifically assume that actual doings could change the very premises on the basis that these doings are supposed to become actualized (Warde, 2005). Assuming twoway interlinkages between doings and thinking, or even more radically that doings precede thinking (Warde, 2014), clearly rejects the views of standard (old-fashioned) economics and sociology, in which human behaviour is deduced from either given (exogenous) preferences (homo oeconomicus) or given norms and institutions (homo sociologicus) (Warde, 2005). Neoclassical economists’ tendency to operate with an atomized, “undersocialized” conception of human action and sociologists’ tendency to have an “oversocialized” conception of (wo)man (Granovetter, 1985) are clearly problematic assumptions in both domestication and practice approaches, both questioning given in historical processes. Indeed, opposing simple inner-directedness (rational calculation) or other-directedness (adaptation, socialization and lifestyle) was among the crucial ideas when in the 1990s new traditions explaining complex interactions between human beings and technology were introduced. From a practice theory point of view, developments in actor network theory (Latour, 1991) were crucial (Evans, 2021). Actor network theory criticized cultural theories for not being sufficiently mindful of the material conditions of society and in fact agency of non-human material elements.3 The version of practice theory presented here, especially the version by Shove et al. (2012), borrows a lot from actor network theory, but also from general evolutionary thoughts, when emphasizing the reproductive quality of behavioural patterns and emerging practice complexes. These ideas manifest a more general phenomenon, a cultural shift in perspective from a mechanical world-view (á la Hobbes) to a “circulatory” conception of life and power (Clegg 1989; Clegg & Wilson, 1991). Indeed, many of recent practice thoughts are in line 221

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with older theoretical concepts such as “habitus” (Bourdieu), “discipline” (Foucault) and “structuration” (Giddens), stressing that structures (institutions) and agency are not separable from each other and the connection is fundamentally two-way. The recursive nature of societal development or the dialectic of structures and practices implies that humans can reproduce the prerequisites for their own history and their own actions. We do not only adapt to developments, but we also produce our own history through our own actions. These introductory remarks serve as a starting point for the following pages, in which everyday life and consumption are approached in terms of evolving interlocked practices and cycles of interdependence. This perspective complements domestication theories well, speaking for different metamorphoses by adding a special emphasis on integrations.

Towards theorizing practice complexes and circuits of reproduction The principal antecedents of practice theory are already apparent in the early pragmatic philosophy of science, in which human practices integrating doing and thinking characterize life routines (see Buch & Schatzki, 2018; Miettinen et al., 2012; Warde, 2014). Famous philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, John Dewey or Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized practical dimensions and the primacy of practice. Correspondingly influenced by various philosophers, but also developments in many sciences (e.g. human geographers and historians), Anthony Giddens suggested in the 1980s that the core subject of the social sciences “is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time” (Giddens, 1984: 2).4 Strong versions of practice theories assume that doings precede thinking. In recent years, milder (empirically oriented) versions have suggested that practice theory acts as a reminder of the importance of routines, practical understanding, embodied wisdom and materiality (Warde, 2014: 285–286). A simplified list of new emphases in the sociology of consumption sounds like this: Against the model of sovereign consumer, practice theories emphasise routine over actions, flow and sequence over discrete acts, dispositions over decisions, and practical consciousness over deliberation. In reaction to the cultural turn, emphasis is placed upon doing over thinking, the material over symbolic, and embodied practical competence over expressive virtuosity in the fashioned presentation of self. (Warde, 2014: 286) To sum up, metamorphoses and transformations stressed in many versions of domestication processes could be complemented (re-described) by looking through the lenses of practice-based views, emphasizing formation of routines and required reciprocal attunements and matching of human skills, images and material objects. The following pages take one simplified version of the practice approach (Shove et al., 2012) as granted. The framework has strong connections to domestication theories in emphasizing both temporal and spatial changes. The perspective is leaning towards integration processes that condition change and less towards decision-making or choices themselves. Shove et al. (2012) manifest their evolutionary network perspective with two essential concepts: “circuit of reproduction” and “practice complex.” By these concepts, the authors refer to a two-way directionality between actions and consequences of these actions. Circuits of reproduction are performative actualizations which either restrict or facilitate practices. Emerging circuits of reproduction are hard to recognize and it is a matter of empirical 222

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research to demonstrate whether circuits of reproduction, or cycles of interdependency, lead to stabilization, destabilization, growth, decay or even development of new practices. Without explicating the specific mechanisms of reproduction, there is a threat of tautological and functional reasoning (see Elster, 1998; Giddens, 1984: 229–243).5 Loose-knit patterns of between practices based on (shared) co-location, for instance, occasionally turn into stickier forms of co-dependence, i.e. practice complexes: “When practices do come to depend upon each other (whether in terms of sequence, synchronization, proximity or necessary co-existence), they constitute complexes, the emergent characteristics of which cannot be reduced to the individual practices of which they are composed” (Shove et  al., 2012: 100–101). What is important is that these complexes participate in processes reproducing the elements these complexes are made of. The idea of closing circuits comes from evolutionary thinking which emphasizes the effect of feedbacks and recursive dynamics.6 Quite generally, examining the various components of entities such as cells, organisms, practices, and societies, it can be found that these entities exist, i.e. sustain themselves, by self-maintenance or self-production, that is, by the continuous renewal of their own components. The components are associated and dissociated in various processes at the expense of a continuous energy and information flow going through the system. From the system’s point of view, damaging components are wiped out; otherwise, the system might disappear. This goal does not, however, mean that contradictory tendencies are absent, but that in time these internal contradictions might be followed by reorientations required by the level of the system. A minimum requirement for any sustainable system is that its components are not eroding the system through their interactions. This condition is not fulfilled in modern society. Indeed, modern consumer society, which as a whole contains Henry Ford’s idea that even labourers can be consumers, could be viewed as a vast metabolistic organism that perpetuates itself. As the integration of artefacts, symbols, skills and human beings proceeds towards larger entities such as lifestyles, communities of practice, neighbourhoods, cities or consumer society, the constituent components relinquish their relative autonomy to the networks which they themselves make up. Seen this way, practices such as the domestication of mundane heart rate measurement (to be analysed in the next section) are open to radical reorientations possibly only in their early stages. This tendency has been documented in the life cycles of many products and industries by Tushman and Romanelli (1985); in social habits by, e.g., Löfgren (1990) and in “biographies of things” by Kopytoff (1986). In nature, the standardization of microscopic forms, such as cells or base pairs, allows for creativity at the macroscopic level. One may ask whether there would be similar dynamics in the development of society, the economy or technology. Seen this way, the evolution of commodity networks can be described with the following hypothesis: as commodities become increasingly widespread and firmly anchored in our lifestyle, human “needs and activities” begin to take second place and the priority shifts to “the mutual interdependency of the commodities in their own right.” These networks, in other words, practice complexes with reproductive qualities, become tighter and more solidly fixed. To further open the ways domestication and practice-based approaches relate, the next section focuses on a specific case, that of domestication of the heart rate monitor (Morozova & Gurova, 2021; Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2015, 2017; Ruckenstein & Pantzar, 2017). The theoretical interpretation is based on Pantzar’s and Shove’s simplified evolutionary/integrative model of practice (Pantzar & Shove, 2010a, 2010b; Shove&Pantzar, 2005, 2007; Shove et al., 2012), suggesting that arrangements of entities are among the principal compositional features of social life. Here, it is important to recognize that two almost opposite views about the site and focus of social practices exist (Schatzki, 2001a, 2001b): first, theories of 223

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practice, which focus more on the conditions for actions and performances; second, theories of arrangement (networks, apparatus and assemblage) that are put forward by e.g. actor network theory. The latter view, to be emphasized here, focuses more on conditions of various integration processes e.g. of ideas, material objects and competencies, and less on performing the very act of measuring. Seen this way, health and well-being could be approached in a non-individualistic way, where biologies and socialities are seen as thoroughly intertwined, and partly translatable to each other. At the same time, dualistic thinking, which manifests in dualisms such as mind-body, action-structure or human-non-human, is rejected.

Case study: domesticating mobile and mundane heart rate monitoring The first wireless portable heart rate monitor (the Polar PE2000) was introduced by a Finnish company, Polar Electro, in 1983. It consisted of a chest belt transmitter and a wrist-worn receiver (Laukkanen & Virtanen, 1998). By using an elastic electrode belt, the transmitter was attached to the chest of a person. The receiver was a watchlike monitor worn on the wrist. At first, it was not at all clear why ordinary people, excluding sport activists, should buy such a gadget other than out of curiosity or as a form of social distinction. In the early years, retail outlets were also unwilling to put the product onto their shelves. Polar Electro had to build its own distribution channel, market a brand around heart rate monitoring and enable the shop presence with its own displays. Airports were important places for the sales of heart rate monitors from the very beginning, perhaps because of images of self-achievement and selfimprovement that they are suggestive of (Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2015). Before the stethoscope was invented 200 years ago, pulse monitoring involved placing an ear on the patient’s chest. The real turning point came, however, in the beginning of the 20th century, when the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven developed the first electrocardiograph (ECG). Soon afterwards, a portable version – the Holter monitor, capable of monitoring individual ECG for 24 hours – was introduced (Achten, 2002). Today, heart rate monitors have moved out from hospitals and doctor’s surgeries to the lives of millions of people around the world. Still in the 1990s, Finnish Polar Electro was the dominant supplier of portable heart rate monitors globally. Today, the middle-sized company from Northern Finland is no longer the dominant player in this field. Several commercial wearables rely on combinations of on-body sensors, mobile displays and web-based applications. As heart rate metering (HRM) has shifted from a medical concern to a sporting environment, so has the nature and significance of measurement changed. The technology is more intelligent and interactive, and therefore the manufactures’ representatives prefer to speak about activating (“activity meters”) and coaching rather than metering. The device, which was initially developed as a means of recording information about health status and critical medical conditions, has become an increasingly important symbol of healthy living and a piece of sport equipment that has agentive power (even as a coach). This is, in brief, a story of a metamorphosis where a product originally developed for hospital purposes transformed to body sensor, facilitating developments where an individual body becomes a knowable, calculable and administrable object. Seen from a domestication perspective, the story seems to end here.

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A practice-based approach would tell a more nuanced story. Today, measurement practices, practices of exercising or practices of socializing by sharing data constitute wider constellations and practice complexes, e.g. evidence-based weight management programmes. Wearables, clothing-like equipment based on various meters, permit specific forms of feedback (and feed forward) in time and space. At the same time, they export ideals such as the (evidence-based) cult of performance from one practice to another. From a practice theory point of view, everyday metering is interesting (and crucial) because self-measurement activities have a role in sustaining, defining and reproducing various practices, and their elements, such as required competence to interpret reasons behind changing heart rate. The developments of heart rate monitoring have been conditioned by diachronic (historical) and synchronic (spatial/simultaneous) continuities. With practice-based views, it is possible to identify emerging monitoring practices with the seemingly simple schematic structure. Based on Shove et al. (2012) and Pantzar and Ruckenstein (2015), Table 15.1 draws together the developments described above, and suggests important historical continuities when ECG meant for hospitals moved to daily use by non-experts. Table 15.1 A schematic presentation of the normalization of heart rate measurement meter (mainly based on Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015) Material/“stuff”

Image

Observing patients’ vital signs in controlled environment, accumulating data and diagnosing illnesses (“mechanical objectivity”) Self-monitoring “Target heart rate,” controlled performance and self-coaching, systematic tracking of metering in physical data and accumulating exercise: “Turn experiences in information into “exercise diaries” speed” With more intelligence Circulating and sharing data, and interactivity, recording and the activity is not diagnosing everyday only metering but life, interpreting monitoring and the data in terms of coaching, “Black belt in fitness,” stress, fitness, etc. (“quantified-self ”: “Every body tells a story, you should listen self-theorizing,), peerto-peer theorizing. to your body” (“situated objectivity”)

1 Electrocardiograph Fixed machine in a Only for medical in hospital use hospital context experts, scientific 1900instruments for observing patient-objects

2 Heart rate monitor Wireless portable for sport purposes heart rate meter 1980with sensory belt and wrist display unit 3 Tracking devices, general purpose “polymeters” for many activities and groups of people 2000-

Heart rate measurement instruments, training computers with various sensors, accelerators, GPStrackers, PCs with displays.

Competencies/skills

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Seemingly separate spheres influenced and transformed by new material objects, existing skills and competences, symbolic aims and social desires have been linked together, when mundane heart rate measuring has normalized and became an everyday life routine and a method of continuously cultivating the body. Once links between material, image and competencies have been made, practices have started to strengthen and become reinforced in repeated doings. With stabilized and predictable routines, it is possible that new (socially shared) larger scale practice complexes emerge. In the case of missing elements (e.g. image of trust), or in case of missing links between, say, new devices and images, it would be less likely that the analytics of everyday life would ever develop and circulate widely. For instance, ECG scientific studies were needed to strengthen the image of trustfulness of the first portable devices. In the early days, Polar Electro had to demonstrate that portable heart rate monitor produced reliable data. Over 500 research trials later, measuring heart rate with a wireless portable device has become a standard practice (Laukkanen & Virtanen, 1998).7 As noted many times, practice-based views’ focus on associations and integrations. How did a practice such as mundane heart rate measuring emerge, exist and die? What are the elements of which this practice is made of? How did regular measuring of heart rate recruit its practitioners? In which way do larger socio-material practice complexes such as sporty lifestyles get accomplished and reproduced? In which way are the lives of these complexes conditioned by the same elements (e.g. cult of exercise and activity meters) they tend to reproduce? Questions like these suggest that practice-based theories could minimally work as an “instrument of selective attention” (Warde, 2014: 280). Feedback is critical for the endurance of practices over time and for their diffusion and aggregation. Seen this way, there should be some positive connections between a practitioners’ first exposure to device and her later contact of that item, and that resources exist which make this possible. For instance, in a way, an “accidental” exposure to HRM took place for many Finnish business executives in the 1990s in sport institutes offering training for top managers. For some people, the pleasant or rather curiosity-driven exposure to the activity of following heart rate produced a more enduring, second-stage preference (comfort/routine). This twostaged process exposure-liking might explain the emergence of the circuit of reproduction, and thus the continuity of new items in a single practitioner’s life (Pantzar, 1989). Following exact heart rate could produce excitement in the first stage, but, in time, the excitement fades away and is translated primarily into increasing comfort. Comfort, however, is like addiction: we become accustomed to it and soon take it for granted (Scitovsky, 1976). Thus, once made, choices replicate themselves. In time, practices related to pulse measurement have integrated with other practices (e.g. physical exercise), and the emerging “ecosystem” of performance metering has captured the new practitioners. In the case of (mundane) “proto-practice” (Polar PE2000 in 1983), we can talk about a pre-formation stage of a practice, where the elements exist, but links between measuring devices, procedures and images were not yet stabilized. Only a minority of people (or retail outlets) could imagine what this device

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or technique was good for. The shift from a proto-practice to an existing practice took place when the links between various elements became increased, stabilized and strengthened. Sport activists’ experiences linked the device to serious exercise and coaching competence with the result that heart rate measurement developed into new directions of serious (even neurotic) self-monitoring and self-theorizing (e.g. biohacking, see Ruckenstein & Pantzar, 2017; Swan, 2012). Instead of being anchored in the realm of mechanical objectivity, or trained judgement, typical to scientific enterprises (Daston & Galison, 2010), experiences and aspects of mundane self-measurement are possibly different. The concept of “situated objectivity” (Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2017) refers to the self-trackers’ way to approach life less systematically or logically – but, rather, combining knowledge in an eclectic manner from past experience, depending on the social context and life situation.8 In the beginning, heart rate monitor users were approached as “information processors,” eager to gather evidence and engage in self-observation. The assumed interactive role of a measurement device and users was articulated in the following headings taken from Polar Electro’s 2005 booklet: “Tune up your engine,” “Black belt in fitness,” “Turn information into speed” and “Everybody tells a story, you should listen to your body.” Indeed, this is an image in which modern ideals of control were taken to a new level: the “natural” body was treated as incomplete, falling behind the demands and potentials of the information age (cf. Viseu & Suchman, 2010: 179). With the aid of the new technology, the body was supposed to be increasingly controlled by reason; it can be used, transformed and improved in order to attain perfection through self-improvements. Practice-based approaches sensitize one to see that the linking of computergenerated knowledge to body performance does not necessarily erase or downplay emotions; the victory of reason over body will remain incomplete. A measurement device can also intensify emotional attachments related to body processes. The current “age of data” (Bowker et al., 2010), “sensory revolution” (Swan, 2012) or “quantified self movement” (Ruckenstein & Pantzar, 2017) resembles the end of the 19th century, when graphic recordings of the state of the body challenged and radically changed how patients and illnesses were understood in medicine (Bert & Harterink, 2004). Yet, the history of finance provides an even more fitting correspondence. The stock market ticker invented in 1867 introduced a new language and mode of abstract representation and it changed the ways in which financial markets operated (Preda, 2002). The ticker reinforced affective ties between investors and the objects of their actions. The stock ticker required permanent presence and keen attention of investors. It generated emotional reactions that could run counter to rational responses based on maximizing profit (Preda, 2002).9 In a similar vein, one may suggest that with heart rate monitoring, the heart became not only an object of permanent monitoring, but – and exactly because of permanent monitoring – it increasingly transformed into an object of emotional attachment, too. With new mobile measurement devices, hearts and their beating started to matter more to people. Possibly, it was visible outcomes, graphs and illustrations that were essential in making the reproductive quality of a practice emotionally more involving. Representing something is describing and, possibly, prescribing it (Bert & Harterink, 2004; Edwards et al., 2010; Latour, 1985).

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We can imagine different psychological, social or material cycles such as those that took place when the stock ticker generated new emotions and relations into the world of investment. Exactly like the stock ticker started integrating investors into a network of investors in the 19th century, heart rate measurements nowadays integrate social realms to bodily functions. With shared visualizations (of exercises) in social media sites, hearts have become more and more public. In distinguishing between promoters and practitioners, Shove et al. (2012) emphasize that practices tend to have two dimensions. Promoters (e.g. manufacturers and advertising companies), as market makers, shape and influence the elements of which practices are made. In other words, the promoters’ role is to provide and promote elements of practice. Indeed, in the case of heart rate measurement, Polar Electro made careful and deliberate moves to cultivate a specific identity and proper image, also re-designing the devices and offering new “affordances” for future populations of practitioners. Practitioners, in their turn, are responsible for the routine and recurrent integration of elements, i.e. for “doing” and so reproducing the practice in question. When heart rate measurement as a new practice was domesticated, each individual started to link stuff, ways of doing (skills) and symbolic purposes in her own ways. New technical HRM inventions transformed to market innovation only through widely distributed activities of practitioners. Seen this way, what looks like the diffusion of the heart rate measurement device is therefore better understood as its successive, but necessarily localized, (re)inventions (Pantzar & Shove, 2010a, 2010b).

Conclusions During the last few decades, temporalities, processual changes and material aspects of everyday life have become objects of interest in many social sciences. This chapter suggests that (academic) continuities exist between the domestication views of the 1990s and practice-based approaches of more recent origin. The succession from cultural studies to practice theories is manifested in greater attention to objects and technologies as material forces (Evans, 2020; Warde, 2014). In addition, practice-based views sensitize scholarly thinking about reproductive aspects of everyday life. Visible and non-visible practices require constant and active reproduction. Domestication approaches, which have so often focused on metamorphoses of meanings in normalization processes, will be reoriented if on-going reproduction of technological and institutional systems are taken into more careful and serious account. Importantly, the concepts “circuit of reproduction” and “practice complex” do not imply that daily routines and patterns are always stable or fixed closures. In a living system of interdependence, there is also a possibility of evolutionary, historical and irreversible change. Possibly stabilized, normalized and standardized practices facilitate innovative integrations with other practices and even emergence of new regimes, as happened when heart rate measurement moved from the realm of hospitals to sport and leisure time. Successful practices recruit people. To answer why radio listening, for instance, is still doing so well over 100 years after its invention, practice-based views would ask about the ways the whole ecosystem of radio listening recruits its practitioners, and the ways participation in the reproduction of the continuously living elements, such as material objects, 228

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positive images and needed practical skills, is taking place. Radio listening is probably so persistent because it is keenly attached to other self-evident, almost transparent and slowly evolving daily practices, but also larger constellations of various institutional practices. Although the mechanisms that guide the invention, adoption or rejection of new commodities and technologies are widely diverse, there is a surprising degree of similarity in the way that different commodities become entrenched in our lifestyle. Consider, for example, diverse views of the infiltration of the water pipe and the automobile. In the initial stages, both were viewed with a considerable degree of scepticism. Cars were thought to disturb the peace and they were regarded as a general nuisance to horse-drawn traffic. Water pipes were dismissed as a superfluous luxury, and even as an outright health risk – particularly when the outdoor privy was replaced by the indoor lavatory. Similar doubts were raised when the first portable heart rate measurement devices (or mobile phones) were introduced to wider public and retail outlets (Pantzar, 1996). In contrast to many domestication approaches, the practice-based view emphasizes that the mechanisms that lead consumers to repeat their earlier choices must be studied in the same depth as those, which prompted the consumer to make that choice in the first place. Choices we make today will guide and restrict the choices we make in the future. Fridges and freezers, when normalized, facilitated and generated new forms of shopping and supply of food. Or choosing a certain form of eating can lead to a certain type of lifestyle, which, in turn, increases demand for the form, say of transport, which originally shaped that lifestyle. Practice-based views add (and/or complement and/or substitute) psychological views with a more general idea of the circuits of reproduction. Microscopic practices are cyclic processes within more extensive circuits rather than given stable entities. When a practice (or practice complex) is identified as a cyclic process, i.e. as a circuit of reproduction, rather than a stable entity, technological and social systems are seen to exist only in and through their reproduction in microsocial interactions. These interactions are, in turn, limited and shaped by the intended and unintended consequences of previous social actions. The seemingly radical idea of emphasizing doings instead of (or preceding) thinking has also challenged standard economics or sociology that emphasizes given preferences, norms and institutions. Needs and wants are consequences of practices or practice complexes rather than their determinants (or sources). Or, put somewhat differently: activities generate wants, rather than vice versa (Warde, 2003). Rather than teasing apart layers of change (macro, meso and micro), the focus of practice-based views is on critical situations, in which microscopic choices/acts are transformed into macroscopic processes (e.g. materialization and commodification of needs), and similarly on moments, when macroscopic phenomena are translated to the level of everyday life (e.g. circulation of behavioural norms and preferences). In macrosocial phenomena, feedbacks and effects are spatially and temporally larger than in the case of microsocial phenomena. Seen this way, the difference between macroscopic order and microscopic order is arbitrary. Microscopic practices as (possibly self-enforcing) circuits or cycles constitute and co-determine macroscopic practices, and vice versa. Seen this way, practice approaches invite to reiterate between two basic movements: on the one hand, to zoom in on how specific practices are accomplished; on the other hand, to zoom out to examine their interrelationships in space and time (Nicolini, 2012). In other words, and translated to research operations, this view suggests that there should be empirical access to spatial but also temporal dimensions of practices. Seemingly different and separate transformations, e.g. naturalizations and cultivations (Wilk, 2009),10 become understandable only when the perspective is shifted from single commodities and needs to 229

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systems of commodities and evolving networks, but also vice versa from macroscopic to microscopic phenomena.

Notes 1 The social shaping of technology perspective (or “social construction of technology”) argued for the interpretative flexibility of scientific findings and technological inventions, and thus provides a non-deterministic model of technological change (Bijker et al., 1987; Mackay& Gillespie 1992). Its focus was on the legitimation processes and social mechanisms by which different commodities become constituted and socially constructed. At the same time, anthropologists’ terms such as the “biography of things” or the “social life of things” referred to qualitative perspectives, aiming to describe and understand the ways different commodities become integrated into the sphere of our daily life, the ways meanings attached to specific goods transform from experience of uncontrolled chaos to ordered cosmos (see e.g. Kopytoff, 1986; Löfgren, 1990), and the ways anonymous commodities with objective exchange value transform into personal possessions (Carrier, 1995). 2 The possibly transformative potential of new technologies can be identified only retrospectively (Gershuny, 1992; Norman, 1993; Rosenberg, 1995), because motives and needs behind buying and using technology transform in use. In the first stage, the fascination (need) of popular movies or television was its novelty as such. New media technologies, for instance, gained first admittance into society as “Trojan horses, with their physical presence clearly visible, but their potentialities poorly understood” (Levinson, 1977: 154). Television, radio, movies and recordings have witnessed a metamorphosis of meanings: from toy, through mirror, and towards art (Levinson, 1977). 3 It is impossible to separate the social and the technological: … instead of asking ‘is this social,’ is this technical or scientific, or asking ‘are these techniques influenced by society,’ or is this ‘social relation influenced by techniques,’ we simply ask: has a human replaced a non-human? Has a non-human replaced a human? Has the competence of this actor been modified? Has this actor-human or non-human been replaced by another one? Has this chain of associations been extended or modified? Power is not a property of any one of those elements but a chain. (Latour, 1991:110) The problems as to what is coordinated, human beings, tasks or practices, and who is coordinating, led to the question whether it is only the human being that can provide agency: “Like a network it is composed of series of heterogenous elements, animate and inanimate, that have been linked to one another for a certain period of time” (Callon, 1987: 93). An actor network approach explains both the first stages of the invention and the gradual institutionalization of the market: “It is applicable to the whole process because it encompasses and describes not only alliances and interactions that occur at a given time but also any changes and developments that occur subsequently” (Callon, 1987: 100). 4 Recent approaches to practice have emphasized unconscious adaptation to new situations and opposed representational accounts of knowledge and meaning. The focus has increasingly shifted from enquiry, reflection and reasoning towards preconscious background knowledge, embodied skills and practical understanding, but also distributed cognition (Miettinen et al., 2012; Warde, 2014). This chapter focuses more on aspects of evolving practice networks and reproductive dynamics (see Shove et al., 2012). Many important debates about the forms of knowledge creation and internal learning processes (Blue & Shove, 2016; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Crabu, 2019) have therefore been skipped. 5 Structural arrangements should not be explained through some sort of intention/reason/function without demonstrating. This is exactly what Giddens (1984: 229–243) has criticized in evolutionism, explaining social change as a purely endogenous (or unfolding) process. 6 The practice theoretical model developed in Shove et al. (2012) draws many conceptual ideas from general evolutionary models (Pantzar, 1989, 1991, 1993). An alternative term to circuit of reproduction would be an “autocatalytic cycle” (Maturana, 1981), i.e. a concatenation of positive influences, where one item in the chain catalyses another. In evolutionary terms, a group of practices must belong to an autocatalytic system of positive feedbacks in order to expand or exist. These causal loops are embedded within larger networks of causalities. In other words, if practice

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A journey from domestication approaches A increases the probability of genesis and maintenance of practice B, and practice B does the same to practice A, then in this autocatalytic cycle, the two practices mutually enhance each other’s rates of replication and gain an advantage over other practices. 7 Most studies had reported that portable electronic monitoring is in fact more accurate than manual pulse palpation (detecting the mechanical pressure changes in blood vein due to blood flow), or methods of detecting heart rate at the earlobe or fingertip via photo-optic techniques (La Forge & Kosich, 1996: 25). 8 One important aspect practice-based views bring is combinations of internal learning processes taking place in everyday life (cf. Crabu, 2019): The central issue in learning is becoming a practitioner not learning about practice… Learners are acquiring not explicit, formal ‘expert knowledge,’ but embodied ability to behave as community members … Communities are emergent, meaning that their shape emerges in the process of activity, as opposed to being created to carry out a task. (Brown & Duguid, 1991: 48–49) In other words, “living practices” tend to constitute knowledge bases, on which their own continuity depends. 9 In abstract terms, the ticker was “a nexus of mutually reinforcing language and representation modes, cognitive instruments and rules, and teleo-affective structures” (Preda, 2002: 2). Teleology refers to orientations towards certain ends, while affectivity gives things value and emotional depth. This fits well with Schatzki (2001: 52) who identifies a mix of teleology and affectivity as an important factor of practice. 10 “Cultivation refers to the processes which bring unconscious routines and habits forward into consciousness, reflection and discourse… Naturalization describes the processes which push conscious practices back into the habitus, or keeps them from surfacing into consciousness in the first place” (Wilk, 2009: 149–150).

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A journey from domestication approaches Miles, I., Cawson, A. and Haddon L. (1992) ‘The shape of things to consume,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming Technologies, Media and Information in Domestic Space, London & New York: Routledge, 56–70. Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, D. (ed.) (1995) Acknowledging Consumption. A Review of New Studies, London: Routledge. Morozova, D. and Gurova, O. (2021) ‘How the practice of commercializing comes together and falls apart in a market of wearable technologies,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 22(3), 674–691. https://doi. org/10.1177/1469540521990862 Nicolini, D. (2012) Practice Theory, Work and Organization. An Introduction, Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Pantzar, M. (1989) ‘The choreography of everyday life – a missing brick in the general evolution theory,’ World Futures - The Journal of General Evolution, 27 (2–4), 207–226. Pantzar, M. (1991) A Replicative Perspective on Evolutionary Dynamics. The Organizing Process of the US Economy Elaborated through Biological Metaphor, Helsinki: Labour Institute for Economic Research, Research Report 37/1991. Pantzar, M. (1993) ‘Do commodities reproduce themselves through Human Beings?’ World Futures The Journal of General Evolution, 38, 201–224. Pantzar, M. (1997) ‘Domestication of everyday life technology: Dynamic views on the social histories of artifacts,’ Design Issues, 13 (3), 52–65. Pantzar, M. (2019) ‘My journey within practice-based approaches bandwagon,’ Sociologica, 13 (3), 167–174. Pantzar, M. and Ruckenstein, M. (2015) ‘The heart of everyday analytics: Emotional, material and practical extensions in self-tracking market,’ Consumption Markets & Culture, 18 (1), 92–109. Pantzar, M. and Ruckenstein, M. (2017) ‘Living the metrics: Self-tracking and situated objectivity,’ Digital Health, 3, 2055207617712590. Pantzar, M. and Shove, E. (2010a) ‘Understanding innovation in practice: A discussion of the production and re-production of Nordic walking,’ Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 22 (4), 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537321003714402. Pantzar, M. and Shove, E. (2010b) ‘Temporal rhythms as outcomes of social practices: A speculative discussion,’ Ethnologia Europaea, 40 (1), 19–29. Petroski, H. (1993) The Evolution of Useful Things, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Preda, A. (2002) On Ticks and Tapes: Financial Knowledge, Communicative Practices, and Information Technologies in the 19th Century Financial Markets, paper presented for the Columbia Workshop on Social studies of Finance, May 3–5. Reckwitz, A. (2002) ‘Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing,’ European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2), 243–263. Ruckenstein, M. and Pantzar, M. (2017) ‘Beyond the quantified self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm,’ New Media & Society, 19 (3), 401–418. Sawhney, C. and Prandelli, M. (2000) ‘Communities of creation: Managing distributed innovation in turbulent markets,’ California Management Review, 42 (4), 24–54. Schatzki, T. (2001a) ‘Introduction: Practice theory,’ in T. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge, 1–14. Schatzki, T. (2001b) ‘Practice mind-ed orders,’ in T. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge, 42–55. Schatzki, T. (2010) Timespace and Human Activity, Lanham: Lexington Books. Schatzki, T., Knorr-Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge. Scitovsky, T. (1976) The Joyless Economy, New York: Oxford University Press. Shove, E. and Pantzar, M. (2005) ‘Fossilisation,’ Ethnologia Europaea, 35 (1–2), 59–63. Shove, E. and Pantzar, M. (2007) ‘Recruitment and reproduction: The careers and carriers of digital photography and floorball,’ Human Affairs, 17 (2), 154–167. https://doi.org/10.2478/ v10023-0070014-9. Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes, London: Sage. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and Hirsch, E. (eds.), Consuming Technologies. Media and Information in Domestic Space, London & New York: Routledge.

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Mika Pantzar Silverstone, R., Morley, D., Dahlberg, A. and Livingstone, S. (1989) Families, Technologies and Consumption: The Household and Information and Communication Technologies, CRICT discussion paper series, Brunel, 12–28. Swan, M. (2012) ‘Sensor mania! The internet of things, objective metrics, and the quantified self 2.0,’ Journal of Sensor and Actuator Network, 1, 217–253. https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan1030217. Tushman, M.L. and Romanelli, E. (1985) ‘Organizational evolution: A metamorphosis model of convergence and reorientation,’ Research in Organizational Behavior. 7, 171–222. Viseu, A. and Suchman, L. (2010) ‘Wearable augmentations: Imaginaries of the informed body,’ in J. Edwards, P. Harvey and P. Wade (eds.), Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies, New York: Bergham Books, 161–184. Warde A. (2003) Consumption and Theories of Practice, Draft CRIC Discussion paper. Warde, A. (2005) ‘Consumption and theories of practice,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 5 (2), 131–153 Warde, A. (2014) ‘After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 14 (3), 279–303. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wilk, R. (2009) ‘The edge of agency. Routines, habits and volition,’ in E. Shove, F. Trentman and R. Wild (eds.), Time, Consumption and Everyday Life, Practice, Materiality and Culture, Oxford: Berg, 143–154. Yli-Kauhaluoma, S., Pantzar, M. and Toyoki, S. (2013) ‘Mundane materials at work: Paper in practice,’ in E. Shove and N. Spurling (eds.), Sustainable Practices. Social Theory and Climate Change, London: Routledge, 69-85

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16 THE MUTUAL DOMESTICATION OF USERS AND ALGORITHMS The case of Netflix Ignacio Siles Introduction1 Researchers have increasingly associated algorithmic platforms with novel forms of power and control (Cardon, 2015). For example, Couldry and Mejias situated the operation of algorithms at the centre of “data colonialism,” which they defined as a new form of exploitation that “combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing” (2019: 337). But, as useful as it has been, focusing exclusively on data colonialism and algorithmic power has also come at the price of either taking for granted or neglecting the role of audiences in processes of datafication. As Livingstone (2019: 176) aptly notes, “in accounts of the datafication of society, attention to empirical audiences is easily displaced by a fascination with the data traces they leave, deliberately or inadvertently, in the digital record.” This chapter draws on domestication theory to offer a supplement to studies of datafication, one that pays particular attention to people’s practices with algorithmic platforms. Considering the case of Netflix, in this chapter, I posit the notion of “mutual domestication” to refer to the parallel process through which users incorporate Netflix into their daily life and how Netflix attempts to turn users into ideal consumers through recommendation algorithms. My findings come from 50 in-depth interviews with Netflix users in Costa Rica and an inductive analysis of their practices and profiles on the platform. Although the notion of “mutual shaping” has been established in the literature for some time (Boczkowski, 2004; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999), domestication theory offers valuable analytical tools to further our understanding of the relationship between audiences and algorithmic platforms. When they developed the framework of domestication, Silverstone and his collaborators faced similar theoretical challenges to the ones we deal with when accounting for datafication today. In Television and Everyday Life, Silverstone (1994) devoted significant time addressing the arguments of authors such as Marshall McLuhan, who clearly emphasised the consequences of new media in society, and counterbalancing downright technologically deterministic claims. The result of Silverstone’s empirical analysis of television was a dialectical consideration of the mutual shaping dynamics between people and technology that take place at the mundane level of everyday life. Domestication thus

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-23

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offers not a formula, but an analytical framework for examining how audiences relate to forms of technological power that seem to overpower them. I begin by considering how the notion of mutual domestication was a crucial part of Silverstone’s work on domestication. To this end, I examine his use of structuration theory and his understanding of the cyclicity of domestication. This chapter then discusses five dynamics through which mutual domestication occurs: personalisation (how a specific or “personal” relationship is established between users and the Netflix “Other”); integration (how users integrate algorithmic recommendations into a matrix of cultural codes, which Netflix constantly seeks to influence); rituals (the spatial and temporal processes in daily life around which user practices and algorithmic recommendations are organised); conversion (the transformation of the private consumption of the platform into a public issue); and resistance (the disputes around Netflix’s operation as a site for both users and algorithms to enact agency). The conclusion elaborates on how the notion of mutual domestication helps to account for the dialectical nature of the user-algorithm relationship. Before discussing the singularities of this case, one final clarification is in order. Although my interest is in the mutual domestication of users and algorithms, I argue that it is impossible to separate how users relate to algorithms from how platforms operate. Algorithms represent a synecdoche in Gillespie’s (2016: 22) sense, an “abbreviation” for larger sociotechnical assemblages that comprise “model[s], target goal[s], data, training data, application[s], hardware.” Recommendation algorithms are crucial in the Netflix assemblage. According to the company’s own estimation, “75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation” (Amatriain & Basilico, 2012a). In short, I argue that platforms are the means through which users seek to domesticate algorithms.

The dialectics of domestication Silverstone’s notion of domestication was a theoretical intervention in various important ways. As noted above, it was a reaction against the prevalence of technological determinism in dominant explanations of audiences’ relationship with the media. Thus, Silverstone (2006) wrote, “domestication was something human beings did to enhance and secure their everyday lives” (231). In this view, domestication was mostly a manifestation of human agency: it was something that audiences did to media technologies (Siles & Boczkowski, 2012). But it would be misleading to suggest that Silverstone’s theory focused entirely on human agency and neglected the importance (or power) of media technologies. The notion that television also “consumed” (Silverstone, 1994: 108) and even “colonised” (Silverstone, 1994: 4) audiences was a given in Silverstone’s work. More precisely, domestication was an attempt to counterbalance two theoretical extremes: on the one hand, “the overdetermination of the cultural industry which members of the Frankfurt School insist upon” and, on the other, “the kind of romanticism embodied in [the] phrase ‘the actual brilliance’ of the consumer” (Silverstone, 1994: 124). Silverstone turned to various theoretical approaches to offer an alternative to these two extremes. In Television and Everyday Life, Silverstone (1994) argued for a dialectical approach. He explicitly proposed a “synthesis” between McLuhan and James Carey’s view of communication as ritual (Silverstone, 1994: 94). He also recognised the centrality of Giddens’ structuration theory in his understanding of domestication. This link to Giddens helps frame the relationship between audiences and media technologies as a matter of “duality” (Webster, 2011): technologies are both “enacted” by people through practices and institutionalised in specific structures (Orlikowski, 1992); they are both the product of user practice and condition (without determining) human action. 236

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Silverstone opted for the notion of “cyclicity” to frame these mutual domestication dynamics. He employed this concept to emphasise two main issues. First, that domestication was not a linear or sequential process but rather that its dynamics depended on and fed each other (Silverstone, 1994: 124). Second, that domestication itself was an “elastic process” (Silverstone, 1994: 98). He elaborated on this idea thusly: Domestication […] stretches all the way from complete transformation and incorporation to a kind of begrudging acceptance, and from total integration to marginalisation. But what links both extremes is the quality of the work involved, the effort and the activity which people bring to their consumption of objects and their incorporation into the structure of their everyday lives. (Silverstone, 1994: 98) By emphasising cyclicity, Silverstone suggested that domestication was enacted through the myriad and rich ways in which audiences related to media technologies by both consuming and being consumed by them. Building on Silverstone’s view of cyclicity, I argue for recognising mutual domestication dynamics as a constitutive part of datafication processes. In Silverstone’s vocabulary, audiences both domesticate and are domesticated by algorithmic platforms; they consume and are consumed by data. Netflix offers an ideal opportunity to develop this argument not only because of its centrality in the reconfiguration of television – Silverstone’s main object of study – around the world, but also because it perfectly materialises the need to account for the “double articulation” of media technologies. Most research has concentrated on Netflix’s role as a content producer. But, in addition to this important role (which links Netflix to television studies), Netflix is also a specific technological infrastructure (which connects the platform to technology studies). In short, Netflix is both television and digital media. Lobato nicely captures the centrality of Netflix’s “double articulation” in its development and operation: Netflix is a shape-shifter: it combines elements of diverse media technologies and institutions. […] In its dealings with government, Netflix claims to be a digital media service— certainly not television, which would attract unwelcome regulation. Yet, in its public relations, Netflix constantly refers to television, because of its familiarity to consumers. (2019: 43) Netflix’s algorithms also embody this double articulation: they are materialisations of code that are expressed through content recommendations. In other words, platforms and algorithms are “texto-material,” an “entanglement […] of content and materiality” (Siles & Boczkowski, 2012: 228). This chapter sets out to explain how a group of users in Costa Rica domesticate and are domesticated by Netflix’s algorithms. Before discussing the specific dynamics on which mutual domestication unfolded, I briefly describe the research design on which this chapter is based.

Research design The empirical work conducted for this chapter is part of a larger research project that examines users’ relationship with various algorithmic platforms (Siles et al., 2019a, 2019b, 2020, 2023). This project focuses on the case of Costa Rica as an attempt to reveal how users relate to algorithms based on their particular historical and cultural conditions, rather 237

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than uncritically reproducing processes identified in the global North as a “natural” or ­“inevitable” outcome. Latin America was the second region where Netflix became available outside the United States (after Canada). Netflix was launched in Costa Rica in September 2011, as part of the company’s early global expansion process (Lobato, 2019). Since then, Netflix has grown steadily in the country. By 2022, 31% of the country’s population used the platform on a regular basis. Costa Rica aptly illustrates the interest that Netflix had in Latin America: it has a relatively large middle-class, high Internet connectivity rates, and reliable telecommunications infrastructures. Costa Rica has a relatively small consumer market and local production industry, which partially explains why there are very few local productions available on Netflix’s catalogue. This catalogue includes the content that Netflix has produced in Latin America. I conducted two studies on Costa Rican users’ relationship with Netflix’s algorithms. The first study was carried out between 2017 and 2018 and drew primarily on 25 in-depth interviews with Netflix users in the country. I focused on individuals who identified themselves as heavy Netflix users. I shared a call for participation on social media and selected 20 individuals with different profiles among those who responded. I also asked interviewees for additional suggestions of people with different backgrounds. The final sample included mostly educated people with a diversity of professional backgrounds. Interviewees’ age ranged between 20 and 53 years of age. The final sample also reflected a balance between people who identified as men (52%) and those who identified as women (48%). This choice reflects larger patterns identified in studies about the sociodemographic characteristics of Netflix users in Costa Rica (Red 506, 2018). I conducted the interviews in person, which lasted an average of 53 minutes. The second study drew on 25 additional interviews with Netflix users in 2019. This study focused exclusively on Costa Rican Netflix users who identified themselves as women to enquire into gendered biases in the algorithmic recommendations they received. I also shared a call for participants on social media profiles of Universidad de Costa Rica. Rather than focusing on “heavy users,” in this case I specifically sought individuals of different ages, occupations, backgrounds, and experiences with the platform. In this way, I tried to diversify the experiences that served as the basis for my research. The age of interviewees ranged between 19 and 58 years of age. Interviews for both studies were conducted in Spanish (all translations are my own). During these conversations, I employed an adapted version of the “scrollback technique” (Robards & Lincoln, 2017). I asked participants about their practices and trajectories with Netflix. Interviewees were asked to open their Netflix accounts on a computer and to describe the particularities of their profiles on the platform. I discussed with participants specific examples of the content available on their profiles. Finally, I captured screenshots constantly for the purpose of analysing them. This made it possible to triangulate data sources, such as verbal descriptions of the interviewees, images, and texts available on the profiles of users. Then, I compared accounts from users with descriptions of how Netflix’s algorithmic recommendations work, which were provided by the company’s representatives in the mainstream media and official outlets. The data were analysed in a grounded theory manner. I use pseudonyms to protect the identity of participants.

Mutual domestication dynamics Interviewees had largely integrated Netflix into their daily lives. For the most part, they described themselves as satisfied users of streaming services, most notably Netflix. Most said 238

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they dedicate at least one hour a day (on weekdays) to watching content on the platform and more hours over the weekends. Although Netflix occupies a central place in their entertainment ecology, many indicated that they still use torrent applications. Interviewees also said they had decreased the consumption of traditional (cable) television since they started using Netflix. Some had even abandoned it altogether. The domestication of Netflix was carried out through a variety of technologies, including television or smart TVs, computers, devices such as Apple TV, cell phones, and tablets.

Personalisation The notion of “personalization” is a keyword in the study of digital media (Kotras, 2020). Most scholarship has tended to employ it to refer to how platforms offer specific content to each individual (by building user profiles through data mining and analysis). Netflix itself has exploited this definition in public culture in order to build an identity and position itself as the specialist in personalisation. Ted Sarandos, the company’s former Chief Content Officer and present CEO, has often expressed that “[Netflix] is really about personalisation” (cited in Rohit, 2014). Company representatives usually stress the role of algorithms in this process: At Netflix, we embrace personalisation and algorithmically adapt many aspects of our member experience, including the rows we select for the homepage, the titles we select for those rows, the galleries we display, the messages we send, and so forth. (Chandrashekar et al., 2017) As a supplement, I define personalisation as the process through which users and algorithmic platforms build a personal relationship. In this view, personalisation is fundamentally a communication process. This relationship is established through various dynamics. To begin with, Netflix’s interface works as a “script” that invites users to think they are receiving content that has been prepared exclusively for them (Akrich, 1992). In other words, personalisation begins with an attempt to interpellate users, to make them feel they are being addressed by someone in a direct manner (Althusser, 2014). This is achieved through Netflix’s double articulation, that is, through a blend of both technological and content features. First, there is the mandatory process of creating a profile on the platform. The first question that Netflix asks users is, “Who’s watching?” This question invites users to recognise themselves as interpellated subjects. Accordingly, interviewees typically named these profiles after themselves and chose specific avatars among pre-selected images offered by the platform. Another instance of personalisation occurs through the configuration of the platform’s preferences, such as selecting Spanish or English as the preferred language in which to display content. Through these practices, users sought to provide the platform with a feature of their personality and, simultaneously, to perform an identity in relation to Netflix. Under the promise of experiencing “their” unique version of the platform, users thus naturalised the mechanism through which Netflix also sought to domesticate them: the segregation of consumption practices into user profiles. Once the question “Who is Watching?” is responded to by selecting a profile on the platform, Netflix then structures the offer of recommendations through similar interpellation devices: it displays content under sections such as, “Continue watching for you,” “Recommended for you,” “Top Picks for you,” and “Because you watched.” These recommendations are algorithmically assembled but are materialised as content offers. Many 239

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interviewees emphasised the efforts they typically devoted to controlling aspects of their profiles to avoid at all costs that their profiles got “contaminated” (as they often put it), that is, altering the nature of algorithmic recommendations in ways that didn’t reflect their interests. The premise behind such statements is that profiles and recommendations were a personal matter. By characterising this process as “contamination,” users framed their actions to keep recommendations personal as a solution. One such action was to provide the platform with “feedback” in order to improve recommendations. Many interviewees noted that they often “Thumbed Up” and “Thumbed Down” movies or series they had watched to this end. Considering that these kinds of actions needed to be repeated constantly enabled the sense in users that a relationship was forming between them and Netflix over time. For Althusser (2014), interpellation processes also suppose the existence of a unique and central Subject, who interpellates individuals as subjects. Althusser used Christian religious ideology to illustrate this point: God is the Subject and God’s people are the “Subject’s interlocutors, those He has hailed: His mirrors, His reflections” (Althusser, 2014: 196). In a similar manner, the personalisation of Netflix resulted in the tendency to personify the platform and treat it as an Other. As users believed that they were being addressed in a personal manner, they sought to make sense of the Subject that interpellated them. Interviewees expressed the sense they were interacting and having a dialogue with this Netflix Subject: they provided inputs to it (by consuming content, creating personal lists, evaluating shows and movies, etc.) and, in return, the Netflix Subject offered personalised content, personalised recommendations, and popularity ratings. In this view, it is algorithms that make Netflix a personal platform. The process of personalisation culminates in efforts to establish a unique relationship with the Netflix Subject through algorithms. This relationship is not stable but rather is constantly “in the making.” Accordingly, interviewees performed different kinds of roles as they interpreted continuous changes in Netflix’s algorithms. Their attachment to the platform was established as their relationship with algorithms underwent a series of “passages” (a term I am borrowing from Gomart & Hennion, 1999). These passages involved shifts from moments of experimentation to instances where users felt they were “training” or even “collaborating” with algorithms to achieve personalisation. Once users had reached their goal, their relationship with algorithms shifted to a process of “maintenance” where they could enjoy the benefits of the time invested in building a relationship with Netflix and its algorithms.

Integration Algorithms do not work entirely alone, nor do they act as the only determinant of users’ choices. Instead, users integrate algorithmic recommendations into a matrix of cultural sources and criteria based on their sociocultural backgrounds, the situations they want to resolve, and the material conditions of their digital environments. The notion of integration emphasises the work carried out by individuals to combine a variety of cultural elements as they ponder what recommendations they want to follow. This notion of cultural integration is comparable to grounded theory’s approach to knowledge building or how conceptual constructs are created and developed by constantly linking categories and sources that fit with the data (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). In grounded theory practice, integration refers to the process of “reconciliation” through which researchers deal with multiple realities that the data express. Likewise, my interviewees integrated overlapping criteria and realities in ways that fit with their sociocultural contexts, situations, and expectations. The domestication of algorithmic recommendations through integration 240

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dynamics thus needs to be situated within the sociocultural and economic contexts in which certain recommendations become meaningful or make more sense to people. Deciding what content to watch has become more complicated because of the abundance of possibilities that users have (Boczkowski, 2021). Netflix users in Costa Rica navigated this context of apparent endless choice by situating their relationship with Netflix and its recommendations within a wider repertoire of cultural sources. A key criterion for some Netflix users was recommendations from opinion leaders or the people whose perspective they value. Some interviewees said they valued these recommendations over Netflix’s algorithmic suggestions for two reasons: on the one hand, because Netflix could not know them as well as the people around them; on the other, because they felt that they could not know Netflix as well as they know their opinion leaders. Underlying this idea was the sense that Netflix had commercial interests in providing specific recommendations. Accordingly, some interviewees said that they viewed these suggestions with suspicion. Other interviewees value in particular the production characteristics of content, such as the presence of certain actors and actresses, the participation of key figures in the production of movies or series (a director or cinematographer). Netflix has consistently sought to shape this part of the domestication process by providing abundant information about each content characteristic available on the platform. Netflix’s involvement in developing content was important for several interviewees. In short, they thought of Netflix as a new standard of quality in the television industry and, thus, received positively any recommendation about its productions. When interviewees emphasised these issues, they tended to assess Netflix not as a platform or repository of content but rather as a brand that embodied a distinct approach to produce and distribute content. For interviewees, the expertise of certain sources made a difference when choosing what to consume on Netflix. Unlike opinion leaders, these sources had formal and official credentials to prove the validity of their recommendations. Thus, users indicated they relied on reviews of films or series on specialised websites in order to learn about recommendations. Netflix has once again attempted to domesticate users’ own domestication practices by influencing the media’s coverage of its content and by incorporating critics’ reviews as a main criterion to improve algorithmic recommendations (Amatriain & Basilico, 2012a). Finally, practically all interviewees said that they considered opinions expressed in social media as a source of direct or indirect recommendations. This occurs when users explicitly ask for recommendations on social media and evaluate the suggestions they receive. But, according to interviewees, social media also shapes their selection process when their contacts discuss specific content that gains popularity. On these occasions, users said that they felt the pressure of watching this content quickly because they didn’t want to feel excluded from conversations or risking that others would spoil plot elements. Users integrated these different cultural sources in different ways and with varied importance. They created their own repertoires and hierarchies of criteria. Although researchers interested in domestication have used the notion of repertoire to designate ensembles of media outlets (Haddon, 2017), I use it instead to refer to subsets of cultural resources and criteria that people draw on and combine to choose content on such platforms as Netflix. My interviewees drew on cultural repertoires as a product of their sociocultural condition. They integrated these various resources in their decision making to respond to certain what they perceive to be “exigences” associated with their work, personal relationships, and affective states (Siles et al., 2019b). Accordingly, they assessed the merits of algorithmic recommendations based on how much they provided a fitting response to such kinds of demands. 241

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It is thus against the backdrop of each person’s sociocultural position that a lgorithmic recommendations acquire meaning as relevant resources.

Rituals The domestication of algorithmic recommendations is done through routines and events that take place in specific times and places. I refer to these particular events as “rituals.” Through rituals, users incorporate Netflix into their mundane activities in a systematic way and create consumption practices around which temporal and spatial processes are organised. This view of rituals builds on Silverstone’s notions of objectification and incorporation: domesticating Netflix is performed at certain times of the day and requires locating certain technologies in specific places. In this way, users naturalise the centrality of Netflix as a social centre of their daily life. To make sense of the case of Netflix, I draw on Couldry’s (2003: 2) notion of rituals as “actions organised around key media-related categories and boundaries, whose performance […] helps legitimate the underlying ‘value’ expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre.” In Couldry’s approach, rituals don’t express a particular social order but rather naturalise it by legitimising social categories and boundaries through the repetitive performance of certain practices. The product of this process is what Couldry refers to as “the myth of the mediated centre,” the notion that the media are indispensable in bringing people together and are the privileged entry point to understand societies. In a similar manner, I argue that Netflix promotes a “myth of the platformed center,” which normalises the notion (or category) that algorithmic platforms are the social centre of users’ lives, an obligatory intermediary to make sense of their practices and lives. The domestication of Netflix among Costa Rican interviewees was characterised by three types of rituals: individual, collective, and a hybrid of the two. These rituals operate through a twofold process: they require adjusting daily life to watch content on the platform, as much as adapting Netflix for daily life activities. In turn, Netflix makes specific recommendations to shape these rituals, based on the technologies users employ and the content they watch when they perform the rituals. Individual rituals make the consumption of Netflix compatible with the most mundane activities of users’ daily lives. Examples provided by users included eating, washing and ironing clothes, and brushing teeth, among many others. During the performance of these activities, Netflix functions as an Other or companion (the way television has traditionally done). Rituals demand adjustments in Netflix’s double articulation: their performance requires both accessing the platform through specific technological devices and choosing certain kinds of content. On the one hand, Netflix’s technological characteristics made it easy for users to perform individual ritual: it was used in multiple devices, at various places, and was interrupted and resumed without major alterations. Users turned to devices that are easier to carry around, including cell phones, tablets, or personal computers. On the other hand, ritually watching Netflix also required specific types of content. Users said they preferred shows when watching Netflix individually, given that they are episodic (which helps to repeat the ritual constantly) and shorter than movies (which helps users to devote some time to this end throughout the day). Collective rituals take place at pre-established times and involve other people. These rituals transcend entertainment purposes and focus on establishing connections with members of the family, partners, or friends. As with individual rituals, domesticating Netflix collectively requires adjustments in the platform’s double articulation. Interviewees indicated to 242

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prefer television (the artefact) because of the size of the screen and the quality of the sound. Regarding the content, users said that movies were best suited to perform this ritual, since they have specific duration and type of narrative that help to bind the ritual temporally. Finally, another type of practice bridged individual and collective rituals. These rituals took place when users coordinated to watch content simultaneously with other people at a distance. The ritual is thus individual (because the user is alone when they watch the content) and also collective (because someone else is doing it simultaneously somewhere else). Interviewees employed terms such as “Netflix party” to name these practices, referring to the web browser extension that allowed them to watch the platform remotely with other people. In turn, Netflix employs various mechanisms to domesticate users through rituals. For example, the platform tracks “the device that the member is using” and “the time of day and the day of week” in which rituals take place (Chandrashekar et al., 2017). In this way, Netflix seeks to adjust recommendations to suggest certain kinds of content and, thus, shape these rituals. The platform also offers genres to frame specific content for these rituals. According to users, these genres were useful instruments of consensus when they discussed with others what content to watch together. A key strategy employed by Netflix to influence the performance of rituals is to suggest that recommendations are a direct result of users’ past behaviours. This is accomplished with Netflix’s iconic category “Because You Watched…” This strategy works by connecting recommendations to consumption rituals in the lives of users. In this way, Netflix presents itself as neutral by suggesting that, through algorithmic recommendations, it merely reflects previous user actions and behaviour patterns.

Conversion Conversion dynamics were key in Silverstone’s original framework of domestication. For Silverstone, conversion referred to how people transformed the private consumption of media technologies into a public issue. In Silverstone’s (2006: 234) words: Conversion involves reconnection […] It involves display, the development of skills, competences, literacies. It involves discourse and discussion, the sharing of the pride of ownership, as well as its frustration. It involves resistance and refusal and transformation at the point where cultural expectations and social resources meet the challenges of technology, system and content. Silverstone’s approach to conversion can be linked to work on the public performance of the self in online spaces. In this perspective, conversion becomes a way to interrogate “the articulated combination of mutually defining conceptions of self, publicness, and technology that characterise certain contexts and moments. [These notions] are deeply situated in that they crystallise and help shape cultural formations and values” (Siles, 2017: 13). Conversion publicly articulates the self to others through algorithms and connects the self to algorithms through others. In their conversion practices, Costa Rican Netflix users performed a self that was primarily defined by its supposed “inner” capacities to produce an original opinion about “external” cultural products. Interviewees envisioned themselves as creative individuals who could express through original thoughts in order to prove their singularity. Many felt pride in sharing suggestions before it had become popular to watch them. When this occurred, they felt that their “taste” and “quality” had been validated. Thus, recommending content was as much about self-understanding as about providing a service to others. 243

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For users, sharing content they had watched on Netflix was inherently good because of its centrality for sustaining interpersonal relationships ( John, 2017). Many interviewees went as far as expressing a sense of obligation in recommending series and films to others, rather than keeping their opinions to themselves. As Silverstone (1994) noted, conversion is deeply tied to the interrelated issues of status, belonging, and competence. These issues were of particular importance for interviewees who said they shared recommendations primarily with their closest social ties or strategic groups of friends. By doing so, users signalled membership in social groups of relevance for both personal and professional reasons. Knowing specific types of content on Netflix also worked as a source of status: users felt that they could cultivate a reputation based on the quality of recommendations they made. Conversion dynamics in Netflix’s case relied on a particular understanding of algorithms. Interviewees considered their recommendations different from those offered by algorithms in the sources and rationale that justified their suggestions. Users’ understanding of the self was again key for making sense of this belief. According to interviewees, one of their main capacities was to know others on a “personal” level, that is, to be aware of their specific situations and experiences. This capacity served for Netflix users what Foucault (1997) would have called an ethopoetic function: the possibility of transforming knowledge of another person’s life into a personal recommendation, one that spoke to their experiences in a direct manner. Interviewees argued that, although algorithms were capable of recommending content of potential interest to people, they could not engage in real ethopoetic functions. In their view, being capable of transcending the intended purpose of a series or film by using it as a way to comment on the life of other people could only be achieved by a person who knew others in a personal way. Conversion situated Netflix within a wider digital ecology. Interviewees used various media technologies to share and discuss content with others, including cell phones, social media, and messaging applications. Many regularly employed Facebook and Twitter to this end. This complicates the process of mutual domestication in that these discussions get further filtered by the algorithms on which other technologies rely. In turn, Netflix has sought to use conversion dynamics as an opportunity to domesticate users. In short, Netflix envisions conversion as a tool to algorithmically “process what connected friends [have] watched or rated” and thus further “personalise” recommendations (Amatriain & Basilico, 2012b). The company has employed several initiatives to shape and exploit users’ conversation practices. One initiative (called “Friends”) allowed users to view each other’s lists and queues and make recommendations. In 2013, the company launched “Netflix Social,” which displayed on Facebook information about the content that others were watching on Netflix. These initiatives have had relatively low success. Interviewees seemed largely unconvinced that this kind of feature would actually improve their recommendations. Instead, they preferred other technologies that provide them better access to their networks of interpersonal relationships.

Resistance For the most part, the users I interviewed enjoyed and appreciated Netflix’s services. However, they were also critical of some issues. This permeated the relationship with Netflix’s recommendation algorithms and, as a result, ended up shaping the mutual domestication process. I refer to these critical notions as resistance. More precisely, the relationship between Costa Rican Netflix users and the platform’s algorithms can be considered an instance of “infrapolitics” or the substratum of more explicit forms of resistance. The notion of infrapolitics was 244

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advanced by Scott to theorise the “wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name” (1990: 19). Scott defined infrapolitics as “the prevailing genre of day-to-day politics […] a diagonal politics, a careful and evasive politics […] made up of thousands of small acts, potentially of enormous aggregate consequence” (Scott, 2012: 113). In short, infrapolitics are practices and gestures that express a form of resistance operating at the interstices of everyday life but that often lack political articulation. Given Netflix’s double articulation or texto-material nature, users’ infrapolitical resistance involved both technological and content issues. Regarding technology, users perceived certain biases in the operation of algorithmic recommendations. Resistance focused mostly on what users considered to be a proneness to exaggeration in Netflix’s recommendations, that is, the tendency to exacerbate certain trends in content production and distribution. According to interviewees, this bias was most obvious in the content that was both created in and recommended for Latin America. They found examples of this tendency in the “Original” series that Netflix created for all its users and in those specifically made for Latin American audiences. In essence, interviewees felt they were being treated as a passive consumer who could be easily duped into falling for stereotypical recipes of commercial success in this particular region. Since 2015, Netflix has produced original content in Latin American countries with large local production industries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (Ribke, 2021). But there is almost no content locally produced in smaller Latin American countries, such as Costa Rica. Although most interviewees said they watched and enjoyed Netflix’s Latin American “Original” productions, they also noted that the company’s focus on larger markets made it difficult to go beyond stereotypes associated with Latin America (most notably drugs, soccer, and telenovelas). Interviewees also criticised the lack of certain content in Netflix’s catalogue for Costa Rica. This criticism focused not on the content that was available on the platform’s catalogue but mostly on what was not recommended to them. Users disputed the existence of content restrictions in Latin American countries because they made them feel excluded. They found this discrepancy arbitrary: although they paid exactly the same prices as users in other countries, they didn’t have access to the same content available. Interviewees indicated that they often received recommendations from friends in the United States, but that they couldn’t access them because they weren’t available in Costa Rica. In their view, Netflix’s Latin American “Original” series did not represent an alternative to content uniquely available in the United States. What bothered interviewees was not having the same options that Netflix users in the United States could watch. They valued English-speaking content because it allowed them to be a part of conversations spurred by Netflix in other parts of the world. This form of resistance expresses an “infrapolitical” stance in that Netflix users in Costa Rica did not seek to alter the streaming economy or datafication as a system but rather claimed their identity and dignity against the backdrop of what they considered to be clear biases. In addition to the platform’s “exaggerations” in the creation, development, and selection of content for Latin America, users also resisted Netflix’s approach to algorithmic recommendation. The spell of Netflix’s “interpellation” was typically broken for three interrelated reasons: users felt they had no interest in the recommendations they received (thus felt that algorithms didn’t work well); they didn’t necessarily understand why they had received certain recommendations (thus considered algorithms to be opaque); and they felt there were biases in the content that Netflix promoted (thus interpreted algorithmic recommendations as commercially motivated). Underlying these forms of resistance was the sense that Netflix 245

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operated by considering users not as people but rather as data profiles. In this context, some users claimed to regularly employ Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications to make Netflix “believe” they were located in countries of the global north where they could watch content without the restrictions they faced in Costa Rica. Others said they continued to watch content through torrent applications, where some “Netflix Originals” series and films could be found. Resistance needs to be situated within the tensions that shape processes of mutual domestication. It is difficult to determine the extent to which users’ notion of agency embodied in their infrapolitical practices of resistance has also been partially engineered by Netflix to domesticate users. Netflix has constantly emphasised the need to promote a sense of awareness in users in order to motivate certain consumer behaviours. According to the company: [An] important element in Netflix’ personalization is awareness. We want members to be aware of how we are adapting to their tastes. This not only promotes trust in the system, but encourages members to give feedback that will result in better recommendations. (Amatriain & Basilico, 2012a) Thus, a reflexive sense of agency in users does not necessarily predate the domestication of Netflix, but can also be a product of algorithmic operations.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have argued for the need to further acknowledge a central tenet of Silverstone’s work on audiences’ relationship with television, namely the dialectics of domestication. To this end, I posited the notion of mutual domestication to theorise how users incorporate Netflix into their daily life and how Netflix also attempts to domesticate users through recommendation algorithms. Recognising the dialectics of domestication invites a consideration of audiences as the targeted subjects of domestication, in addition to the traditional focus on media technologies as objects of domestication. I have argued that this twofold analytical approach is key in accounting for major transformations in Internet-distributed television and datafication processes. Although the practices of audiences have received significantly more attention in work on domestication, Silverstone (1994: 124) himself emphasised the need to conceptualise domestication as “cyclical and dialectical.” In his words: “consumption must be seen as a cycle, in which the dependent moments of consumption […] themselves feed back […] to influence and […] to define the structure and the pattern of commodification itself ” (Silverstone, 1994: 124). He evoked the figure of a spiral to further theorise domestication as a “dialectical movement” (ibid.). Silverstone’s view of cyclicity opens up numerous opportunities to theorise the mutual domestication of users and algorithmic recommendations on such platforms as Netflix. To begin with, it stresses the importance of considering how domestication dynamics mutually shape each other. Although I have discussed personalisation, integration, rituals, conversion and resistance independently for analytical purposes, I argue that they must be seen as interdependent, porous, and co-constitutive. For example, personalisation dynamics shaped other domestication dynamics. Users expected that the “dialogue” they established with the Netflix Other would serve as a basis for making decisions about which content to watch, either individually or collectively. It also created grounds for deciding what series or 246

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films they decided to share with others. But when the expectations of having invested time building a “personal” relationship with Netflix were not met, resistance became prevalent. By the same token, infrapolitical acts of resistance infused other dynamics of domestication. Thus, not having access to the content that is available in the United States led users to certain rituals, such as accessing Netflix through VPN. This, in turn, was informed by the integration of recommendations that came from specialised media outlets, from comments on social media, or from “opinion leaders” who had watched content that was not available in Costa Rica. More broadly, a mutual domestication approach helps to balance out a prevalent dichotomy in the study of datafication. While some scholars have emphasised issues of algorithmic power and control (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), others have sought to understand instead the role of audiences in processes of datafication. Leong (2020), for example, employed the framework of domestication to account for the everyday experiences of Facebook users in Myanmar. Rather than separating the study of algorithms and users, the notion of mutual domestication points to the need to examine the dynamics through which both seek to domesticate each other. In this view, efforts to colonise audiences and user practices to domesticate algorithms are simultaneous occurrences rather than sequential: users variously incorporate algorithmic recommendations into their daily lives while these algorithms are designed to adjust to these user practices in order to colonise them. The notion of mutual domestication offers an opportunity to understand the contemporary transformation of culture as a result of this cyclical interaction.

Note 1 This chapter draws on the arguments developed in Siles (2023). I thank the MIT Press for permission to incorporate this material.

References Akrich, M. (1992) ‘The De-scription of Technical Objects,’ in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge: MIT Press, 205–224. Althusser, L. (2014) On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, London: Verso. Amatriain, X. and Basilico, J. (2012a) ‘Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 Stars (Part 1),’ Netflix Technology Blog, available at: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5stars-part-1-55838468f429 (accessed October 29, 2021). Amatriain, X. and Basilico, J. (2012b) ‘Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 Stars (Part 2),’ Netflix Technology Blog, available at: https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5stars-part-2-d9b96aa399f5 (accessed October 29, 2021). Boczkowski, P. J. (2004) ‘The Mutual Shaping of Technology and Society in Videotex Newspapers: Beyond the Diffusion and Social Shaping Perspectives,’ The Information Society, 20 (4): 255–267. Boczkowski, P. J. (2021) Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cardon, D. (2015) A Quoi Rêvent les Algorithmes: Nos Vies à l’Heure des Big Data, Paris: Seuil. Chandrashekar, A., Amat, F., Basilico, J. and Jebara, T. (2017) ‘Artwork Personalization at Netflix,’ The Netflix Tech Blog, available at: https://netflixtechblog.com/artwork-personalization-c589f074ad76 (accessed October 29, 2021). Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. (2015) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (4th ed.), Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Couldry, N. (2003) Media Rituals, London: Routledge. Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. A. (2019) The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Ignacio Siles Foucault, M. (1997) ‘Self Writing,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984: Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New York: New Press, 207–222. Gillespie, T. (2016) ‘Algorithm,’ in B. Peters (ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 18–30. Gomart, E. and Hennion, A. (1999) ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users,’ The Sociological Review, 47 (1): 220–247. Haddon, L. (2017) ‘The Domestication of Complex Media Repertoires,’ in K. Sandvik, A. M. Thorhauge and B. Valtysson (eds.), The Media and the Mundane: Communication Across Media in Everyday Life, Gothenburg: Nordicom, 17–30. John, N. A. (2017) The Age of Sharing, Cambridge: Polity. Kotras, B. (2020) ‘Mass Personalization: Predictive Marketing Algorithms and the Reshaping of Consumer Knowledge,’ Big Data & Society, 7 (2): 1–14. Leong, L. (2020) ‘Domesticating Algorithms: An Exploratory Study of Facebook Users in Myanmar,’ The Information Society, 36 (2): 97–108. Livingstone, S. (2019) ‘Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research,’ Television & New Media, 20 (2): 170–183. Lobato, R. (2019) Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution, New York: New York University Press. MacKenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (1999) The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.), Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1992) ‘The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,’ Organization Science, 3 (3): 398–427. Red 506 (2018) Red 506, San José: El Financiero. Ribke, N. (2021) Transnational Latin American Television: Genres, Formats and Adaptations, London: Routledge. Robards, B. and Lincoln, S. (2017) ‘Uncovering Longitudinal Life Narratives: Scrolling Back on Facebook,’ Qualitative Research, 17 (6): 715–730. Rohit, P. (2014) ‘Personalization, Not House of Cards, Is Netflix Brand,’ WestSideToday.com, available at: https://westsidetoday.com/2014/06/17/personalization-house-cards-netflix-brand/ (accessed October 29, 2021). Scott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (2012) ‘Infrapolitics and Mobilizations: A Response by James C. Scott,’ Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 1 (131): 112–117. Siles, I. (2017) Networked Selves: Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France, New York: Peter Lang. Siles, I. (2023) Living with Algorithms: Agency and User Culture in Costa Rica, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Siles, I. and Boczkowski, P. J. (2012) ‘At the Intersection of Content and Materiality: A Texto-Material Perspective on Agency in the Use of Media Technologies,’ Communication Theory, 22 (3): 227–249. Siles, I., Espinoza, J., Naranjo, A. and Tristán, M. F. (2019a) ‘The Mutual Domestication of Users and Algorithmic Recommendations on Netflix,’ Communication, Culture & Critique, 12 (4): 499–518. Siles, I., Segura-Castillo, A., Sancho, M. and Solís-Quesada, R. (2019b) ‘Genres as Social Affect: Cultivating Moods and Emotions through Playlists on Spotify,’ Social Media + Society, 5 (2): 1–11. Siles, I., Segura-Castillo, A., Solís-Quesada, R. and Sancho, M. (2020) ‘Folk Theories of Algorithmic Recommendations on Spotify: Enacting Data Assemblages in the Global South,’ Big Data & Society, 7 (1): 1–15. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating Domestication. Reflections on the Life of a Concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K. Ward (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Webster, J. G. (2011) ‘The Duality of Media: A Structurational Theory of Public Attention,’ Communication Theory, 21 (1): 43–66.

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PART IV

(Counter-)domesticating media and technologies

(Counter-)domesticating media and technologies Introduction Shangwei Wu

When domestication theory was first applied in media and communication studies in the 1990s, it was before the internet entered most ordinary people’s daily lives. Television, the peak and also the last magnificence of one-to-many mass communication, was undoubtedly the protagonist of the domestication studies carried out by media researchers. Hardly used as an individual device, television was predominantly associated with household settings. Therefore, the family became an important unit of analysis; domesticity and household-based ontological security were prominent themes in early domestication studies, especially those conducted by British scholars. Since then, researchers have expanded the theory so that it can be used to analyse media use beyond the household. In the meantime, the worldwide media landscape has drastically changed with the rapid development of the internet and portable digital devices. As everyday media use has become more personal and less subject to time-spatial constraints – at least in those countries where people have abundant options of internet service and devices – and media operation mechanisms have seen significant changes, researchers need to rethink domestication and its implications. Focusing on the internet and/or smartphones, all the five chapters in this section show us the direction in which domestication research can further develop. Hartmann, Leong, and Møller share the view that “domestication” is more about the acts of taming media technologies and making them familiar, rather than the private and the domestic. Accordingly, they look at domestication outside the home. Hartmann focuses on how roofless people use and appropriate smartphones in the context of homelessness. Leong examines how people’s adoption and use of the “Cuban Internet” in Havana rely on their social networks; she coins the concept of “networked domestication,” calling attention to the individual relations to other actors (beyond the familial context) in the domestication process. Møller explores how people domesticate smartphones in clubbing settings and make clubs feel safe enough. His research challenges the normatively prescriptive notion of “ontological security” that is often associated with home. He maintains that domestication research should be “sensitive to the many ways safety, pleasure, risk, and control is defined, made meaningful and take form in different situations across different populations” (see Chapter 21). If domestication means getting used to media technologies and taking them for granted, then Bakardjieva and Pierson are firmly against the idea of a complete domestication of digital media. Bakardjieva proposes a persisting “moral itch,” or a reflection on whether we have DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-25

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seized the opportunity for progressive social change facilitated by new ICTs. She elaborates on the relevance of the moral itch in our living with the Big Other, a concept taken from Zuboff, which describes the “ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit” (Zuboff, 2015: 81). The Big Other helps users domesticate the countless applications, content, and connections offered to them in the digital media ecology through the mechanism of “personalization” and “customization,” and through algorithm-aided nudging and shoving. In a sense, the Big Other is domesticating the domesticators. The price, however, is that it narrows the users’ field of vision and future opportunities for engagement and action. We are likely to get stuck in our ideological comfort zones, and will be “further and further exposed to viewpoints and ideas related to public issues that we are already inclined to believe and agree with” (see Chapter 17). In this context, the moral itch would prompt us to maintain hospitality to the small Other “who is unlike us, who holds different views, pursues different goals and espouses different lifestyles” (see Chapter 17). This, Bakardjieva describes, is key to democracy, which expects citizens to listen to and understand each other and solve social problems together. Similarly concerned about the domestication of digital media, Pierson proposes wilful non-participation in digital platforms as a way to counter-domestication. Data-driven and algorithm-based digital platforms, as Pierson argues, bring us the problem of unaware data subjecthood. Once these digital platforms are sufficiently domesticated and trusted to obscure their operating mechanisms and interests, users will be disempowered and subject to dataveillance, failing to problematize commercial and government institutions’ exploitation of personal data. Accompanying this domestication process is a transformation of the model of trust: from an institutional-professional model of trust to a corporate-computational model of trust. The former is “based on human-made decisions and rules of power by media institutions and professionals that can be held publicly accountable for governance” (see Chapter 18), whereas the latter is “predicated on personalized data flows, algorithmic computation and proprietary business models” (see Chapter 18). With this transformation process being unquestioned, people could face the loss of data privacy and individual autonomy. Pierson suggests that in this case, counter-domestication can take the form of users actively establishing a situation of temporary or continued non-participation in digital platforms to raise awareness of data subjecthood and its possible consequences. The ultimate goal, however, is to facilitate change at a larger scale, so that users do not have to take all the responsibility themselves for avoiding harm from data-driven media technologies. Bakardjieva and Pierson’s warning concerning the idea of complete domestication of digital media is important. The reality, however, is that access to digital media has never been evenly distributed across different demographic groups and territorial divisions. Hartmann’s chapter reminds us that there are people, such as the roofless, who may find themselves in a disdomestication situation and count as serial disconnectors. Besides, internet service in countries like Cuba has not yet been dominated by internet giants from Silicon Valley (as, for example, Meta Platforms), as Leong clearly outlines. These cracks in the media landscape allow us to de-naturalize the seemingly mainstream experience of digital media use, possibly preserving the potential for counter-domestication and the impulse to seek progressive changes.

Reference Zuboff, S. (2015) ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,’ Journal of Information Technology, 30 (1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5

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17 DOMESTICATING THE DOMESTICATORS Where have all the agents gone? Maria Bakardjieva If Roger Silverstone – one of the originators of the domestication approach – had had a Twitter account, we would have known him as a great influencer. An influencer he was as the very appearance of this collection demonstrates. If “domestication” had been a hashtag, it would have trended for more than a decade – at least among media scholars. Why was the influence of the concept so strong and lasting? Each author in this collection can speak for her- or himself, but I believe a common theme among such personal accounts would be the idea of audience or user agency. As Silverstone himself has reflected, the process of domestication was conceptualized at a time when media studies had begun a “journey away from determinism, in the guise of media effects, and towards constructivism, in the guise of audience freedom and creativity” (2006: 231). The talk of the time was that of semiotic democracy, choice, agency, as if somehow the encompassing world of both material and symbolic resources were only there for the taking: as if their limiting constraints, their resistances, their preferences, their demands, were avoidable, infinitely negotiable in the transactions of everyday life, through which individuals and groups made sense of their worlds. (ibid.) Worn out by analyses highlighting the inevitability of technological change – for good or bad – and Frankfurt School-inspired insistence on the pervasive ideological grip of media messages, scholars of a burgeoning generation took in the idea of domestication of media technologies as a breath of fresh air. Despite the critical underpinnings of the schools in which many in this cohort had been raised, Silverstone’s followers embraced his critique of the structural determination of the social consequences of consumption, especially when it came down to the consumption of media technologies and messages in everyday life: But nevertheless while Bourdieu uses the analysis of consumption to display the structuring of patterns of everyday life in contemporary society, and does so to convincing effect, he understresses the dynamics: the shifts and turns, the squirming and the resistances which in their significance or lack of significance, do indeed make consumption

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an active, sometimes creative, process in which individual and social statuses and identities are claimed, reclaimed and constantly being negotiated. (Silverstone, 1994: 116‒117) The empirical studies conceived in this growing tradition adopted a social constructivist perspective, which means they saw social actors engaged in signification work as the main drivers of what was going on in and around media technologies. In opposition to economic, technological and ideological structuralisms and determinisms, they opted to uncover where and how the agency of media users manifested itself. Indeed, multiple research projects conducted over a long period of time, and popping up in journals to this day, provided evidence of the mindful ways in which users introduced and appropriated media technologies – television, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, etc. – guided by the “moral economies” regulating their households and other everyday settings (Berker et al., 2006). The notion of the “moral economy” was another concept that the domestication tradition employed to reclaim the capacity of local private or small-group micro-cultures to uphold their identities and values in the face of disruptive technological innovations brought in from the outside world – from the spaces governed by industry, commerce and marketing. This capacity and the more specific processes that were said to make up domestication – the appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion (Silverstone et al., 1992) – were seen as a potential source of emancipation of the user and consumer, as a manifestation of her or his power to not only retain a position of critical reflexivity and a degree of autonomy, but also to put her or his own mark on the course of media development. What was there not to like and to celebrate? Year after year, our research community drilled deeper and deeper into these processes, looked for them and found them in various places on the geographical, cultural and demographic maps. We scrutinized their elements and material and discursive expressions and compiled ever more convincing accounts of “the dynamics: the shifts and turns, the squirming and the resistances… in their significance or lack of significance” as Silverstone (1994) had put it. The question of significance or insignificance eventually came to haunt the domestication model. Andrew Feenberg (1999: 107), himself a philosopher on a quest to find sources of emancipation and user agency in the technological sphere at large, put his finger on it when he criticized domestication for being “too cozy” and conservatively oriented towards the protection of traditional values from the perceived threats, but also from the progressive opportunities opened by new technologies. Feenberg was also dissatisfied with the inward-looking aspect of domestication and interested in coining a conceptual framework that would be prefigurative, pointing to possibilities for progressive change and expressive of a wide range of social and political concerns rather than limited to the moral economy of the private household. His idea of “democratic rationalization” (Feenberg, 1999: 107–108) was proposed as a candidate to do that job. In a stock-taking essay published in 2006, surprisingly, Silverstone did not jump to defend domestication against this critique as vigorously as a dedicated follower might have wanted and expected. While reiterating the fine points about what the concept was intended for and what it did well, he openly confronted the limitations that he had identified from the perspective of his evolving thinking on the role of media in social life. Domestication, he wrote, is “double edged.” In words close to Feenberg’s critique, he pointed out that in its original formulation, the concept was: a conservative response to the challenge of technological change … a way of absorbing such threats and denying such opportunities for new kinds of reflexivity into the 254

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cosy familiarity of a private moral space, the family, the household… In some senses domestication is, by definition, a process of moral defensiveness, and in so far as technologies are moulded to (or rejected by) private values in private cultures, then what is at stake is the preservation of the core of a personal world against all-comers. (Silverstone, 2006: 246) In that sense, Silverstone agreed, there is a “politically retrogressive dimension of domestication: that its force is precisely to reject the novel and the possibility of change” (Silverstone, 2006: 247). And if that is so, he contended, it would be better if domestication remained incomplete. A persisting “moral itch” (ibid.), a search for the new possibilities unlocked by new information and communication technologies should go on if the hopes for a technologically facilitated progressive social change are to be realized. Does novel communication technology and the way we appropriate it in our private sphere, then, enable a better world and a more sustainable relationship between ourselves and the multifaced Others with whom we share it? Moral questions like that break out of the cosy enclosure of complete domestication and force us to look for the broader significance of our resistances and appropriations and urge us to live up to the higher responsibility that comes with them. I will now, once again, follow Silverstone in his critique of the concept that he himself had co-invented and will go on to examine the consequences of a complete and triumphant domestication as they present themselves to us in our current media moment. But first, I need to complicate things by mapping out the different articulations that give significance to communication media.

The third articulation In the beginning, it was “double articulation” that scholars insisted on recognizing as a key characteristic of how communication media became meaningful and integrated into the fabric of everyday life: … these technologies are not just objects: they are media…[they] have a functional significance, as media; they provide, actively, interactively or passively, links between households, and individual members of households, with the world beyond their front door… in complex and often contradictory ways. (Silverstone et al., 1992: 15) Succinctly captured by Livingstone (2007: 17), the idea of double articulation contrasts the consumption of the media “qua material objects located in particular spatiotemporal settings” with the consumption of the media “qua texts or symbolic messages located within the flows of particular socio-cultural discourses” and insists that these two dimensions are inseparably integrated and should be analysed as such. This property makes the media subject to the sociological study of consumption like other material things coming into the private household from the open space of the market and at the same time, it demands a semiological scrutiny of the content and reception of the meanings encoded in the texts that flow through them. These two approaches have flourished, each on its own terms, in the form of domestication research on the one hand and audience or reception research on the other. As Livingstone (2007) complains, it is not often that they have been combined within the same project. However, something else has gradually become clear as the technological nature and the social organization of media channels 255

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have changed: domestication and reception are not so fundamentally different. Already in his Television and Everyday Life Silverstone had suggested as much: “Technologies, and television and television programmes must be domesticated if they are to find a space or place for themselves in the home” (1994: 83). Radway’s (1984) study of the reading of the romance had given another early indication that not just material objects, but also texts are being domesticated very much along the lines of the model put forward by Silverstone and his colleagues (1992). In an expanding multi-channel and multi-vocal media market, this domestication of texts became a necessity and an important project for households and the individuals living in them. This necessity was raised to a new level by the arrival of the Internet and the plethora of interactive media proliferating on it. Indeed, as Livingstone (2007) has rightly noted, active selection of both channels and texts by searching, clicking, scrolling and typing, and later also by subscribing, sharing and commenting brought a whole new media-user action repertoire into existence. A lot of it can be parsed along lines similar to the original domestication model – appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion. Therefore, I see ample grounds for arguing that not just a reading or interpretation, but a domestication of the symbolic messages themselves became a common practice of media audience members and users in the digital environment. Moreover, under these changed conditions when the media are doing much more than beaming wholesale content into homes and people are doing much more with the media than receiving that content and quietly trying to make sense of it, it becomes reasonable to talk about a “triple articulation” as Hartmann (2006) has proposed. Hartmann points us to look at media use in context in order to find a third level of articulation. My suggestion zooms in on one particular type of media use – social interaction and the social relations established by it. To state the obvious, interactive digital media connect people at home to a variety of communication partners – individual, collective and institutional – i.e., to social networks and a wide spectrum of providers in the form of organizations, communities and platforms. Digital media users navigate this vast and diverse social universe and make efforts to domesticate it by searching, selecting, turning on and turning off processes of interaction with its members and components. To comprehend that, we do not need to look farther than the old, tired and readily dismissed technical model of communication proposed by Shannon and Weaver (1949): source-message-channel-receiver. Then, of course, we need to reimagine its technical elements as social and symbolic entities. The elements of message (symbolic content) and channel (or socially constructed technical object) are accounted for by the double-articulation concept, but the element of source (which changes places with the receiver, or recipient, in an interactive, two-way social communication flow) evades doublearticulation analyses. It remains in the hands of the political economy of communication on the one hand, and the social psychology of mediation on the other. Whom do users interact with via digital media in their daily life? Whose voices and virtual presence do they accept and engage with (and to what extent), while sitting at the computer screen, or holding the smartphone in their palm, or for that matter, when they change television channels at home? Already in 1956 Horton and Wohl observed that “one of the most striking features of the new mass media – radio, television, and the movies – is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer.” They proposed to call this “seeming faceto-face relationship between spectator and performer” a “para-social relationship” and the simulacrum of conversational give and take involved, a “para-social interaction” (Horton & Wohl, 1956: 215). This relationship is limited, the authors noted, in the sense that it is onesided, non-dialectical and controlled by the performer, but they acknowledged that the audience was free to choose between the potential relationships offered presumably in the 256

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corpus of available radio and TV programming. Needless to say, the scope of this choice of para-social relationships with performers – anchors, journalists, actors – grew exponentially in the multi-channel universe that was to follow. In the pre-Internet age when television dominated the media scene, Thompson (1995) introduced the concept of mediated quasi-interaction, which referred to the monological creation of symbolic messages for an indefinite range of potential recipients that is typical of the media of mass communication. No matter that this relation lacked the degree of reciprocity and interpersonal specificity of face-to-face or mediated interpersonal interaction, Thompson considered it a type of interaction because it created a certain social situation in which individuals are “linked together in a process of communication and symbolic exchange.” The production and consumption of symbolic forms takes place without physical co-presence between the interlocutors, but nevertheless the situation allows them to “form bonds of friendship, affection or loyalty” (Thompson, 1995: 84–85). Analysing the different manifestations of mediated quasiinteraction, Thompson notes that “the distant others whom one comes to know through mediated quasi-interaction are others who can be slotted into the time-space niches of one’s life more or less at will” (Thompson, 1995: 219). The non-reciprocal character of mediated relationships implies a significant degree of control: “recipients have a great deal of leeway in shaping the kind of relationship they wish to establish and sustain with distant others” (Thompson, 1995: 220). The intimacy created through mediated quasi-interaction allows individuals “a great deal of scope in defining the terms of engagement and fashioning the character of intimate others” (ibid.). For the argument I am developing here, Thompson’s observations suggest two things: first, that the media, even the one-way print and broadcast variety, clearly perform an articulation of the home scene to a vast social world of individual and collective others, and second, that even in the one-way mode of reception, “recipients” situated at home have a great deal of scope for selecting and fashioning the character of these distant others, as well as the nature of the relationship with them. In other words, the social articulation for its part opens a wide field for the domestication of distant others. In an early study of Internet adoption by home-based users, I came upon multiple examples of individuals interacting actively, regularly and sometimes intimately with distant people and communities via their networked computers. These interactions went beyond the para- and the quasi- and although carrying their own limitations, allowed dialogical and dialectical relationships to evolve. On this basis, I argued that computer-mediated communication makes possible, in a reversal of Raymond Williams’ notion of mobile privatization, an immobile or stationary socialization. Users socialize with others who are scattered far beyond the domestic thresholds while remaining in their living rooms or basements (Bakardjieva, 2005). Notably, in the process of this socialization, users were able to make subtle choices with respect to partners to connect to, degrees of privacy and sharing and modes of exchange. In the years that followed, a plethora of studies on computer-mediated communication, online friendships, intimacies and communities, and most recently social media ties and graphs have left no side of this kind of socialization unscrutinized. Thus, it is patently obvious to me that the third articulation that needs to be added to those accounting for the material and the symbolic is that of the social. Domestication in this third articulation is a very different ball game. The crucial cargo that the media bring into the home is not an object to be placed among other pieces of furniture or a text that the recipient can pore over curled up in a couch by the fireplace or cite to family and friends. The crucial effect of the third articulation is a crack in the wall that allows the inflow and outflow of interaction with countless others – people, communities, market players and public institutions – populating the wider social world. Domestication then refers to the choices of how to pick, reach out 257

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and interact with the above cited social entities from the home base; whether and how to perform as an actor in diverse social domains while sitting at home and by virtue of that, how to attach the home to these domains’ turbulent dynamics. In light of these three articulations that call for their respective and distinct domestication efforts on the part of home-based media users, the issue of leaving domestication incomplete acquires new significance. Will it be, if completed, a “politically retrogressive force” that purges the novel and closes the potential for change entrenching us into a narrow-minded, self-centred and narrowly focused moral economy (Silverstone, 2006: 247)? Or will it leave the door open for a “moral itch” that includes curiosity towards the unknown, openness to the different and care for the distant fellow-human? Ironically, at the same time that the availability of technical gadgets, symbolic content and social relations spawned by media digitization has become limitless, new retrogressive forces have been unleashed that suppress that moral itch and seek to exploit our domestic moral economies in unforeseen ways.

At home with the Big Other The exciting opportunities for para-social, quasi-social and computer-mediated relationships at a distance brought about by digital media came at a price. Proximal relationships had to pay it. Late modern individuation did away with what modernity had left of the family hearth and gradually took over the domestic sphere through vehicles such as television sets and gaming consoles in bedrooms, networked computers in home offices and basements, and ultimately, smartphones in pockets and palms (Livingstone, 2001; Turkle, 2011). Headphones and earbuds made sure the inhabitants of the household mentally hovered in their own personal symbolic and social worlds. The “reflexive project of the Self ” (Giddens, 1991) replaced the moral economy of the household in its role as a domestication compass and guide as far as the navigation of both the media technologies at hand and the mediatable world beyond the front door was concerned. This certainly brought a degree of liberation from stale norms and hierarchies. However, it also undermined the home as an “embryonic community” (Douglas, 1991: 288) and a context in which solidarity is first learned. The primary problem of a community of this kind, Douglas argues is to “achieve enough solidarity to protect the collective good. If solidarity weakens, individual raids destroy the collective resource base” (1991: 299). Home, she warns, is a fragile system, easy to subvert. The main contribution its members make to the collective good is to be physically present at its assemblies: “An act of presence is public service. Absence is to be deplored” (Douglas, 1991: 301). The present absence of household members, or the alone-together (Turkle, 2011) mode of coexistence furnished by personal digital devices shrinks the base for solidarity-building and fragments the morals of the moral economy of the household. From a rooting in a private and yet collective set of norms, its new anchor becomes the identity project of the isolated individual. However, the self hood of that individual her- or himself is heavily dependent on the new generation of “technologies of the Self ” (Bakardjieva & Gaden, 2012; Foucault, 1988; Marwick, 2013), which are now exemplified by none other than digital media. A peculiar circularity will be noticed in this development. The domestication (turned personalization) of communication media by individuals seems to be driven – by way of the individual’s Self project – by relationships and discourses constituted through, and following the logics, of these media themselves. There are some even more troubling issues with the allegedly reflexive project of the self that arise in the age of what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has called “surveillance capitalism,” whose indispensable means of production are digital media. Zuboff opens one of her book 258

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chapters citing the laments of university students who had been asked to abstain from using their digital devices for 24 hours as part of an international study. The data of this study include multiple confessions under a few common themes: “I felt so lonely… I could not sleep well without sharing or connecting to others…,” “The only thing going through my mind was (voice of a psychopath): I want Facebook, I want Twitter, I want YouTube, I want TV…,” “My dependence on the media is absolutely sickening….” Among the study’s main findings was that: “a clear majority in every country admitted outright failure of their efforts to go unplugged;” “that media – especially their mobile phones – have literally become an extension of themselves.” Going without media, therefore, made it seem like they had lost part of themselves and “being tethered to digital technology 24/7 is not just a habit, it is essential to the way they construct and manage their friendships and social lives” (ICMPA, n.d.). These confessions are telling us that the domestication of digital media and platform services is not going the way an agentic theory of domestication would have predicted. The anguish, the helplessness and the inability to resist and take control over the imperatives and impulses stemming from the very availability of these media stand out in the young respondents’ accounts. Among other things, this comes to show that the third, the social articulation is a very different beast from the earlier two highlighted by researchers. Doing domestication with regard to it, consequently, is a very different ball game. Zuboff’s analysis of the transformed social and economic landscape in the age of “surveillance capitalism” leads her to define a suggestive metaphorical figure – the Big Other. The Big Other is “a new universal architecture.” It is a “ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit.” Unlike the Panopticon and the Big Brother that came to symbolize centralized power at earlier stages of modernity, Zuboff argues, there are no places of escape outside of the totalizing glance and embrace of the Big Other: habitats inside and outside the human body are saturated with data and produce radically distributed opportunities for observation, interpretation, communication, influence, prediction, and ultimately modification of the totality of action. Unlike the centralized power of mass society, there is no escape from Big Other. There is no place to be where the Other is not. (Zuboff, 2015: 81–82) If we are to heed Zuboff’s warning, the home space is no exception. An honest look would reveal that with the triumph of the third articulation, the Big Other has entered the home. It is no longer a place that can be ordered by the moral economies and choices espoused by the household community, or at the very least, it is becoming increasingly difficult to order it according to these choices. Big Other has snuck through the cracks in the wall created by digital media, and is already hard at work enticing young girls to crave the makeup and body shape of lifestyle influencers and mommy bloggers to objectify their babies in dozens of photos in exchange for cereal coupons. Glimpses of the kind of “behavioral modification” that according to Zuboff is performed by the Big Other in all spheres of human life were already caught by communication researchers such as Joseph Turow (2011), whose “Daily You” is a shorthand for manipulated consumer behaviour with respect to both information and material goods. It emerges as a result of massive data gathering, profiling and channelling of choices and purchase decisions down the tracks determined by the calculations of 259

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marketing departments and media buying firms. But this image also implies a respective transformation of consumers’ personal identities and worldviews. Immersed in the daily flow of stimuli that are intended specifically for them and based on how marketers and providers see their needs and values, they are gradually entrenched into predetermined social positions and lifestyles and doomed to predictably reproduce those for the pleasure and convenience of the agents of the Big Other. In broader and broader ways, computer-generated conclusions about who we are affect the media content – the streams of commercial messages, discount offers, information, news, and entertainment each of us confronts. Over the next few decades the business logic that drives these tailored activities will transform the ways we see ourselves, those around us, and the world at large. Governments too may be able to use marketers’ technology and data to influence what we see and hear. (Turow, 2011: 10) In this context, Turow observes, “the rhetoric of consumer power begins to lose credibility” (2011: 10). And so does, I would argue, the agentic edge of domestication. Domestication in the sense of more or less mindful selection of devices, sources, texts and social partners to engage with in the course of daily media consumption does go on. But the moral economy of the household and the reflexive project of the self have been pushed aside as its main driving forces. Big Other’s gentle (or not) algorithm-aided nudging and shoving takes precedence in defining the direction of our gaze. It pulls up the images on our screens, connects us with “people [we] may know,” movies we may like, and points us to communities and corners of the Web where our views are shared and reinforced. Indeed, it is our own online searches, likes, shares and comments, or as Turow (2011: 10) details, our “measurable physical acts such as clicks, swipes, mouseovers, and even voice commands” providing the starting point. So, in a way Big Other is giving us a hand in the domestication of the bottomless abundance of apps, content and connections available online. In its language, this is called “personalization” and “customization.” However, this aid is not unselfish, and very soon it stops being on our own terms. The Big Other is domesticating the domesticators. And this is a problem because like profiling, domestication entails discrimination – whether it is performed by us when we choose to avoid certain content and connections, or by the marketing algorithms that decide to show us certain things, sights and news and withhold others based on our use history. Regardless, this kind of algorithmic domestication narrows our field of vision and thus, our current and future opportunities for engagement and action. The dubious domestication qua discrimination practices Turow’s pioneering investigation describes do not stop at the border of the market for consumer goods. They spill into the business of serving news and hence the intake of public and political information: A firm called The Daily Me already sells an ad and news personalization technology to online periodicals. If a Boston Globe reader who reads a lot of soccer sports news visits a Dallas Morning News site, the Daily Me’s technology tells the Dallas Morning News to serve him soccer stories. (Turow, 2011: 13) At the time Turow was doing the research for his 2011 book, he noted that the tailoring of news and entertainment was less advanced, but it was “clearly under way” (Turow, 2011: 14). Only a few years later, an app called “This Is Your Digital Life” designed to collect 260

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data for the psychological profiling of millions of Facebook users was set in motion. These “psychographic” profiles were later sold to Cambridge Analytica and allowed it to offer narrowly targeted political advertising to be fed to finely profiled types of users in order to align election-related information content with their personality traits and needs (Hu, 2020; Lapowsky, 2019). In its own way, the notorious company was helping election news recipients and potential voters to domesticate the content peddled by the different political contestants. To what extent the victories of Brexit, Ted Cruise and Donald Trump can be attributed to this behavioural modification is a matter of ongoing debate. One thing is clear: there are two forces at work in a grand-scale manipulation like this. On the one side are the efforts of political propagandists to attune information to users’ preferences based on data-fuelled profiling. On the other sits these users’ own “collusion” (Silverstone, 2002), i.e., their willingness to accept such cushy, easily digestible, personalized content and never leave their ideological comfort zone. As the revelations about the role of Cambridge Analytica in a number of political events were popping up in various publications, Carole Cadwalladr, one of the investigative journalists who reported on the scandal, reached this conclusion: “Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world” (2016). Cass Sunstein, author of #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media would certainly agree, based on his observations of the digital media environment more broadly: When people use Facebook to see exactly what they want to see, their understanding of the world can be greatly affected. Your Facebook friends might provide a big chunk of the news on which you focus, and if they have a distinctive point of view, that’s the point of view you will see most. (2017: 14) Reflecting on the “Daily Me” vision set forth by Nicolas Negroponte (1995) at the dawn of digital culture (and hype), Sunstein points out the positive and negative aspects of a news package that is tailored specifically to the particular individual. People, he observes, would be able to give in to their natural “homophily” and bond exclusively with others who see the same or similar news content. After all, digital media offer us the affordance to selectively cultivate our interpersonal relationships via strategic pursuit, sifting and engagement with social contacts. Applied to our dealings with the public world, this selectivity – of sources of information and argument, be they news media, trending hashtags or our friends’ Facebook and Instagram profiles – produces a logical consequence. We will be further and further exposed to viewpoints and ideas related to public issues that we are already inclined to believe and agree with. Proponents of the contrary and their arguments will be filtered out and we will be sure to sink deeper and deeper into unbending convictions that are partial in one way or another. This is what Sunstein termed an “echo chamber,” but we could also see it as an outcome of a completed domestication. We get to live in “different political universes” like science fiction’s “parallel worlds” (Sunstein, 2017: 13), which threatens to make us unable to speak to fellow-citizens across divides. What adds an even darker side to the story is that we are not making these “Daily Me” packages ourselves. Others are curating their content for us (ibid.). Helpful agents of customization and personalization eagerly assist our domestication endeavour. The Big Other capitalizes on the conservative aspects of domestication to commercially profile, entrench, segregate and polarize the population. This may be beneficial to the padding of comfortable isolated niches of predictable consumption and political homophily. It is, however, as Sunstein has argued, destructive to public life in a democracy. 261

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In a democracy deserving the name, citizens should frequently be exposed to views they did not specifically ask for. They should be able to share “a wide range of common experiences” with their fellow-citizens, because if that does not happen, they soon would not be able to understand each other and address social problems together (Sunstein, 2017: 16).

Domestication and morality At the time his critical recapitulation of the domestication concept was published, Roger Silverstone was working on the topic of media and morality. This work can be read as another powerful appeal to raise our analytical sight above the household and its moral economy and recognize the role of the media in the construction of a shared public world. Silverstone (2007) compared the “mediated space of appearance” to the classic polis. Hence, he proposed the term “mediapolis.” It is the “mediated public space where contemporary political life increasingly finds its place, both at national and global levels, and where the materiality of the world is constructed through (principally) electronically communicated public speech and action” (Silverstone, 2007: 31). Via this mediated space of appearance, Silverstone contends, we learn about those who are and who are not like us. The mediapolis emerges in the interaction between human beings and presumably, can also dissipate in the absence of such interactions. The mediapolis is fragmented as different people navigate it differently (i.e., it is subject to domestication, customization and personalization) and as a result, those who consistently watch, say, television stations of different ideological leanings and agendas will end up inhabiting different social worlds. Yet, this mediated space of appearance is the only one that makes possible “the visibility of the other, of the stranger as well as the neighbour, the capacity for dialogue and the manifestation of discord, the presence of alternative views and the struggle for an audience…” (Silverstone, 2007: 32). Importantly, the mediapolis does not replace the world of experience, however, it frames it in commonly understandable terms and by virtue of this, it makes collective action possible. It should be easy to imagine what giving in to the “personalized engines of content” (Turow, 2013: 20) and social connections set in motion by the Big Other would do to the mediapolis. A completed domestication deprived of a “moral itch” to learn more beyond what is immediately practical and self-serving, to meet strangers and hear the arguments of opponents would spell the collapse of the mediated space of appearance into innumerable bubbles and chambers incapable of conversing and acting with one another. It is questionable if it would be possible to maintain a democracy deserving the name under such conditions. Silverstone saw media audience members and users each as an “active, and more or less skilled, participant in the management of her or his own media culture in the mediapolis” (2006b: 107). But how are these participants to deal with the wild jungle of texts, sources and other people and institutions that is intruding into their domestic space and everyday life through different media? How are they to respond to the siren calls of the digital devices strewn across the domestic scene? What would be the sovereign reference point and touchstone that would help them launch a strategy of resistance and a struggle for control over their everyday lives and civic commitments? The moral economy of the household is broken down into individuated pieces. The reflexive project of the self is circularly intertwined with the signage displayed by the media themselves, and hence not so reflexive any longer when it comes to these same media. Silverstone is not blind to the challenges posed by the aggressive advance of the Big Other, but he does not rush to admit the capitulation of the 262

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human agent. He sees the moral responsibility to the small Other as such a reference point. I use the notion of the small Other here as a counterpoint to the Big Other conceptualized by Zuboff (2015, 2019). The small Other has had an established presence in moral philosophy and ethical phenomenology (Bauman, 1993). She or he is simply the other human being with whom we collaboratively construct a shared social and political world. The small Other is the fellow-citizen and fellow-member of the mediapolis. Agentic choice lies in the ways we relate to her – in the recognition of her existence and the respect for her otherness. Should we follow the path of algorithmic domestication offered to us by the Big Other, the small Other who is unlike us, who holds different views, pursues different goals and espouses different lifestyles would remain outside the scope of our awareness and concern. For such awareness and concern to remain possible, the domestication of the social connections the media bring into our private spaces needs to stay incomplete. We can claim back our agency by facing our responsibility to the distant small Other who falls out of the purview of our domesticated screens and social graphs and by mindfully reaching out to allow them to enter this otherwise comfortably cocooned space. Thus, following Silverstone, I argue that we should recognize the agency of media users not as some sort of magic power emanating from the squirming of everyday practices, but as a moral responsibility carried by these users to stay aware, vigilant and active in making sure that their horizon of meaning does not collapse into the familiar and readily acceptable. Agency involves taking stock of and questioning the works of the technologies of the Self that shape one’s reflexive self-project with special attention to the media. Agentic domestication in that sense comprises a critical attention to the effects that our profound dependency on the media has for becoming who we are and for where we stand in the mediapolis. Not only when a crisis, a scandal or an academic study shocks us into looking at ourselves from that perspective, but a constant vigilance and taking responsibility for what kind of person and citizen we emerge as from underneath that influence. Silverstone’s later work points to yet another way of thinking about agency in domestic spaces. It is his notion of hospitality – to the stranger and the visitor. For him, hospitality mandates “not just to let the other speak but the requirement that the stranger should be heard” (Silverstone, 2007: 139). Silverstone’s call for hospitality is mostly oriented towards media institutions that should be ready to open their agendas to the cultural and ideological Other. However, his invitation certainly addresses the audience/user participant in the mediapolis and asks her to open her private realm for the journalistically represented or computer-communicated visitation by this cultural and ideological Other: There has to be space for the unbidden and the uninvited, both in the material as well as the mediated world. The journey towards unconditional hospitality involves respect for those who speak in public space, and a willingness to grant, without qualification, a right of audience to those who would otherwise be beyond the pale. (2006b: 142) So, maybe the way to ensure that domestication never fully succeeds, is to maintain hospitality to the small Other. That power and that agency remain within our reach. Hospitality would ensure that the door of the home is always ajar and amenable to the visitation of otherness. The moral agency at play here is not simply the moral economy of the household narrowly understood and defensively mobilized, but a morality of a wider scope. Silverstone calls it a “thick morality” – one that transcends the face-to-face and engages with otherwise distant humanity (Silverstone, 2006: 246). 263

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Conclusion: does domestication need politics? As I write this text, the television set in my home flashes the images and transmits the sounds of the streets of the Canadian capital, Ottawa, clogged with heavy trucks blasting their horns. This is the “freedom convoy” protesting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates imposed by the government. The towering tractor-trailers, the signs and particularly the horns want one thing above all – to be heard. However, several levels of government refuse to talk with the protestors; protestors, for their part, meet politicians, journalists and medical experts with mistrust; academics are pulling their hair struggling to figure out how we got to that point. My hypothesis is that although the truckers and those of us who are now shaking our heads at their actions domesticated the same media devices in similar ways, we domesticated the symbols and the social networks that these devices connect us to very differently. We all most likely changed the channels, obeyed the algorithmic nudges, followed like-minded others on Twitter, checked friendly profiles on Facebook, unfriended, i.e., slammed the door in the face of strangers and opponents. Both sides of this controversy did that diligently and as a result, we ended up living in different social universes. By virtue of these choices, we let our mediapolis, and eventually our polis, fall apart. We seldom showed hospitality or allowed visitation by the distant and unfamiliar small Other, and gradually lost our capacity for dialogue across difference. This is of course a moral failure, but it also betrays a lack of political responsibility. We fail both as ethical humans and as politically responsible citizens when we allow defensive domestication to enclose us in its circle. We lose sight of the Big Other and of all those circular processes that domesticate us via our media. We may not be “sheep” as those loud antivaxxers allege, but we are not sovereign agents either. Because the mediapolis is a function of our participation in it, when we fail in all these ways, we take it down with us. And no democracy that deserves the name can possibly survive without a robust mediapolis. Therefore, I argue that domestication needs politics. In a technological and corporate environment where the squirming and the resistances driven by the moral economy of the household are no match to the Big Other, in an age when the media bring the public world continuously and uncompromisingly into our private spheres, the right response is not to domesticate the public, but to look at our private choices through a political lens. Including at the ways we chose to domesticate media with all the articulations they, as well as we, are responsible for.

References Bakardjieva, M. (2005) Internet society. The internet in everyday life, London: Sage. Bakardjieva, M. and Gaden, G. (2012) ‘Web 2.0. Technologies of the self,’ Philosophy and Technology, 25 (3), 399–413. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0032–9. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern ethics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. (2006) The domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Cadwalladr, C. (2016) ‘Google is not “just” a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world,’ The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2016, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google-frames-shapes-and-distorts-how-we-see-world. Douglas, M. (1991) ‘The idea of home: a kind of space,’ Social Research, 58 (1), 289–307. https://www. jstor.org/stable/40970644. Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning technology, London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1988) ‘Technologies of the self,’ in L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: Univ. Massachusetts Press, 16–49. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Domesticating the domesticators Hartmann, M. (2006) ‘The triple articulation of ICTs. Media as technological objects, symbolic environments and individual texts,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), The domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 80–102. Horton, D. and Wohl, R. (1956) ‘Mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance,’ Psychiatry, 19, 215–229. Hu, M. (2020) ‘Cambridge Analytica’s black box,’ Big Data & Society, 7 (2). https://doi.org/ 10.1177/2053951720938091. ICMPA (n.d.) International center for media & the public agenda: the world UNPLUGGED, University of Maryland, available at: https://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/. Lapowsky, I. (2019) ‘How Cambridge Analytica sparked the great privacy awakening,’ Wired, 17 March, available at: https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-facebook-privacy-awakening/. Livingstone, S. (2001) ‘Children and their changing media environment,’ in S. Livingstone and M. Bovill (eds.), Children and their changing media environment: a European comparative study, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 307–334. Livingstone, S. (2007) ‘On the material and the symbolic: Silverstone’s double articulation of research traditions in new media studies,’ New Media & Society, 9 (1), 16–24. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444807075200. Marwick, A. (2013) Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age, New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital, New York: Knopf. Radway, J. (1984) Reading the romance: women, patriarchy, and popular literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shannon, C.E. and Weaver, W. (1949) The mathematical theory of communication, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (2002) ‘Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life,’ New Literary History, 33, 761–780. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating domestication: reflections on the life of a concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), The domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R. (2007) Media and morality: on the rise of the mediapolis, Cambridge: Polity. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the house- hold,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming technologies. Media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, 15–31. Sunstein, C.R. (2017) #Republic: divided democracy in the age of social media, Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Thompson, J. (1995) The media and modernity: a social theory of the media, Cambridge: Polity Press. Turkle, S. (2011) Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other, New York: Basic Books. Turow, J. (2011) The daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Turow, J. (2013) ‘How should we think about audience power in the digital age?’ in A.N. Valdivia and E. Scharrer (eds.), The international encyclopedia of media studies: media effects/media psychology, first edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 1–24. Zuboff, S. (2015) ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,’ Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75–89. Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, New York: Public Affairs.

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18 COUNTER-DOMESTICATION THROUGH INFRASTRUCTURAL INVERSION User empowerment in digital platforms Jo Pierson Domestication coming to terms with digital platforms Technological tools for mediated communication and interaction have undergone a major digital transformation, in line with the long-term changes investigated in media and communication research. This has led to new and revised theories of the role of digital media in social change (Schroeder, 2018). In this way, van Dijck, Poell and de Waal (2018: 2) described how platformization has led to the platform society, emphasizing the inextricable relation between digital platforms and societal structures, where both mutually articulate each other (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). Despite the long tradition in domestication research, there has been scant scholarly investigation on how the domestication framework can offer critical insights on digital platforms, in particular given the role and impact of data capture (Agre, 1994) and dataveillance (Clarke, 1988) by these data-driven media technologies in everyday life. The digital transition from one-to-many mass media (like television and newspapers) and one-to-one interpersonal media (like telephone and postal mail) to digital platforms has led to “mass self-communication” (Castells, 2009). Jensen and Helles (2017) have defined this as communicative practices based on many-to-many and many-to-one communication, with the latter referring to the (meta) data trails that users leave behind and that serve to structure their future communication. Hence, the boundaries between mass and interpersonal communication have fundamentally blurred, which has led to the folding of their respective roles of “curator” and “ facilitator” (Pierson, 2022). In that way, digital platforms for mass self-communication can present themselves as trustworthy “neutral” facilitators, while simultaneously curating mediated communication through algorithms according to their commercial interests. In order to investigate mass self-communication, we therefore need to merge social- cultural perspectives on media with a techno-economic understanding (van Dijck, 2013: 28). The folding of the curator and facilitator roles and henceforth the need for integrating socio-cultural and techno-economic perspectives on media are illustrated by the evolution of messenger apps. These apps, like other forms of intermediary platforms for mediated communication, have become accepted and embedded in everyday life. Their indispensability 266

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co-determines how digital platforms seep into the basic functional areas of private life like social networking, but also news and commentaries, entertainment and the practical organization of daily life (Zerdick et al., 2000). This creates a situation where users domesticate and trust these platforms to benefit themselves and society, discouraging them from questioning any potential alternative rationale of advertising and/or surveillance. In other words, platforms are only presented and perceived as social media for human “connectedness,” while they should also be seen as “connective media” based on automated “connectivity” (Couldry & van Dijck, 2015). The latter is defined as the engineered, curated and steered connectedness (i.e., activity of creating social connections) that draws people to the platform to create and consume (user-generated) content, advertising and data (through algorithms) (van Dijck, 2013: 12). The question remains what are the broader societal consequences of this mutual articulation of digital platforms and society, given the folding of the curator and facilitator role of these data-driven media technologies in the platform society. A critical perspective on the transformed role of these media technologies requires that: “(…) attention is drawn to the potential of innovations in technologies to be associated with people’s empowerment and their disempowerment, depending on the extent to which they are able to master or control the innovation process” [emphasis added] (Mansell, 2012: 37). We therefore need to take a closer look if and to what extent users are able to master data-driven and algorithm-based media technologies, which will engender empowerment or disempowerment. Empowerment has been defined as the process of strengthening individuals, by which they get a grip on their situation and environment, through the acquisition of more control, sharpening their critical awareness and the stimulation of participation (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988). Empowerment in the context of digital platforms: “(…) is dependent on knowledge of how mechanisms operate and from what premise, as well as on the skills to change them” [emphasis added] (van Dijck, 2013: 17). However, the user becomes disempowered from the moment the data-driven media technology is sufficiently domesticated and trusted to obfuscate its operating mechanisms and interests, thereby exploiting the loss of user control for dataveillance by commercial and government institutions, i.e., leading to unquestioning acceptance of extensive capturing, processing and (re)use of (personal) data. When data-driven media technologies become an “obligatory passage point” (Latour, 1992: 158) for interaction and communication in everyday life, users have little meaningful agency – especially from a social perspective – to oppose their data from being processed in an opaque and uncontrollable way (Pierson, 2022). The vulnerability resulting from this type of user disempowerment entails a double-sided perspective: external and internal (Pierson, 2012). The external side relates to “exposure” or the structural dimensions of vulnerability exposure, while the internal side looks at “coping capacities” or the action of becoming aware of and possibly overcome the negative effects (Bohle, 2001). In order to understand user disempowerment from the perspective of vulnerability exposure and coping capacities, I situate and centre the materiality of data-driven media technologies for mass self-communication by integrating perspectives of domestication research in media and communication studies and infrastructure studies in science and technology studies (STS). Several authors have already indicated how media and communication studies can definitely learn from STS and vice versa (Boczkowski & Lievrouw, 2008; Gillespie, Boczkowski, & Foot, 2014; Quet, 2014; Star & Bowker, 2002; Wyatt, 2003). I start from media and communication studies, foremost domestication concepts that discuss how (digital) media are accepted and trusted by users in everyday life, based on double articulation by having both a cultural and a technological form. I further discuss how disempowerment might 267

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happen through exposure in the case of domestication of data-driven media technologies. This is complemented with a corporate-computational perspective, looking at the role of data-driven “infrastructures” mediating social interaction and communication (see also Berker, this volume). Here, I mainly build on insights from the subfield of infrastructure studies, creating a bridge to the domain of STS. The latter field is relevant, given its focus on the mutual shaping between (media) technologies and society. Particularly, I discuss how people might be able to cope with domesticated digital platforms. For this, I use the socio-technical notion of infrastructural inversion as a possibly (partial) way of coping, that enables “counter-domestication” of media and technologies. This can be seen as a kind of gateway to enhance user awareness and empowerment by also disentangling private-public motives for data processing.

Disempowerment through unaware data subjecthood Digital platforms increasingly mediate everyday life, while users gradually become one with their mediated environment. The societal consequences of this evolution have already been highlighted by several scholars in media and communication studies and beyond, in particular through notions like “mediation” (Mansell, 2012; Silverstone, 2006), “media life” (Deuze, 2012), “mediatization” (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), “deep mediatization” (Hepp, 2020), “digital condition” (Stalder, 2018) and “implicit everyday religion” (Latzer, 2022). However, the way that media technologies as artefacts are appropriated and taken for granted has been part of media and communication research for decades. It was Raymond Williams in his seminal work, “Television – Technology and cultural form” (1974), who merged technological and cultural perspectives in order to critically investigate how television technology became an essential part of everyday culture, while forcefully rejecting technological determinism. His perspective is multi-scalar by embedding micro and macro perspectives on how these media technologies take shape, as eloquently described by Roger Silverstone: (…) Williams is at pains to point out the distinctiveness and the novelty of television, above all, perhaps, in its directness and its closeness to the ordinariness of everyday life. Television offers a technologically and institutionally discrete form of cultural framing and expression, one which can only be understood in situ, as it were, as in turn an expression of wider social, political and economic forces. (Williams, 1974/2003: x) It was also Roger Silverstone who later, in the early 1990s, together with other cultural studies scholars further elaborated on the fusion of media technologies and everyday life, proposing the notion of “domestication” (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1990). This perspective focuses on the critical role of media technology in everyday life by also bringing together macro and micro views (Silverstone, 1994). In this way, “domestication” is defined as the gradual process by which (digital) media artefacts are consumed and “tamed” within the socio-cultural context of everyday life (Lie & Sorensen, 1996; Pierson, 2005). Through that process, the domesticated media technologies disappear into everyday life practices. They are not perceived as (savage) technologies anymore, but offer “ontological security” as natural extensions of personal interactions and social communication. Silverstone applies Giddens’ (1990) notion of “ontological security” in the context of media technologies (like television), stressing the necessary interrelationship between ontological security and trust. They are both the product of active physical, cognitive and affective 268

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engagement in the events and patterns and relationships of everyday life (Silverstone, 1993: 577–578). The transparent, familiar and predictable character of domesticated media technologies, based on ontological security and trust, makes it difficult for users to reflect on them, and hence to critique how they operate and the role they have. The latter is very problematic when epistemic trust is “at the heart of a socio-technical and ideological power shift in open democratic societies” as indicated by van Dijck (2021: 327), when we are moving from an institutional-professional model of trust towards a corporatecomputational model of trust. The former model of trust is based on human-made decisions and rules of power by media institutions and professionals that can be held publicly accountable for governance. In the case of professionals, this refers, for example, to independent researchers and their peer-reviewed methodologies and public media journalists, whose editorial decisions and data policies need to be open to public scrutiny (van Dijck, Poell, & de Waal, 2018: 154). People are willing to consider this type of mediated communication and knowledge as trustworthy and beneficial for society. Public trust is thereby established by the possibility of the general public to continuously assess the trustworthiness and responsibility, based on long-established societal values and professional norms. This changes with the transition to a corporate-computational model of trust in digital platforms in the age of mass self-communication, which does not offer the same affordances and guarantees for public trust. Here the configuration of trust is in principle not formally attached to democratically accountable media institutions and professional expertise, but is predicated on personalized data flows, algorithmic computation and proprietary business models, whose obscure dynamics produce opaque rules of power. The dominant corporate platforms might try to weaken or undermine the power of institutions by bypassing their systems of trust traditionally anchored in professional routines to ensure common knowledge. For a long time, the dominant – mainly American – digital platform companies that mediate communication have claimed they cannot be held accountable, as they should be considered as merely facilitating technology companies rather than curating media companies. By positioning themselves as “neutral” technological intermediaries and being protected by the US Communications Decency Act (Section 230) and the EU e-Commerce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC), they have been able to decline most of the responsibility for what happens on their platforms for a long time (Gillespie, 2010). When these data-driven media technologies are domesticated, they gradually “sink” into the background of everyday life based on ontological security and the corporatecomputational model of trust. If this process is left unquestioned, people are then becoming increasingly exposed through unaware data subjecthood, which can lead to fundamental disempowerment with loss of data privacy and individual autonomy (Susser, Roessler & Nissenbaum, 2019). Data subjecthood or the situation of being a data subject can be seen as a key charatistic for being exposed to “data colonialism” which Couldry and Mejias (2019) have described as a new form of colonialism that is appropriating human life through its conversion into data. They describe how the disempowerment and degradation of life happens in two ways: by exposing life continuously to monitoring and surveillance, and by making human life a direct input to capitalist production (Couldry & Mejias, 2019: xix). However, by emphasizing their social role and by playing down their data monetization interests, digital platforms (like social media) appear to be media that just facilitate social interactions and are henceforth easily domesticated, just like other media in the past. The true capitalist motives of data capture are deliberately obfuscated, as explained by Zuboff (2019) in her discussion of the emergence of surveillance capitalism. With the obfuscated and complex character of data commodification, it is not obvious for everyday users to become aware and 269

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understand how these platforms really operate and particularly how they differ from one another in terms of their monetization and data strategy (Heyman & Pierson, 2015). And even if people are aware of this, they mostly have no choice but had to accept this, because otherwise they cannot use the “free” service. All this exacerbates the imbalance of power between sorters and sortees, i.e., “those who are able to extract and use un-anticipatable and inexplicable (…) findings and those who find their lives affected by the resulting decisions” (Andrejevic, 2014: 1683). We use the example of messaging apps to illustrate how ontological security, linked to the corporate-computational model of trust, takes shape from a user perspective and how this can have disempowering consequences of exposure through unaware data subjecthood. “Messaging apps” or “chat apps” are a form of personal media for mass self- communication that typically enable de-institutional and de-professional content through symmetrical mediated interaction (Lüders, 2008). In particular “mobile messenger apps” are currently one of the most popular digital platforms with almost 91% of internet users worldwide using this type of apps in late 2020 (Ceci, 2022). By far, the largest part of these messaging apps is advertising-driven, with Meta Platforms Inc. taking up the largest share. Recent figures show that 3.6 billion people worldwide use at least one of the company’s core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger) each month (Statista Research Department, 2022). Originally, people were accustomed to use texting via SMS (or Short Message System) as a convenient way of text-based communicating via telecommunication network infrastructures (Fibæk Bertel & Ling, 2016). Digital platforms then introduced applications to replace this type of telecom connection by a datafied over-the-top internet connection (McGoogan, 2016). This happened gradually through the rising popularity of messaging apps that send messages via an internet infrastructure protocol instead of the wireless telecom infrastructure protocol. This shift to datafied connections has led to disempowerment as it helps to leverage the intense everyday use of these messaging apps for increased (meta) data capturing (and processing) for commercial and surveillance aims. As these messaging apps tend to emphasize their social role, while playing down their connective function for the monetization of data, they appear to be media that just facilitate social interactions and are henceforth easily domesticated. However, the gradual domestication and the institutional-professional model of trust of these messaging apps by platform users as essential tools for social interaction and communication have run parallel with the strategic market-driven approach of designing and extending these media technologies, leading to a corporate-computational model of trust. Nieborg and Helmond (2019) have observed how most substantial recent changes in social media and messaging apps (like Facebook Messenger) have been taking place “under the hood.” Instead of focusing on the singular, user-facing media side of social network sites, they explain how these digital platforms for mediated communication (like Facebook) have been continuously making adjustments to their advertising-driven infrastructure. They particularly emphasize: (…) the much bigger, invisible technical dimensions of the platform, as well as its business dimension, which together dictate how the platform is transforming over time and how it interacts with other inhabitants in the wider ecosystem of ‘connective media’. (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019: 3) These technical and business dimensions thereby make up the corporate- computational model of trust. In that regard it is important to analyse the expansion of digital platforms, 270

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like messaging apps, into the mobile ecosystem. Social media platforms need to be identified as “connective media” (van Dijck, 2013), based on “data infrastructures” as socio-technical systems for the creation, processing and distribution of data (Gray et al., 2016). In a similar way, Alaimo and Kallinikos (2017) argue that these digital platforms are performing “infrastructural, backstage data work,” i.e., encoding social activities into data for further processing (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2017: 175), which is central to their advertising-driven business model (Srnicek, 2016). Nieborg and Helmond (2019) frame proliferation of mobile messaging apps as front-end user-facing “platform instances” that distribute and perform this type of data work, based on mobile messaging among end-users and interactions between end-users, advertisers, institutions, content developers and businesses. However, users do not experience these messaging apps as sophisticated platform instances for data work, but trust them as ordinary basic tools for social interaction and communication. This demonstrates how trust among platform users, based on a corporate-computational model, can establish disempowerment as outlined by van Dijck (2013), i.e., by obfuscating how and from what premise the system actually operates, and thereby eliding the entries for change. Therefore, in order to make people – at least temporarily – aware of their data subjecthood, we need to find a way for the so-called “counter-domesticating” digital platforms. In order to address the latter, we look at the STS notion of “infrastructural inversion” as a potential empowering intervention for making platform users aware of their trust and entanglement with digital platforms in everyday life.

Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures As explained in the former section, users that have domesticated data-driven media technologies are most often unaware of their data subjecthood. In this way, people become more vulnerable and disempowered, because the digital platforms can exploit domestication for opaque dataveillance, possibly at the expense of public interest values like data privacy and autonomy. In order to cope with this type of increased exposure to data colonialism, we need to find ways of making people more aware of the entangled data infrastructures. The latter refers to how – through domestication – data-driven media technologies simultaneously constitute the social and material infrastructures in everyday life (Plantin & de Seta, 2019), highlighting the role and significance of the materiality and the technological perspective on media. Earlier work has identified how social infrastructure and corporate-computational infrastructures are being entangled (Pierson, 2021). The social infrastructure is created through the appropriation of media technologies, while the corporate-computational infrastructure is based on the integration of business and technological decisions and motives. Both types of infrastructure are consciously rolled out and strategically entangled. The latter is facilitated and embedded in everyday life through domestication. This approach starts from an infrastructural perspective, joining the “infrastructural turn” in media and communication studies and internet studies (Hesmondhalgh, 2021) which focuses on “the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world” (Plantin & de Seta, 2019: 1; Sandvig, 2013). Plantin et al. have also framed this as the “infrastructuralization” of digital platforms, happening in parallel with the “platformization” of infrastructure: “Articulating the two perspectives highlights the tensions arising when media environments increasingly essential to our daily lives (infrastructures) are dominated by corporate entities (platforms)” (Plantin et al., 2016: 3). Similar to other 271

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key infrastructures in society like electricity, railroad and telephone, these platforms become essential for everyday social and cultural life (Plantin & de Seta, 2019). These computational infrastructuralized platforms are in the Western world for the largest part controlled by the five Big Tech American-based GAFAM companies (Google-Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook-Meta, Apple and Microsoft) (Plantin et al., 2016). The platform companies themselves also make claims of building a “social infrastructure” in their discourse (Rider & Murakami Wood, 2019; Zhang, 2020), becoming indispensable in social life (Edwards, 2003: 187). For example, in 2017, Facebook’s CEO posted an extensive manifesto announcing the changing direction from “connecting people” to building “social infrastructure” (Zuckerberg, 2017). This happened after a wave of criticism about the company’s alleged part in disinformation diffusion, possibly affecting the US elections and Brexit referendum. The platform was henceforth positioned as a ubiquitous and essential gateway, supporting “social” services, reflecting “Facebook’s changing ambition from being the ‘operating system of our laptops and desk-tops’ to becoming ‘the operating system of our lives’” (quoted in Nieborg & Helmond, 2019: 4; see also Vaidhyanathan, 2018: 99). By combining and co-opting notions like “social” and “infrastructure,” these social media technologies aim to appropriate the connotations of “neutral” utilities and infrastructure as non-commercial services for the common good and to normalize the commodification of connectivity and user data (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019: 16). This infrastructural perspective helps in reframing the study of data-driven media technologies and enables an “on the ground” insight into issues of trust, entanglement and (dis)empowerment in relation to the everyday uses. In that sense Star and Ruhleder (1996: 113–114) warn not to speak loosely of infrastructure and underestimate their socio-technical importance, especially when applied to powerful infrastructural tools on a wide scale, like the ecosystem of data-driven media technologies. They stress that “most importantly, such talk may obscure the ambiguous nature of tools and technologies for different groups, leading to de facto standardization of a single, powerful group’s agenda” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996: 114). For that reason, Star and Bowker indicate that a given infrastructure may have become transparent, but a number of significant political, ethical and social choices have without doubt been folded into its development - and this background needs to be understood if we are to produce thoughtful analyses of the nature of infrastructural work. (Star & Bowker, 2002: 153–154) Taking the infrastructural perspective on media and communication, we need to start from the basic attributes that typify infrastructures in society. According to Star and Ruhleder (1996), we should not so much ask “what is an infrastructure?” but more “when is an infrastructure?” The latter depends on several salient dimensions that emerge from an infrastructure, like embeddedness, transparency, ubiquity, dependence on human practices and invisibility (where it only becomes visible upon breakdown) (Star & Bowker, 2002). These elements make them powerful entities by submerging in practices of everyday life, leading to unconscious exposure to structural dimensions of user disempowerment. The risk of submerging in practices of everyday life is directly related to the domestication of digital platforms.

Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion Given the typical character of digital platforms as a social infrastructure to become domesticated and entangled into everyday life, it is neither straightforward to cope with unaware 272

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data subjecthood nor to make the disempowering consequences of these platforms explicit from the perspective of platform users. Nevertheless, as expressed by Star and Bowker, (…) the most important thing is for the user of the infrastructure to first become aware of the social and political work that the infrastructure is doing and then seek ways to modify it (locally or globally) as need be. (Star & Bowker, 2002: 160) But even if users do become aware of the social and political work the entangled social and corporate-computational infrastructures are doing, it might be very difficult to make sense of the organizations and data-driven systems that are widely seen as inscrutable in ways that even their creators do not fully understand (Burrell, 2016: 2–3) (cited in Ziewitz and Singh, 2021). This leads to the question of how people can effectively cope with a situation where they are not fully aware of their position and are themselves figuring out their situation vis-à-vis digital platforms as data-driven systems. We therefore need to find ways to reveal their lived experiences of this entanglement and to establish that critical awareness of the social and political work happening through the data subjecthood and the domesticated and trusted platforms (based on commercial interest and mechanisms). This can become a basis for coping with the condition, while opening up possibilities for social change and user empowerment.

Infrastructural inversion According to Ziewitz and Singh (2021), coping with unaware data subjecthood requires so-called “critical companionship.” Data subjects do not routinely think about their data subjecthood but may experience it in particular moments of breakdown and repair (Ziewitz & Singh, 2021). These particular moments for increased awareness of data subjecthood and thus of the underlying systems or infrastructures offer a way out. In STS, this has been indicated by the concept of “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker, 1994), which can be seen as a way for users of infrastructures to become aware of their invisible entanglement. The notion is understood as struggling against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear by operating as a gestalt switch, a figure-ground reversal “(…) to the mundane operational processes, i.e., the silent, unnoticed work that enables infrastructures to function rather than the work that infrastructures invisibly support” (Simonsen, Karasti & Hertzum, 2020: 121). Plantin and Punathambekar notice how media scholars have responded to Bowker and Star’s call for “infrastructural inversions” (Bowker & Star, 1999: 34), in order “to explore the world-making dimensions of media and communication systems that we have so far taken for granted.” (Plantin & de Seta, 2019: 166). This approach fits in the idea of not only applying infrastructural inversion as a conceptual-analytic strategy but also proposing this approach as an empirical- ethnographic strategy (Simonsen, Karasti & Hertzum, 2020: 122). Linking this idea back to media and communication studies, we can interpret Berelson’s (1948) study “What ‘Missing The Newspaper’ Means” as an early example that somehow prefigures the idea of infrastructural inversion in the context of media. He discussed the effects of the absence of newspapers on its readers during a big newspaper strike in New York, where he analysed why people missed the news and how people felt when they could not get their daily news. His findings showed how the reading of a newspaper had become a ceremonial and ritualistic or near-compulsive act for many people (Berelson, 1948). Our approach of applying infrastructural inversion as a critical empirical-ethnographic strategy for coping with unaware data subjecthood is not foremost oriented at finding and 273

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understanding digital disconnection as a research subject itself. The latter perspective has received increased attention in positivistic media psychology and social psychology research of mindful use and resistance towards digital media, feeding discussions about, for example, digital detox, slow media, media refusal and resistance through leaving social media. All these perspectives have in common that they belief that disconnection is possible, meaningful and necessary (Baym, Wagman & Persaud, 2020; Bucher, 2020). The set-up of our perspective is based on using digital disconnection as a way to get fundamental understanding of how social infrastructures take shape in their data subjecthood and the lived experiences of people regarding digital platforms. We are therefore foremost interested in digital disconnection as a means instead of a goal on itself. We use the notion of infrastructural inversion for gathering insights into the place, role and meaning these digital platforms have in the platform society. In that way, we follow the perspective of Bucher, building on Nancy’s (2000) concept of Being, to understand what it means to be many and that not using media can help with “(…) bringing the performative shaping of our algorithmic environments into the conscious foreground of experience” (Bucher, 2020: 6). With this approach we align ourselves also with Moe and Madsen, who aim “to spur media scholars to treat digital disconnection as part of broader cultural trends” (Moe & Madsen, 2021: 1584). In order to apply the notion of “infrastructural inversion” for digital platforms in media and communication studies, we explore the under-theorized field of wilful non-participation in digital platforms as a way for counter-domestication.

Active non-participation in digital platforms Applying infrastructural inversion for coping with unaware data subjecthood and passivity corresponds with the wilful or active non-participation in digital platforms as explored by Casemajor et al. (2015) in media and communication studies. They propose a form of mediated political action that can originate from conscious choices, instead of being understood as merely passivity or apathy. The notion of “active” refers to the actor’s intentions rather than results. The polarity active-passive has been traditionally used for cultural consumption in media studies, defining audiences in terms of their interpretative and/or productive capabilities (Ang, 1991; Morley, 1992). “Non-participation” aims to highlight the complex social, political and technical apparatuses that structure the exploitative conditions for digital participation through ubiquitous digital platforms. The active category of non-participation, illustrated by wilful collective and individual practices of productive refusal and resistance, is distinguished from a passive category of participation in which agency is taken away from the participant individual. Hence, it is through the so-called “active non-participation” that users may become aware of the “infrastructure” element within their “social infrastructure.” Only then, people will be able to be reflective on what kind of digital condition (Stalder, 2018) they are submerged in. Active non-participation becomes a privileged site for user empowerment in the sense of political wilful engagement and resistance aimed at being aware of data subjecthood and slowing down, disrupting, or disconnecting from platforms that implement regimes of surveillance, capture and recuperation (or co-option). In this way, the notion of active non-participation in digital platforms is very similar to the critical remit of domestication. Investigating the domestication of media technologies enables a critical understanding of how media practices on a micro level of everyday life enable awareness, reflection, questioning or even subversion of hegemonic strategies on a macro level. In that way, active non-participation can be reframed as a means to invert domestication to counter-domestication. The latter is then defined as actively establishing a situation of 274

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temporary or continued non-participation in the technologies to enable critical awareness of data subjecthood and more effective coping with possible adversarial consequences. Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion and non-participation thereby becomes a means to enable further reflection, meaningful assessment, skills and possibly even resistance against data capture and dataveillance. In that way, it fits in with the principle of making technology “seamful” (instead of “seamless”). This implies to make the elements, the workings and the outputs of the system visible and apparent (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Hildebrandt & O’Hara, 2020). When referring to the principle of seamfulness, Couldry and Mejias (2019) particularly outline the need to set boundaries to the continuous flow and processing of data, instead of prioritizing the seamless handling of data. Data transfers always need to be responsible and accountable to those affected by that data; otherwise, they should not proceed. Thus, this principle becomes “a potential tool for resisting social worlds that are less accountable, harsher, and characterized by ever higher levels of inequality, mistrust, and despair” (Couldry & Mejias, 2019: 200).

Multi-level public value approach beyond counter-domestication In this chapter, we substantiated why domestication – and particularly its opposite, counter-domestication – can offer critical insights into user empowerment/disempowerment when appropriating data-driven media technologies in everyday life. We explained how ontological security leads to unaware data subjecthood, which exposes people to data capture and dataveillance. This is based on misguided trust in digital platforms, especially as the institutional-professional model of trust is being replaced by the corporate-computational model of trust (e.g., messaging apps). In order to bring about a way to cope with this increased vulnerability, we suggest an approach of counter-domestication. The latter builds further on the STS notion of infrastructural inversion as a possible means of active non-participation in digital platforms against disempowering consequences, given that social and corporatecomputational infrastructures are being entangled while domesticating media technologies. However, we need to be aware that counter-domestication needs to be seen as a temporary means for empowerment. Just like temporary fasting helps us to become healthier or purposefully employing a white hat hacker discloses vulnerabilities in technological systems, counter-domestication cannot be seen as a continuous state. Especially as digital disconnection through counter-domestication can be a double-edged form of active nonparticipation, as “(…) the stakes of opting out of a platform can be higher for those who are more dependent on the processes of interaction and care that characterize social networking sites” (Casemajor et al., 2015: 862). In the end, people need to be able to confidently domesticate essential tools for social communication in everyday life, without all being fully responsible themselves for avoiding inappropriate data flows and the adverse consequences of data-driven media technologies. We therefore oppose the idea that late modern technological societies can only be effectively and efficiently governed by shifting full responsibility from the state to the individual (Garland, 1996). The accountability for empowering citizens also needs to be taken up by other stakeholders in society, foremost the platform companies themselves and the authorities at different levels (through oversight bodies), as is also the case in other domains (like food safety and cybercrime). A holistic critical approach towards data subjecthood in digital platforms and the related benefits and vulnerabilities this engenders, needs to be situated on three interrelated levels: socio-legal arrangements, technological artefacts and communication practices by people. These levels follow the three-way perspective of Lievrouw and Livingstone 275

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(2002) when they define digital media as information and communication technologies with associated societal consequences. First, traditional socio-legal arrangements of regulation might not be able to catch up with the fast changes in technology. Therefore, a combination of public policy regulation with co-regulatory efforts is advisable to guarantee that public values are upheld in digital platforms. This approach fits in current data-related policy initiatives of the European Union (e.g., General Data Protection Regulation, Data Governance Act, Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act). This type of principles-based socio-technical policy aims to address the disempowering consequences of digital platforms, in a way which is reflective of their reach, their resources, their technical architecture and the risk such content is likely to pose for society (Brown & Marsden, 2013). Second, on the technological level, we need to be mindful of possible conflicts between public values (e.g., data privacy versus freedom of speech, in the case of addressing contentious content), especially when automated systems and artificial intelligence are involved. The latter demands a mandatory duty of care to make companies take more responsibility for balancing and safeguarding public values, by legally obliging them to be transparent and fully disclose their efforts to address public value issues. This focuses foremost on the architectural elements of digital platforms (e.g., algorithmic amplification of contentious content). Mandatory oversight by an independent regulator would then need to assess the effectiveness of procedural measures against a set of statutory objectives (Vermeulen, 2019). Finally, citizens would profit from an enhanced level of media and data literacy. The latter needs to be expanded with a deeper understanding of the material conditions and technological affordances of the proprietary control of personal data (Morozov, 2013; Naughton, 2017). The growing power asymmetry between those who generate data and those who convert these data into value, due to “infrastructuralization of platforms,” creates a need for “data infrastructure literacy,” defined as the “(…) the ability to account for, inventively respond to and intervene around the socio-technical infrastructures involved in the creation, extraction and analysis of data” (Gray, Gerlitz & Bounegru, 2018). It is through this way of extending literacy that citizens can act with agency in the face of data power (Kennedy, Poell & van Dijck, 2015). Our conclusion therefore complements the proposed approach by van Dijck, Nieborg and Poell (2019) on curbing platform power, as they urge to look beyond single regulatory frameworks and articulate a comprehensive set of principles to protect public values in the platform ecosystem. Only a systematic multi-level approach ensures that the corporatecomputational model of trust will not undermine public interest values in platform societies.

Bibliography Agre, P.E. (1994) ‘Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy,’ The Information Society, 10, 101–127. Alaimo, C. and Kallinikos, J. (2017) ‘Computing the everyday: Social media as data platforms,’ The Information Society, 33 (4), 175–191. Andrejevic, M. (2014) ‘The big data divide,’ International Journal of Communication, 8, 1673–1689. Ang, I. (1991) Desperately seeking the audience, London: Routledge. Baym, N.K., Wagman, K.B. and Persaud, C.J. (2020) ‘Mindfully scrolling: Rethinking Facebook after time deactivated,’ Social Media + Society, 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120919105 Berelson, B. (1948) ‘What ‘missing the newspaper’ means,’ in P. Lazarsfeld and F. Stanton (eds.), Communications research 1948–1949, New York: Harper, 111–129.

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Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion Boczkowski, P.J. and Lievrouw, L.A. (2008) ‘Bridging STS and communication studies: Scholarship on media and information technologies,’ in E.J. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch and J. Wajcman (eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd ed., Cambridge & London: MIT, 949–977. Bohle, H.-G. (2001) ‘Vulnerability article 1: Vulnerability and criticality,’ IHDP Newsletter Update, 4. Bowker, G. (1994) Science on the run: information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–1940, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting things out: classification and its consequences, Cambridge: MIT Press. Brown, I. and Marsden, C.T. (2013) Regulating code: good governance and better regulation in the information age, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bucher, T. (2020) ‘Nothing to disconnect from? Being singular plural in an age of machine learning,’ Media, Culture & Society, 42 (4), 610–617. Burrell, J. (2016) ‘How the machine “thinks”: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms,’ Big Data & Society, 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715622512 Casemajor, N., Couture, S., Delfin, M., Goerzen, M. and Delfanti, A. (2015) ‘Non-participation in digital media: Toward a framework of mediated political action,’ Media, Culture & Society, 37 (6), 850–866. Castells, M. (2009) Communication power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ceci, L. (2022) ‘Leading app categories worldwide Q3 2020,’ Statista, 27 April, available at: https:// www.statista.com/statistics/1252652/top-apps-categories-by-global-usage-reach (accessed on 27 April 2022). Clarke, R. (1988) ‘Information technology and dataveillance,’ Communications of the ACM, 31(5), 498–512. Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. (2017) The mediated construction of reality, Cambridge: Polity. Couldry, N. and Mejias, U.A. (2019) The costs of connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Couldry, N. and van Dijck, J. (2015) ‘Researching social media as if the social mattered,’ Social Media + Society, 1 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604174 Deuze, M. (2012) Media life, Cambridge: Polity. Edwards, P.N. (2003) ‘Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems,’ in T.J. Misa, P. Brey and A. Feenberg (eds.), Modernity and technology, Cambridge: MIT Press, 185–226. Fibæk Bertel, T. and Ling, R. (2016) ‘“It’s just not that exciting anymore”: The changing centrality of SMS in the everyday lives of young Danes,’ New Media & Society, 18 (7), 1293–1309. Garland, D. (1996) ‘The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society,’ The British Journal of Criminology, 36 (4), 445–471. Giddens, A. (1990) The consequences of modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Gillespie, T. (2010) ‘The politics of ‘platforms’,’ New Media & Society, 12 (3), 347–364. Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) (2014) Media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, Cambridge: MIT Press. Gray, J., Bounegru, L., Milan, S. and Ciuccarelli, P. (2016) ‘Ways of seeing data: Towards a critical literacy for data visualizations as research objects and research devices,’ in S. Kubitschko and A. Kaun (eds.), Innovative methods in media and communication research, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 227–251. Gray, J., Gerlitz, C. and Bounegru, L. (2018) ‘Data infrastructure literacy,’ Big Data & Society, 5 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786316 Hepp, A. (2020) Deep mediatization, London: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2021) ‘The infrastructural turn in media and internet research,’ in P. McDonald (ed.), The Routledge companion to media industries, London: Routledge, 132–142. Heyman, R. and Pierson, J. (2015) ‘Social media, delinguistification and colonization of lifeworld: Changing faces of Facebook,’ Social Media + Society, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115621933 Hildebrandt, M. and O’Hara, K. (2020) Life and the law in the Era of data-driven agency, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1–15. Jensen, K.B. and Helles, R. (2017) ‘Speaking into the system: Social media and many-to-one communication,’ European Journal of Communication, 32 (1), 16–25. Kennedy, H., Poell, T. and van Dijck, J. (2015) ‘Data and agency,’ Big Data & Society, 1–7. https://doi. org/10.1177/2053951715621569

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Jo Pierson Latour, B. (1992) ‘Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artefacts,’ in W.  Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping technology – building society: studies in sociotechnical change, Cambridge: MIT Press, 225–259. Latzer, M. (2022) ‘The digital trinity – controllable human evolution – implicit everyday religion,’ KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 74 (1), 331–354. Lie, M. and Sorensen, K.H. (1996) ‘Making technology our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life,’ in M. Lie and K.H. Sorensen (eds.), Making technology our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1–30. Lievrouw, L.A. and Livingstone, S. (2002) ‘Introduction: The social shaping and consequences of ICTs,’ in L.A. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (eds.), The handbook of new media, London: Sage, 1–15. Lüders, M. (2008) ‘Conceptualizing personal media,’ New Media & Society, 10 (5), 683–702. Mansell, R. (2012) Imagining the internet: communication, innovation, and governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGoogan, C. (2016, April 22) ‘End of SMS? WhatsApp and Facebook messages outstrip texts by three times,’ The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/22/end-ofsms-whatsapp-and-facebook-messages-outstrip-texts-by-thre/ Moe, H. and Madsen, O.J. (2021) ‘Understanding digital disconnection beyond media studies,’ Convergence, 27 (6), 1584–1598. Morley, D. (1992) Television, audiences and cultural studies, London: Routledge. Morozov, E. (2013) To save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism, First edition. New York: PublicAffairs. Nancy, J.-L. (2000) Being singular plural, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Naughton, J. (2017, October 29) ‘Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech,’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/29/why-we-needa-21st-century-martin-luther-to-challenge-church-of-technology-95-theses Nieborg, D.B and Helmond, A. (2019) ‘The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: Facebook Messenger as a platform instance,’ Media, Culture & Society, 41 (2), 196–218. Pierson, J. (2005) ‘Domestication at work in small businesses,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 205–226. Pierson, J. (2012) ‘Online privacy in social media: A conceptual exploration of empowerment and vulnerability,’ Communications & Strategies, Digiworld Economic Journal, 4thQ (88), 99–120. Pierson, J. (2021) ‘Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures: Addressing public values and trust in messaging apps,’ European Journal of Communication, 36 (4), 349–361. Pierson, J. (2022) ‘Media and communication studies, privacy and public values: Future challenges,’ in G.G. Fuster, R. van Brakel and P. De Hert (eds.), Research handbook on privacy and data protection law: values, norms and global politics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 175–195. Plantin, J.-C. and de Seta, G. (2019) ‘WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms,’ Chinese Journal of Communication, 12 (3), 257–273. Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P.N. and Sandvig, C. (2016) ‘Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook,’ New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Quet, M. (2014) ‘Research in brief: Pour une approche communicationnelle des enjeux scientifiques et techniques (Special issue: Bridging communication and science and technology studies),’ Canadian Journal of Communication, 39 (4), 651–662. Rider, K. and Murakami Wood, D. (2019) ‘Condemned to connection? Network communitarianism in Mark Zuckerberg’s “Facebook Manifesto”,’ New Media & Society, 21 (3), 639–654. Sandvig, C. (2013) ‘The internet as infrastructure,’ in W.H. Dutton (ed.), The Oxford handbook of internet studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 86–106. Schroeder, R. (2018) ‘Towards a theory of digital media,’ Information, Communication & Society, 21 (3), 323–339. Silverstone, R. (1993) ‘Television, ontological security and the transitional object,’ Media, Culture & Society, 15 (4), 573–598. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (2006) Media and morality: on the rise of the Mediapolis, Cambridge: Polity. Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical change and everyday life,’ in R. Mansell and R. Silverstone (eds.),

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19 ROOFLESSNESS RUNNING WILD? TAMING TECHNOLOGIES, TAMING OUR FEARS Maren Hartmann

“How Can Germans ‘Stay at Home’ If They Are Homeless? COVID-19 Is A Double Blow to People Living on the Streets” (Williamson, 2020). These and similar headlines appeared in the spring of 2020 in many local and international media outlets. The pandemic brought the plight of people living in the streets to the forefront. How can one ‘stay at home’ if home does not exist? Or rather: how can one ‘stay at home’ without a roof over one’s head? In many ways, this is a rhetorical question – or rather, it is a question that needs to be answered through societal hospitality. Hospitality is after all one of the core desired characteristics of our current mediapolis (cf. Silverstone, 2008: 210ff.). How media technologies could contribute to this rather specific form of hospitality (and why they often do not) is a core concern here. This chapter therefore deals only in passing with the impact of COVID-19 on homelessness. Its main focus is an adaptation of the above-mentioned question: How Can Anyone ‘Domesticate’ Media Technologies If They Are Living on the Streets? Or, put differently, what does the concept of domestication offer in the context of researching the media use of roofless people? I will begin with a brief interlude on defining homeless-/rooflessness, before I introduce our research project on rooflessness and media use. Two different sets of observations will consequently be explored: first of all, there are several examples of ‘successful’ smartphone domestication processes in the roofless context, echoing usage patterns that also tend to be reported about the general public (Beisch & Koch, 2021). These appropriation instances are, nonetheless, enhanced by or embedded in particular challenges, which are also to be discussed in this chapter. The most extreme challenge is found in the second set of observations, preliminarily labelled as ‘dis-domestication processes.’ In a final part, this chapter will regard the presented observations in terms of their potential consequences for the domestication framework and particularly the question of how ‘wild’ technologies actually are and what taming and domesticating processes have to do with all this.

A matter of definition? Let me begin with a quick clarification. Whenever the term ‘homeless’ is used, quite a range of living instabilities are implied. The first association that many people have are those people who are actually living on the streets, ‘living rough’ as it is sometimes called. Homeless, 280

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however, is anyone who sleeps on a friends’ couch, who lives in temporary accommodation or even in prison. In our project (see below), we are concentrating primarily on people who are sleeping on the streets or in night shelters. While housing insecurities are rather fluid, this was the limitation we tried to stick to. In this sense, we are studying homeless people in the first three of the six categories developed in European research, i.e. the ETHOS Light typology (European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion Light). Their six categories of homelessness encompass (a) people living rough, (b) people in emergency accommodation, (c) people living in accommodation for the homeless, (d) people living in institutions, (e) people living in non-conventional dwellings due to lack of housing, and (f ) homeless people living temporarily in conventional housing with family and friends (see FEANSTA, 2018). Beyond the empirical definition, however, there is more. Rather than calling this whole heterogenous group of people ‘homeless,’ I eventually decided to use the term ‘roofless,’ based on an earlier definition by FEANSTA (the original ETHOS). Here, they differentiated only between rooflessness (without a shelter of any kind, sleeping rough); houselessness (with a place to sleep but temporary in institutions or shelter); living in insecure housing (threatened with severe exclusion due to insecure tenancies, eviction, domestic violence) and living in inadequate housing (in caravans on illegal campsites, in unfit housing, in extreme overcrowding). (FEANSTA, 2005) I am using the term roofless for two reasons (and despite the fact that some of our study participants are houseless instead of roofless): first of all, for most of the respondents in our study the question of having a roof over their head is often key to the way they organise their everyday life, the way they define themselves, the way they are categorised socially. They literally have no cover. Secondly, roof and home are interlinked in complex ways, as many scholars have addressed (Flusser, 1992; Somerville, 1992). They are, however, not congruent. The complexity does not lessen when digital media come into play. Especially in the context of the domestication framework, it makes sense to ask about the home rather than to assume it (and/or its loss) – and asking about the home involves asking about a roof as one of several potential questions. The term rooflessness therefore challenges our existing categorisations of homelessness.

The study The so-called MoWo project focusses on digital media use of roofless people in Berlin, financed for three years by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It began with an ethnographic approach, in which homeless aid organisations and various other actors in Berlin were visited several times, getting to know roofless people, making contacts with aid workers, and generally understanding the field. Two researchers (David Lowis and first Anabell Specht, later her replacement Vera Klocke) were primarily involved in this – with me visiting the field once in a while and generally guiding the project. The second year of the three-year project was meant to focus on deepening these contacts, while also performing a so-called qualitative experiment, in which (originally 20) smartphones were meant to be handed out to those roofless people who did not own one. Their usage and appropriation were meant to be accompanied for several weeks, interjected with interviews about the use, 281

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its difficulties and delights. The other part of the project is a basic questionnaire on digital media use amongst homeless1 people in Berlin. Such numbers did not exist for the German context when the project was first conceived.2 The final year of the project was reserved for the analysis of the material (and leaving the field). We knew from the beginning that it would be a challenging project, difficult to plan in detail (a debate we kept having with the ethics committee). But we, too, were ultimately surprised as how different the project was to become. With a project starting date in November 2019, the pandemic simply took over soon after we had begun, approximately three months into the project.3 As the initial quote in this chapter also underlines, the question of where those people who usually lived on the streets, were meant to go, with night shelters closing, their income stream (e.g. the sale of streetpapers) disappearing and their whole lives, as fragile as they had already been, turned upside down. For the project, the pandemic was first of all a huge challenge. Who of us would still enter the field with an unknown virus ‘out there’ and no vaccination developed yet? Where would we find roofless people when shelters, cafés and other institutions usually supporting the homeless, were closed? We eventually found answers to some of these questions, but not to all. Ultimately, the pandemic also created new chances for the project. We contacted one of the major organisations providing for the homeless in Berlin (an organisation with sometimes unusual approaches, which does not always sit well with the established organisations): Karuna. This organisation had managed to get around 1,500 revamped, second-hand smartphones to distribute amongst the roofless in Berlin. These were provided by rebuy, a Berlin-based recommerce enterprise that focusses on electronics and electronic media.4 The refurbished smartphones were meant to be distributed amongst people sleeping on the street, aiding them through the pandemic. David Lowis was soon handed over the task to distribute these and to conduct (limited) accompanying research.5 This provided us with an unexpected opportunity to observe smartphone handouts on a much larger scale than we had planned (but obviously without the close follow-up that our qualitative experiment was focussing on). It is partly from observations of that particular handout that some of the following remarks stem. Other parts are taken from the ethnography, yet others from an initial trial handout in a programme aimed at providing housing and work.6 Additionally, I am referring to some material that Vera Klocke produced as one part of her ethnographic engagements. She asked her study participants whether she could film whatever the participants were willing to share in terms of their favourite smartphone pastime. In these short films – between two and nine minutes long – she portrays her participants without showing their faces or other clear markers of identity. We mostly see their hands and the screens of their smartphones and hear them talking about their actions. The range of different smartphone occupations, but also of presentation style and interaction with her as the researcher is wide: from a brief ‘that’s it’-approach to a proud display of abilities and (inter-) actions. The observations below are based on all of these different study elements. Since the study is still in the analysis phase, they represent only preliminary outcomes.

Domesticating roofless media? Making do(mestication) Rather than following a traditional domestication approach, looking for the different dimensions of domestication (such as appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion), this is a somewhat loose understanding of the basic question of how roofless people first of all use and second of all appropriate – or not – digital media, specifically smartphones. The looseness stems from the fact that nothing concerning media use is taken for granted 282

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in the roofless context – apart from the fact that the rest of the world expects connectivity. Ownership of media technologies (or at least having access to them) is not a pre-given. Using it is an equally unstable business (does one have the necessary access to charging facilities? Does one have access to free WiFi or enough money left on the prepaid card? Is the number one gave to someone still valid? etc.). This basic instability – coupled with instability in the rest of life – does not provide a proper base for domestication in the traditional sense, as will be explored below. Nonetheless, one of the most striking outcomes of the research in my eyes is the widespread (and mostly unacknowledged) expertise in these usages. Many of the participants have to ‘make do,’ but nonetheless manage to develop routines and patterns, partly displaying them proudly, when asked to show how their access works. Hence one participant in Vera Klocke’s video diaries, a white man in his late forties, slowly takes her through the steps he needs to take to watch his favourite movies. He first downloads movies from a friends’ computer hard drive via a USB-cable. This friend has access to a large range of potential films. Since our study participant sleeps in a night shelter, he watches his films with his headphones on. And, as he proudly declares: “I don’t disturb anyone. I am the quietest person in this shelter.” Headphones turn from a fashion statement to a sheer necessity in this context. Not everyone has access to this additional technology, however. As our participant goes on to explain, his smartphone, an old Samsung, has 64 GB storage capacity, which, he emphasises, is actually less than 64 GB in use (around 58 GB). With this, he tells us, he can store around five films at a time. One of his all-time favourites is Tron (1982), which he has watched 20–30 times already. We get to see the beginning of the film when he explains that Tron, although produced in the 1980s, already managed to describe our present, the digitalised world. The contrast between this film and him watching it on a small (and slightly broken) smartphone screen is emblematic of many of our encounters with domestication in this context. Especially because many of our respondents need to make up for a certain lack (such as a lack of storage capacity), they display expertise in handling the lack. This often affords planning and organisation (e.g. visiting the friend, deleting the movies on his phone, making choices, downloading new films). This expertise in ‘making do’ is often coupled with a desire to use their smartphones to retreat, to make oneself feel at home in circumstances that one does, to a great extent, not choose. Homing here – as the process of “making-oneselffeel-at-home” or “the gradual creation of a safe environment” (see Hartmann, 2014, 2019) is not so much a process of bringing home, but rather of finding and keeping a niche – both space-wise, but also by pursuing an interest – by having a choice in a life where much is predetermined and very limited, but also full of risks. Another participant, a white man in his sixties, watches YouTube shorts, on cats, but also about Elon Musk and his SpaceX rocket, which he finds fascinating. He uses the public WiFi networks (here at an underground station) and moves swiftly through the actions that are required to access his favourite clips. He likes YouTube ‘shorts,’ because there are “all these weird stories – about cats, tanks, some idiots that perform stunts.” He begins to chuckle at the cats and later admires the rocket’s landing. Again, in this act of conversion (initiated through the researcher), we also see traces of objectification (the way these media are stored, added to, etc.), but also incorporation (the underground station is usually visited between shelter visits and food handouts). In these particular instances, we are seeing established usage patterns rather than appropriation of new media. Below, we will return to that moment of newness as a major challenge. Let me briefly draw out another point: content-wise, we were confronted with two major strands of interest in using smartphones: the entertainment strand (next to films and clips, 283

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gaming is an important pastime, mostly for younger roofless people) vs. the information strand. The latter is key for another participant in the videos: an Italian man in his sixties, who moved to Berlin in 1987. He lives in his car and watches ‘Tagesschau,’ the main news programme on German public service television (ARD), at least ten times a day (one can find new versions of the programme several times a day online). The particular day he is interviewed, the news is actually full of the Holocaust, since the interview took place on Holocaust Memorial Day. He uses this to display his distaste of politics, which, according to him, have not learned enough from this horrific past. News is clearly an obsession of his, but also a survival mechanism and an identity: “This is my life.” He emphasises that he is thereby kept up-to-date, it makes him cultured (his own words). One can feel the passion in his words, but also his anger about the state of the world. His Samsung phone – handed over a few weeks prior through us – appears new and well-kept. It is clearly a lifeline. While this might not seem surprising, it was interesting for us to see that these two fractions – entertainment vs. news – were rather strong. What was lacking, however, were uses of these digital media specifically created for the roofless. Instead, most study participants tended to stay away from such media content – many did not even know they existed (e.g. specific apps that show which shelter with what capacity is located where). There are other interesting knowledge gaps, even in those people who could otherwise be labelled mediasavvy. One important gap was the knowledge about and usage of cloud services – although these could potentially solve the rather widespread problem of data loss (see below).7 Only one provider stuck out: YouTube. It was mentioned by nearly everyone who was regularly using a smartphone. YouTube is a general reference point, because it offers films, clips, music, etc., all in one. Any streaming service that needed to be paid for, such as Netflix or Disney+, was just used by people who had been provided with passwords by others (these were only a few). This also applied to music streaming services and similar apps. Instead, there was a tendency for reduction: thanks to often limited storage capacities, many respondents kept it simple: one explained that he always has to de-install certain apps in order to let even the most basic services function. He owns an old smartphone with only 8 GB of memory. He therefore de- and re-installs apps in order to use his phone. In this, he was very quick (he briefly showed me his interactions with his phone). He knew exactly what the limitations of his phone were and what he had to do in order to at least get close to a smartphoneexperience. Hence we again encounter an expertise in ‘making do,’ coupled with a desire to take part in digital life. Let me close this section with two brief descriptions of younger people. The shortest of Vera Klocke’s clips is by a white transwoman (currently still presenting as male, hoping for accommodation to enable her to live more as a woman) in her late twenties, who explains that she likes to watch fashion clips, where young women show the newest trends (for example, for the spring). She seems slightly embarrassed by her own preference, giggling on and off throughout her explanation. Nonetheless she is very clear, even if she does not use too many words to say so. An equally young man (24 years old) is quite a contrast to this: he happily chats away and is rather proud of his digital abilities, expressed in gaming. He explains that he tends to listen to music (e.g. he downloaded one hour and twenty-five minutes of an RnB and HipHop mixture), while playing an online game (Call of Duty), which also allows him to chat to people. He states that he is a sniper in the game and a very good one, wherefore he is often asked by others to be on their team. His voice displays a certain pride in his abilities. But he also talks about recently having lost his phone. This was annoying to his online friends, because they couldn’t play (he is a clan leader and needs to be present). He managed to get another phone and is currently back on the game. But he sometimes gets 284

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told off for having a connection that is too slow. This is accompanied by his complaint that his shoes are broken, wherefore he cannot enter the sandpit that he and Vera encounter while walking and showing his phone. Overall, his is the most cheerful and confident display of smartphone usage and expertise – which is accompanied by a less shy demeanour overall, less image of a ‘broken life.’ While long-term rooflessness often takes away self-confidence and therefore also attacks ontological security (see below), this is not automatically so: this study participant, although only 24 years old, has lived on the streets since 2016. Why am I describing all these people and their smartphone use? They stand in contrast to those encounters described below, where people are constantly challenged in their connectivity. Despite having just mentioned the idea of broken lives, what features most in the observations described above is first of all the above-mentioned expertise in ‘making do(mestication)’ – a form of domestication in precarious circumstances. These people are not bringing technologies into their houses, but they make themselves feel at home in their niches (be it temporal and/or spatial). Here, we can definitely find examples of ontological security emerging from the use of media technologies (see Hartmann, 2014, 2019). These (favourite) uses, however, are rarely functional. As outlined above, they are not related to finding a place to sleep, finding work, reviving lost contacts – all those aims that any officially funded project would favour in this context. In fact, as mentioned above, the special apps for homeless people in Berlin (e.g. Kältehilfe app and Mokli app) are hardly known, let alone used. Instead, one of my interviewees pulled out the paper leaflet – this was all he needed. Since going online was always connected with difficulties (especially the questions whether there was enough battery power left and where the next free WiFi was located), going online to search for information that could be found on paper or by asking others, was not an option. Let us now have another look at the more problematic aspects we also found in our study, where domestication was challenged.

Non-domestication in the context of rooflessness Non-domestication 1: smartphone loss One of our study participants speaks something in Polish into his phone. The smartphone translates loudly: ‘For nothing in the world will I hand this back.’ He adds ‘It’s mine only.’ (Notes from the interview with participant No. 5, September 2020) It was indeed ‘his only’ – a new smartphone (for less than 100 Euros), handed over to this homeless man in his thirties. He was in the first cohort of homeless people we handed smartphones to in a trial run. And while he was adamant in his claim of ownership, a few weeks later his phone had disappeared – as had those of several other participants in our study. The phones were broken, lost or stolen – or at least that is what we were told. We were also told beforehand how important these kinds of technologies were in the context of homelessness – lifelines to connect to the world out there, to be able to communicate – to be alive. There was a particular point though at which the likelihood of the disappearance of these technologies rose substantially: it was the moment that this cohort moved from their temporary accommodation back onto the streets. While the original aim of the charity’s programme was to aid these five men finding a home and a job, none of them managed to do so in the three months that the programme lasted. Life on the streets, however, did not provide the necessary base to hold on to the smartphones we had provided. And while the 285

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participants were very approachable and most were also somewhat communicative (despite language barriers) while still part of the support programme, this ceased as soon as they re-entered their life on the streets. Domestication processes had started, but they had not ‘solidified’ enough to guarantee further abilities to tame, despite the explicitly uttered desire to do so. This was the most significant, but not the only hurdle we saw.

Non-domestication 2: networks without people When one of our study participants in that first cohort was initially given a smartphone, he happily agreed with the others in the group that he wanted to use Facebook on his new phone. The two researchers in the field agreed to integrate this into one of the workshops they offered on smartphone usage. When that particular session came and everyone had installed the app, this particular participant seemed to struggle somehow. It was not the app itself, however, that made him wary: he admitted that – in contrast to the other people around – he simply did not know anyone who was on Facebook. His move to Germany and his subsequent life on the street had severed most of his social contacts. His inability to connect took therefore place on several levels: he was unable to connect because of a lack of taming abilities (he did not know how to search for people on Facebook, he had no other networks from which he could simply important contacts, etc.), but also because rooflessness really did mean homelessness in this context and implied ontological insecurity. As R.D. Laing outlined, the ontologically insecure person “may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties,” with “no parents, home, wife, child, commitment, or appetite; He has no connexion with power, beauty, love, wit, courage, loyalty, or fame, and the pride that may be taken in these” (cited in Laing, 1960: 39). The technological disconnection is here congruent with a social disconnection – which was also visible in his exclusion of this particular moment of joy, where others were pointing to their social networks that they were re-connecting with. In this sense, rooflessness is too closely coupled with ‘rootlessness’ (Somerville, 1992), a problem that technologies cannot solve. The affordances of Facebook were simply not fitting, although the basic desire for social networking was shared.

Wild technologies? In this final section, I would like to reflect on the potential consequences for the domestication concept of what I described above. If we think of the early (British) domestication approach and roofless people, a core intention of the approach – researching the process of bringing new technologies into an existing home environment, into one’s house – is mostly impossible. Even those people who sleep in a night shelter, are forced to pack their bags in the morning and disappear – standing in line again the next night, hoping for a bed for the night. While technologies are used and these public spaces are also domesticated (one great example of this is the way that power outlets are used to charge – and how people sit next to these in order to not have their phones be taken), questions of a moral economy are extremely complex here as are notions of domesticity. Overall, these spaces have a somewhat fluid occupancy and domestication processes are therefore much more scattered. There are many expressions of failed domestication – a description I would use in those instances, where the desire to use is rather large, the ability to hold on to the technology and develop a more permanent relationship, however, is limited due to the circumstances.

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Nonetheless, we have seen many instances of ‘successful’ individual domestication. This potentially supports the argument that appropriation is key in the domestication approach and not domesticity: Our suggestion … is to argue for a purification of ‘domestication’ in the sense that it should be analytically dissociated from the private and the domestic, and exclusively associated with acts of taming, which we argue refers to the fundamental and necessary process of contextualization. (Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008: 46; see also Helle-Valle & Storm-Mathisen in this book) Contextualisation, however, Helle-Valle and Slettemeås define as “making ICTs familiar, not (necessarily) bringing them into the family” (Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008: 58). This kind of familiarisation, can take place outside of a house – it can be individually performed in relation to one medium or it can be a more communal effort. This is closely related to the idea of domestication as developed in the Nordic context (see Hartmann, 2020; see also contributions of Sørensen, Henricksen, and Karlsen in this book). It is a form of situational domestication, but that does not appear to be its main characteristic. It is also a process of homing, of creating a safe space. And this again is an expression of ‘making do (mestication),’ of using the little resources one has to the fullest. As was also shown above, in some cases the technologies have turned out to be wilder than anticipated and taming them was not for everyone. With the help of these observations from roofless media use, I will try to assess the preconditions for domestication as ‘taming’ to take place in the section below. In other words, what does it need for domestication processes to even begin? This returns us to the question of ‘wild technologies’ and how wildness can potentially be re-addressed in domestication theory. Before outlining this, I briefly want to return to the question of how rooflessness and media can be researched. As I have argued elsewhere (Hartmann, 2022), media use can potentially aid with the question of ontological security – a highly ambivalent, but also highly important question amongst those who are lacking a house. We have seen instances of this in the above material. In order for this to happen, however, a basic domestication of the technologies and their applications needs to have taken place – or at least have started – beforehand. And this is where the specificity of the situation of the here researched people prevails. While other authors in this book engage actor-network theory (ANT) to develop a different understanding of the technologies at play in domestication research (see e.g. Berker in this volume) or yet others define technologies as persons (see Hirsch in this volume), I also want to turn to these technologies, but with an emphasis on the original domestication concept idea of ‘taming.’ My impression was that it was simply impossible to understand the processes of appropriation and especially of non-appropriation of (media) technologies in this specific context of rooflessness without turning to those metaphors that have been central to the domestication concept. In letting these metaphors run wild, I am trying to pay tribute to the late Hermann Bausinger’s claim that “A bit of wild thinking is needed to catch and describe this complex world in all its rational irrationality” (Bausinger, 1984: 351). As a first step in this approximation, I would briefly like to compare the concept of taming with that of domestication. In a second step, I will return to the question of loss of smartphones mentioned above and the question of taming/wildness as applied to the technologies in question.

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Wild technologies! Thomas Berker, in his chapter in this book, actually proposed the end of the wildness of media technologies: At the current moment, after two years of home-office for those who are lucky enough to make a living through screens, microphones and cameras, it is increasingly difficult to revive the fears of the 1980s in which ‘wild’ technology threatened to invade the sanctity of the home. It is now clear that living large parts of everyday life more or less completely within socio-technical networks is quite possible. (Berker in this volume: 28) Has the wildness of the technology (as much as the sanctity of the home) actually disappeared? Is there no threat anymore? This at least is what Berker seems to suggest. He rightly reminds us that no concept is a-historical and the domestication concept is very clearly related in its content to a particular time (and specific places). Its origins in both Great Britain and Norway of the early 1990s (see Hartmann, 2020) point to a time when an awareness of potential agencies within technologies was gaining ground while at the same time the viewer was liberated from his/her assumed inactivity and seen to provide a range of interpretations and practices that were only partly based on the affordances of technologies and contents alike. Hence, the domestication framework emphasised – using de Certeau to underline this point – that users were making technologies their own, granting them spaces, decorating them, ignoring them and using them in ways that they saw fit. Appropriation was taking place. At the same time, these technologies, especially media technologies, were also interpreted as a potential threat or challenge to existing lifestyles, to beliefs and practices, i.e. to ontological security. This implied that media were potentially wild. This book overall, both in its empirical focus and in its theoretical remit, speaks to these questions of agency and the social in the context of (media) technology use. There is actually an ongoing struggle concerning these questions. The struggle could, if written up, document the history of our (recurring) understanding of media as a problematic and increasingly dominant Other throughout the last decades. The domestication approach emerged at a time when the viewer had been instated by cultural and media studies as an active (albeit not always conscious) agent, who was interpreting media content on his/her own terms (albeit far from ‘free’ – see e.g. Hall, 1980; Morley, 1980). The domestication framework fitted into this rather nicely, emphasising how users were actually ‘taming’ wild media technologies and fitting them into their everyday lives. It added an emphasis on the technology that provided the content as well as on the social surrounding and shaping the uses. As Roger Silverstone explained: By domestication I mean something quite akin to the domestication of the wild animal: that is a process by which such an animal is accustomed ‘to live under the care and near the habitations of man’, a process of taming or bringing under control, a process of making or settling as ‘a member of the household; to cause to be at home; to naturalize’ (OED). Technologies, and television and television programmes must be domesticated if they are to find a space or place for themselves in the home. That process of domestication starts, of course, in the production process (‘user friendliness’, giving audiences ‘what they want’ are common enough characterisations); it is continued in 288

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the marketing and advertising, but it is completed in consumption (…). through these various stages both the object and services, hardware and software, become (or do not become) accepted and acceptable. The history of technologies is a history, in part, of this process of domestication. (Silverstone, 1994: 83) Technologies become accepted through this process of domestication, they become “a member of the household,” as Silverstone outlines. The debate of whether this process is actually tied to the household is nearly as old as the concept itself. As outlined above, there have been arguments to stick to the taming aspect rather than the ‘bringing-it-into-the-home’-aspect (see e.g. Helle-Valle & Slettemeås, 2008) or to whether states and other environments can also be spaces of domestication processes. Especially the Norwegian tradition has argued for the latter (see Hartmann, 2020) – and many contributions in this book are expressions of this opening of the concept to non-household settings. The taming aspect, however, has received much less of a challenge; it is usually taken for granted (cf. Baym, 2010: 45). One notable exception to this has been Andrew Feenberg, who wrote the following already in the late 1990s: He and his collaborators have developed a reception theory of the appropriation of technology in the household…. Undoubtedly, the phenomena Silverstone identifies do exist. However, the domestication model appears a bit too cozy as a general description of user appropriations. … Silverstone emphasizes the ‘conservative’ implications of domestication, and compares it to a process of ‘taming’ wild devices as they are adapted to the home (Silverstone and Haddon, 1996: 60). But what of cases, such as online communication, where users do not bring technology in from the outside but act through it on the public world? (Feenberg, 1999: 107) Feenberg offered an alternative – “democratic rationalization” – which is meant to bring user interventions into the equation, albeit only those that “challenge undemocratic power structures rooted in modern technology” (ibid.: 108). While it is indeed interesting to think more about the public nature of technology use, it stops short, in my eyes, in exploring the equally important question of what users do with technologies in private (as far as this still exists). Only taking both, the private and the public, into consideration will ultimately let us understand how technologies are appropriated – or not. And privacy, it turns out, is also a major driver for media use in the context of rooflessness. Apart from this brief hint at the notion of taming, it has gone fairly unchallenged. In fact, in most of the domestication literature, the terms ‘taming’ and ‘domesticating’ are also used interchangeably. The technologies are integrated into everyday life (both in terms of space and time, and in terms of routines and values) and this process is described as one where the wildness of the technology – as the unknown object entering the safe space of the home, to put it bluntly – is somehow brought into an acceptable and less threatening state – its wildness is reduced or entirely extinguished. And this process is either labelled as taming or domesticating. But if we turn to actual domestication and taming approaches in the natural sciences (and I am very aware that I am treading on thin ground here, as this is not my field of expertise), a slightly different picture emerges. Taming is here a much less adaptive process than domestication, it seems, i.e. the object is changed to a lesser degree. 289

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Wild at heart: taming vs. domestication Taming is described as a process in which a wild animal is exposed to human presence over a longer period of time. The animal slowly learns to tolerate not only the human’s presence, but also his/her behaviours. In order to achieve this state, the animal needs to trust the human being – and vice versa. This partial adaptation does not yet say anything about the danger of a return of the wildness, i.e. a potential attack or other such behaviours. The wildness is temporarily caged (often most literally), but not extinguished. The animal remains ‘wild at heart.’ In domestication, especially in the so-called domestication syndrome, however, we are first of all speaking of a different category. This term does not address an individual animal and its behaviours, but it refers to the whole species. We therefore speak of dogs or other species as domesticated animals. This also implies that domestication, in contrast to taming, is a much more long-term process, which takes place over generations. It can be proactively initiated through selective breeding, but it also takes place ‘naturally.’ Domestication implies that the animals change as such, i.e. that their phenotype changes over time. This is, ultimately, a much more radical process than taming. It does not yet say anything about agency, however, i.e. about the question of voluntariness or involuntariness, about the motifs on either side, etc. (and here, again, it is extremely difficult to leave the anthropocentric worldview aside). In this radical process of domestication, however, there are also interesting changes taking place in what used to be a wild animal: the domesticated animal tends to be friendlier, i.e. less aggressive and will therefore not attack (neither the domesticator nor other animals of its kind). An extended youth period tends to also follow from domestication, wherefore the animal tends to show more social behaviour, in particular playfulness. And all of this leads to more communication (e.g. through eye contact) and a form of not only cooperation, but also planning. For the time being, it is only important to keep in mind that there is a difference between taming and domestication and that this difference has to do with the degree of wildness left after the processes have taken place. In media domestication, it seems, the technology has actually been moulded according to the users’ desires (that this process is far from smooth and far from ever complete, is exactly one of the things that domestication research has been able to show). What happens though, if we take the threat of the wild seriously, as something that could re-emerge at any time? What happens, when we turn to the thrill of the wild that leads people into the zoo and the circus? And what happens, when that wildness becomes too hard to handle? How does domestication work in an environment where ‘one’s own’ is much more difficult to define?

Dis-domestication: roofless people’s media domestication The problems in domestication in the context of rooflessness described above could potentially be labelled dis-domestication processes (rather than non-domestication). In contrast to re-domestication that refers to a change-intensive phase in which users tend to renegotiate and thereby reshape the way they integrate different media into their everyday lives at home (see Röser & Peil in this volume), dis-domestication is more clearly pointing towards a non-engagement with media (and/or technologies or other entities – see Hebrok, 2010 for the dis-domestication of furniture; see also Pierson in this volume). This can be a phase, as pointed out by Huang and Miao (2021) in relation to WeChat, wherefore they also call the overall process re-domestication. However, this kind of dis-domestication is still a fairly 290

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conscious act – maybe not a choice or desire, but not something that simply happens. People stop doing something, they turn away from something. In terms of agency, they are still important actors. In our case studies, the loss of the phone is not wanted, even in those cases where people sell their phones, i.e. a life without the phone is feared and lamented.8 Loss is nonetheless widely accepted, because life on the streets ‘just is that way.’ The brutality of the social interactions on the streets (stealing from each other, constant loss of things, etc.) is simply accepted. ‘Zappzarapp,’ explains one of our interviewees with a quick movement of the hand. He is a 34-year-old Bulgarian, eager to work, but without luck and in daily contact with his son ‘at home’ via his old smartphone. His German is still very limited, but this somewhat unusual colloquial term from post-war times – Zappzarapp – he manages to bring into our conversation several times. It implies a swift robbery, sometimes by peers. The sound of the word indicates more a circus trick than this betrayal of trust. Zappzarapp happens regularly on the streets, we are told. Falling asleep always implies that one’s backpack – and therefore often one’s phone – could be gone by the time one wakes up. That’s why many roofless people carry their phones close to their bodies. Tales of loss are told with quite a bit of emotion – because all the pictures are gone and therefore many memories lost, as are the contacts of the last few years, numbers that cannot be retrieved. As already outlined above though, when we asked about storage of data in a cloud in our survey, almost all of them shake their head, some implying that they have not heard of this possibility. Domestication, as was pointed out by Sørensen as early as 1994, is not necessarily a harmonious process or as a process which indicates a linear progress of some sort. Domestication is potentially conflictual as well as dynamic. The concept does not for example imply a stable closure of the distribution of meaning and practice related to an artefact. The truce expressed in practical routines of use may be broken, needs may change, relevant, external symbolic codes may be transformed, or the persons involved may shift. Children grow, and sometimes households split up. An artefact might thus become re-domesticated, even radically. Often, artefacts may become worn out and replaced, or we lose interest in them. Thus, we initiate a process of dis-domestication, or divestment. (Sørensen, 1994: 7) In our context, we have both – the harmonious processes as well as the radical disdomestication instances.

The savage medium All consumption, even that of the repressed, is informed: informed by the demands and statuses, the socially defined needs and desires of those who consume. In consumption, we communicate…. communication is real in its consequences. It provides the fundamental matrix for the conduct of our everyday lives, and for a politics of difference which maintains bourgeois culture as arbiter of taste and distinction, guaranteeing its place in the hierarchy by virtue of education, tradition and wealth. (Silverstone, 1994: 116) It is this bourgeois culture which dictates the policies of homelessness programmes. For a long time, this has meant (at least in the Global North) that a philosophy of rewards was the guiding principle. Roofless people were their own fate’s master, i.e. if they were able to prove 291

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that they could change, they would be rewarded with help (in terms of jobs, housing, etc.). In contrast, Housing First, an approach first developed in the US, aims to first provide secure housing and then support people in all the other changes they might need to go through (a drug-free life, enough earnings to support oneself, etc.). This turns this philosophy of rewards around. We have increasingly come to an understanding in our project that combining Housing First with support in digitalisation could potentially be beneficial (for some). It is therefore not surprising to see a first (small) initiative in Berlin that connects these two: the digital home.9 Underlying all this is yet another problem though: it is not just consumption that has been denied, but communication has been clearly defined for homeless people: it is meant to serve a function, it is meant to connect them to the working world. Entertainment and enjoyment are not part of this agenda. This is also how van Deursen and van Dijk (2013) define differences in usage as part of the digital divide, because they apply a normative framework concerning the value of consumption and communication patterns. Choice is not left to the consumer, precarious or not, roofless or housed. While this is justified in terms of societal norms (and therefore questions of success, etc.), it begs the question how far these norms are also questionable. The idea that usage restrictions will aid people to become better citizens would be an interesting reversal of the idea of consumer freedom that Silverstone criticised in the mid-1990s: Without some sense of these frustrations and limitations, as well as a sense of the inequalities of power which they express, analyses of consumption do have a tendency to romanticise consumer freedoms (and … the freedoms of television audiences as well). (Silverstone, 1994: 119) In her chapter in this volume, Bakardjieva uses Zuboff’s work (2015, 2019) to emphasise that there is no escape anymore from the big Other, from data being observed and sold. In relation to the here presented outcomes one could state: yes, there is. Simply become a serial disconnector – like these roofless people in our study. This is – as is hopefully clear – an extremely cynical point of view. While some of our respondents are quite critical of the digital regime, others appreciate the scopic nature of it all (see chapter of Chambers in this book), i.e. the possibility to create closeness despite actual distance – the ability to (re-)connect. Many of our study participants expressed a desire to connect, i.e. to become part of society again, which will not let them in unless they are technically connected. But this does underline that there is indeed no choice: if you’re in, you might decide to temporarily disconnect (see Karlsen’s chapter on digital detox camps in this book), but most people would not choose to become serial disconnectors. This sentence is only valid though, if we redefine choice. While we have reason to believe that indeed some of our study participants pro-actively took the smartphones and sold them soon after they received them from us, the question of agency in the context of drug and alcohol abuse, of insecure living conditions, is a highly problematic one. Hence we kept facing the problem that to perform research in this context is to become a temporary social worker (without the necessary expertise). It also means that a “materialist, non-media-centric media studies” (Morley, 2009) is not a choice, but something that emerges from the research itself. What we heard most of all was not so much a desire to connect technologically, but to be seen

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and heard. And here digital media can play a role, even an important one, but they cannot solve the underlying problem. In this context, the technologies appear to be wild. Taming processes are nonetheless taking place. Domestication, however, in the sense of long-term and therefore fundamental changes, is exactly what is missing in this context. It is, after all, society that needs to be domesticated. However, one should be weary of complete domestication in whatever form or shape. We instead need the “moral itch or irritation” that Roger Silverstone mentioned in his last reflections on the concept (2006: 247). Only then can we hope for “technologically facilitated social change” (ibid.). As the above-presented observations have also shown, this needs to be embedded in a wider debate on what houses have to do with homes – and how we can develop a more inclusive society, allowing everyone to live under ‘our roof,’ or even in ‘our house.’ This is a highly actual question in times when even more people are faced with losing their places to live, having to move where did they did not choose to be. This also means that policy work is inevitable. Then hopefully, we will move from ‘making do(mestication)’ and dis-domestication to not only homing, but domestication in the true sense of the word.

Notes 1 I am using the term homeless here because we have a larger diversity of states of homelessness in the questionnaire than we have in both the ethnographic part and the qualitative experiment. Most respondents would still count as roofless or houseless though. 2 In fact, general statistics on homelessness in Germany are also only beginning to be developed as I am writing this piece; for years, one had to rely on estimates produced by an NGO – BAGW (see e.g. BAGW, 2021). 3 There is no established way to state this in an academic context like this, but since it did influence the project, I need to add that I, as the project leader, was diagnosed with cancer in September 2019. I was therefore not able to lead the project in quite the way I had planned to (added to which was the additional threat of COVID-19, which kept me away from the field for a long time). All the more important is to stress that the researchers on the project (David Lowis throughout, Anabell Specht for approximately the first half, and Vera Klocke for the second half ) have conducted incredible work at a particularly difficult time. 4 https://company.rebuy.com/news/rebuy-weitet-zusammenarbeit-mit-der-karuna-eg-aus – retrieved on 05/04/2022. 5 The organisational structure of the ‘homelessness industry’ is a whole other debate, which we are hoping to pursue in other publications. This includes the fluidity of work in this industry, which primarily relies on voluntary work. Researching aid organisations relying on the support of voluntary workers often implies doing voluntary work oneself. This has many challenges. 6 A full report of the findings will take place elsewhere, once the project results are out. For an initial overview of the project overall (albeit in German), see Klocke, Lowis and Hartmann, (2022). 7 Microsoft seems to have developed the idea of the ‘virtual backpack’ or ‘virtual rucksack’ as far back as 2008 – it did not take off, however (see https://lt149.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/virtualrucksack/ – retrieved on 06/04/2022). Elsewhere, this idea has also been taken up, albeit on a rather small level (see https://digitaltag.eu/bewerbung/publikumspreis/cloud-fuer-wohnungslosemenschen - retrieved on 10/04/2022), sometimes with more success, as this example from France, called the Digital Safe, has shown (see https://www.reconnect.fr/reconnect-le-coffre-fortnumerique – retrieved on 28/03/2022). 8 A note of caution is necessary here: obviously, our study participants tend to tell us things we want to hear, a well-known phenomenon in social research. But we did see too many instances where the loss was clearly destabilising in order to dismiss this as wrong. 9 https://neuechanceberlin.de/de/ueber-uns/projekte/11-digitales-zuhause.html – retrieved on 28/03/2022.

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References BAGW (2021) Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Wohnungslosigkeit e.V.: 21.12.2021. Aktuelle Schätzung der BAG Wohnungslosenhilfe, available at: https://www.bagw.de/de/themen/zahl-der-wohnungslosen/ index.html/ (last accessed 05/04/2022). Bausinger, H. (1984) ‘Media, technology and daily life,’ Media, Culture and Society, 6 (4), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378400600403. Baym, N. (2010) Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity. Beisch, N. and Koch, W. (2021) ‘25 Jahre ARD/ZDF-Onlinestudie: Unterwegsnutzung steigt wieder und Streaming/Mediatheken sind weiterhin Treiber des medialen internets,’ Media Perspektiven, No. 10, 486–503. FEANSTA (2018) ETHOS Light, available at: https://www.feantsa.org/download/fea-002-18update-ethos-light-0032417441788687419154.pdf (last accessed 06/04/2022). FEANSTA (2005) ETHOS – European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion, available at: http://www.feantsa.org/en/toolkit/2005/04/01/ethos-typology-on-homelessness-and-housing­ exclusion (last accessed 06/04/2022). Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology, London: Routledge. Flusser, V. (1992) Bodenlos. Eine philosophische Autobiographie, Bensheim: Bollmann. Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding,’ in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Hutchinson, 128–138. Hartmann, M. (2022) ‘Zuhause ist…? Ontologische Sicherheit und Mediennutzung obdachloser Menschen,’ in F. Sowa (ed.), Figurationen der Wohnungsnot: Kontinuität und Wandel sozialer Praktiken, Sinnzusammenhänge und Strukturen, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 264–283. Hartmann, M. (2020) ‘(The domestication of ) Nordic domestication?’ Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2, 47–57. DOI: 10.2478/njms-2020-0005. Hartmann, M. (2019) ‘Domestizierung, mobile Medien und anderes (un)häusliches mehr,’ in C. Linke and I. Schlote (eds.), Soziales Medienhandeln – Integrative Perspektiven auf den Wandel mediatisierter interpersonaler Kommunikation, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 101–116. Hartmann, M. (2014) ‘Home is where the heart is? Ontological security and the mediatization of homelessness,’ in K. Lundby (ed.), Handbooks of Communication Science, Vol. 21: Mediatization of Communication, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 641–660. Hebrok, M. (2010) Developing a Framework of Disdomestication: The Disdomestication of Furniture in Norwegian Households, Master thesis, University of Oslo. Helle-Valle, J. and Slettemeås, D. (2008) ‘ICTs, domestication and language-games: a Wittgensteinian approach to media uses,’ New Media & Society, 10 (1), 45–66. DOI: 10.1177/1461444807085326. Huang, Y. and Miao, W. (2021) ‘Re-domesticating social media when it becomes disruptive: evidence from China’s “super app” WeChat,’ Mobile Media & Communication, 9 (2), 177–194. DOI: 10.1177/2050157920940765. Klocke, V., Lowis, D. and Hartmann, M. (2022) ‘Von Obdachlosigkeit und digitalen Medien: ein Projektbericht,’ in S. Gillich, G. Kraft, H. Moerland and W. Sartorius (eds.), Würde, Haltung, Beteiligung. Herausforderungen in der Arbeit mit Menschen ohne Wohnung, Freiburg: Lambertus-Verlag, 157–169. Morley, D. (2009) ‘For a materialist, non-media-centric media studies,’ Television & New Media, 10 (1), 114–116. Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding, BFI Television Monograph 11, London: British Film Institute. Silverstone, R. (2008) Mediapolis – Die Moral der Massenmedien, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating domestication: reflections on the life of a concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), The Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Somerville, P. (1992) ‘Homelessness and the meaning of home: rooflessness or rootlessness?’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16 (4), 529–39. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.1992.tb00194.x. Sørensen, K. (1994) Technology in Use. Two Essays on the Domestication of Artefacts, DOI: 10.13140/ RG.2.2.27048.26881. van Deursen, A. and van Dijk, J. (2013) ‘The digital divide shifts to differences in usage,’ New Media Society, 16 (3), 507–526. DOI: 10.1177/1461444813487959.

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20 CONFIGURING THE “CUBAN INTERNET” A networked domestication approach1 Lorian Leong Introduction As the Spanish sitcom Aida plays in the background from a USB drive on the living room TV, Irene excitedly tells us she will soon use the Internet alone. “I am practicing for when I get my own [smartphone],” she says. “I am practising: making calls, searching for the contacts, and just playing with [my husband’s] phone.” She aspires to improve her skills to optimise time at the local Wi-Fi park to speak with her Miami-based niece. Too young to remember when his cousin moved away, her son Alejandro primarily speaks to friends in Cuba. Instead of using Wi-Fi parks, he uses SNET, the local Havana intranet, where he buys motorcycle parts on the classifieds site Revolico and connects to local Cubans on Social Habana, SNET’s social networking site. It’s not your typical set-up to access digital content, but it works. For people like Irene and Alejandro, access to Internet services comes in networked, fractured components. In 2017, content access in Havana was not simply access to the Internet via an ICT device, but hybridised in both the digital and physical world. The contribution of this chapter is two-fold: first, it employs a combined framework to analyse the process of Internet and content access and the boundaries of use of varying content technologies and services among 35 informants in a Havana suburb in 2017; second, it develops domestication theory by proposing the concept of networked domestication. It underscores the characteristics of networked technologies, services, and processes relative to the domestication process, and the emerging areas ripe for exploration and development.

Recent scholarship on the “Cuban Internet” In Havana, the Internet is an ambiguous term. In fact, several news articles refer to different parts and services like StreetNet (SNET) or El Paquete Semanal (EPS) as alternative Internets, supplementary to the Wi-Fi park Internet (Koebler, 2015; Martínez, 2017; San Pedro, 2015). When discussing the “Cuban Internet” in Havana, we refer to a composite, modular experience which varies by user, but includes and is not limited to Wi-Fi park international Internet and national Internet, SNET, EPS, and hacked services like Connectify inter alia, also acknowledged by Dye (2019). While many authors have discussed adoption of the Cuban Internet as component parts with reference to other services, it has seldom been examined 296

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holistically from the perspective of a network analysis. Each component certainly merits an in-depth analysis, but this chapter will look at the implications of the Cuban Internet as both a singular composite technology and a group of technologies. Dye (2019) synthesises the Internet modules of the Cuban Internet in the conclusion of her dissertation, focusing her enquiry on “collective configurations” to emphasise the role of human computing and participation overall. This chapter begins with this composite Cuban Internet as the point of departure to explore its relational and networked context further.

Internet and Wi-Fi parks Although some Cubans have access to several resources for content access and the Internet, most have access to the public Wi-Fi, first implemented in parks by the state-owned telecommunications provider ETECSA in 2015, starting at $2 CUC2 per hour (Koebler, 2015). By 2017, there were nearly 300 public Wi-Fi locations (The Economist, 2017) and hourly costs had decreased to $1 CUC per hour. Even so, at $1 CUC per hour, access was expensive relative to the 2017 national average monthly salary, reported at 767 CUP (approx. $30 USD) (ONEI, 2019). Meanwhile, there exists a $0.10 CUC national Internet for limited access to Cuban websites approved by the government (ACN, 2017) and a private hotspot business known as Connectify was built on top of the Wi-Fi park Internet (Polson, 2019). According to national statistics, 5.9 million of Cuba’s 11 million people were considered “Internet service users,” although this term was undefined (ONEI, 2017). Sanchez reports only 150,000 Cubans with daily access to the Internet (2017). Mobile data was not readily available until 2018 and in-home Internet was only offered in 2020. At the time of research, tech-savvy Cubans had constructed their own network to supplement and serve their needs. Past Wi-Fi park scholarship has looked at Wi-Fi technology and the resulting social reconfigurations in terms of time and space from affordances (Dye, 2019) or mediatisation perspectives (Polson, 2019). These contributions have contributed greatly to a better understanding of the social reconfigurations around Wi-Fi access, meanings associated, and new habits. Additional attention has been placed on space, examining its locality as both a physical and symbolic geopolitical, technical, and social intersection (Grandinetti & Eszenyi, 2018). Leong (2022) synthesised the motivations and behaviours of everyday Wi-Fi parks users, arguing how their collective aspirations and actions constitute a shadow Wi-Fi public – an uncoalesced public of Wi-Fi users, bonded by shared everyday practices to achieve economic and social aspirations despite state implementation of the Internet, taking place and established through private discourse and habits.

El paquete semanal (EPS) For some time, Cubans have accessed entertainment content (movies, television series, and music) via a physical distribution network. In Pertierra’s (2009) ethnography of content networks, she describes the distribution system of VHS tapes across two cities in Cuba where informants visited traditional informal banco de peliculas (film banks/rental stations) to rent shows for a small fee. While not seen as “morally dubious” (2009: 119), this illegal business described in Pertierra’s study was characterised by customers ranging from personal relations like friends and neighbours to local officials. The contemporary version of this takes place in a 1-terrabyte hard drive, documented in news media (Koebler, 2015; San Pedro, 2016) and academic scholarship (Dye, 2019). Known as the el paquete semanal (the weekly package), 297

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distributors make their way from house to house for a weekly fee to update household computers, USB drives, or hard drives for a price of $1–2 CUC per week to bring otherwise inaccessible entertainment content to homes, reducing the cost and time it would take to download at a park (San Pedro, 2015). Described in news media as an alternative to the web (San Pedro, 2015), the content on EPS goes beyond movies and entertainment to also include mobile apps, magazines, and the Cuban classifieds “Revolico.” It is an expansive network reaching up to 3 million Cubans across the island (Martínez, 2017).

StreetNet (SNET) SNET was founded by a group of hobbyist hackers connecting homes together for gaming in the early 2000s, finally joining networks in 2015 (Martínez, 2017) and expanded across the city to establish the main intranet in the greater Havana area. The intranet is made up of nine main hubs or pilares, with additional connections made with nano-stations and ethernet cables (Martínez, 2017). This network, although prominent, remains less widespread due to the hardware requirements costing about 150 USD for a local hub (not including cables), the knowledge for infrastructure set-up, and the monthly subscription for access. The internal Internet offers local social networking sites, forums, games, classifieds, and more, including the content of the EPS (Pujol et al., 2017). The network is spread across the greater Havana area with somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 reported users (Dye, 2019). SNET has been of scholastic interest due to its grassroots and collaborative shaping, collective efforts of labour and maintenance, and innovation under political, economic, and technical constraints. Pujol et al. (2017) detail the community shaping of SNET, bringing attention to the mapping and construction of the major pilares and technical topology. Dye (2019) examines the establishment and development of SNET, with focus on the everyday labour involved in maintenance and care of the physical network. Cuban scholarship in this arena has also examined the establishment, acceptance, and enforcement of rules established by administrators on SNET, including no religious or political discussion on local discussion forums and websites, and not connecting SNET to the Internet (Rodríguez Fernández, 2019). Rodríguez Fernández highlights the conflicting nature within the network, seen as a participatory and deliberative process which was also met with “multiple layers of authoritarianism and forms of exclusion regarding decisions” (2019: 406; translation by author).

Domestication origins The development of the domestication approach began in the early 1990s by British researchers drawing from anthropology, consumption studies, and media studies (Haddon, 2011; Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992) and further developed by Norwegian researchers (Lie & Sørensen, 1996), drawing from science and technologies studies (STS) and social shaping literature. Leveraging established disciplines, the domestication framework emerged as way to understand the process of shaping technology adoption, but also the symbolic meanings, experiences, and role of technologies in the everyday lives of users (Haddon, 2011). While both examine technology adoption in everyday life, scholastic legacies inform the nuances between the two tracks. The British framework comprises three central features: the four (then five) phase process of adoption, the moral economy of the home, and double articulation (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992; Silverstone and Haddon (1996)). These phases looked at imagination 298

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(conceiving use of technology), appropriation (acquisition of technology), objectification (physical placement), incorporation (time reorganisation), and conversion (shift of meaning from private to public). They could be overlapping phases and are not specifically defined as linear. While the norms, habits, symbolic values, and attitudes analysis of the moral economy continued to be of theoretical interest, this track began to move outside the household to a more mobile version of “home” (Bakardjieva, 2006; Morley, 2006). Morley (2006) notes that users are de-domesticating media, or discontinuing media use, with the convergence of media into smartphone and the increasing prevalence of these technologies. The Norwegian track, however, has historically looked at domestication outside the home (Hartmann, 2020; Lie & Sørensen, 1996). Developed from STS and actor-network theory (ANT), the Norwegian domestication stream contributes four major areas of analysis, the former three with a clearer cross-over to the British track: the consumer/producer act of domestication, the practices developed around technologies, the symbolic meanings developed, and learning involved (Ask & Sørensen, 2017; Lie & Sørensen, 1996). The main idea is borrowed from ANT’s semiotic notion of scripts to address technology designer intentions and user deviation from these scripts to derive symbolic meaning. ANT, Lie and Sørensen (1996) argue, bolsters domestication theory by making it more sensitive to technology’s properties; meanwhile domestication theory renders more concrete some of ANT’s more abstract concepts (Sørensen, 2006). Early Norwegian scholars like Sætnan explored the understanding of technology as a sociotechnical ensemble, the network relations around a technology, whereby an artefact is explored by its “surrounding human actors, meanings, institutions, and technical linkages” (1996: 35).

Domestication beyond the individual The use of the domestication approach has evolved over the past three decades as technologies change. Two central areas pertinent to this study are combined approaches delving deeper into ANT and the expansion of domestication beyond single actors. While ANT has been drawn upon early in the Norwegian domestication track, this was primarily noted for its use of social shaping influence and the use of inscriptions to highlight the influence of both the user and intentions embedded in technology (Sørensen, 2006). Connecting the British framework to ANT provides more context to sociological and anthropological insights. Hjørth and Arnold (2013) have drawn on ANT and British domestication to analyse the meaning making of mobile sociality and the mutual shaping and influence of both technologies and users; this is linked to social outcomes in publics, intimacy, and symbolic status. Leong (2017) used a combined ANT network tracing and British domestication framework to understand the broader socio-cultural role in app adoption. Specifically, the study employed elements of ANT (Czarniawska, 2007; Latour, 2005) by following associations between human actors, non-human actors, and mediators to explore the negotiations that enabled and limited certain smartphone users to acquire and adopt mobile apps. Exploring user adoption relative to other people and things is not new: “domestication happens in conjunction with the acts of objects and other people” (Ask & Sørensen, 2017: 4). Håpnes touched on collective domestication strategies in the 1990s in her analysis of a Norwegian hacker collective, where community and collaboration were central in the domestication process of computers as subcultural artefacts (1996). Ask and Sørensen (2017) sought to extend domestication by looking at collective domestication in two forms. They investigate this process through power distribution via goal achievement and the norms and attitudes established in the adoption process. 299

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Towards networked domestication Haddon (2016) remarked a shift in the object of study in recent domestication studies, addressing “complex media repertoires,” citing a variety of studies who have continued to use domestication in new media environments. Studies now need to be sensitive to social context and be able to cope with the richer media repertoires. As the Internet, mobile media, and social media intensify a networked society (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), scholars are looking into other actors in the network and the impact they have on the overall experience. The need for new theoretical and analytic approaches to domestication is growing with the increasing complexity of the Internet combined with smartphones, apps, and interconnected media (Brause & Blank, 2020; Haddon, 2016). API integrations, massive feature sets, ecosystems, and acquisitions have made formerly small services into mega-apps with the “app-within-an-app model” (Chan, 2015). Some like Huang and Miao (2020) have used existing theories like re-domestication to handle the complexity of mega-apps like WeChat. Media scholars have also specifically identified the need to address the networked nature of devices and the externalities that actors bring into the moral economy and into the sociotechnical organisation of composite technologies, be it the home or otherwise. Brause and Blank (2020) offer the concept of externalisation, using the case of smart speaker assistants to show how these devices invite external factors into the home, expanding spatial affordances. This study tracks closely to this contribution, noting the externalities a technology invites in, with larger focus on the network of actors impacting the overall experience and meaning in a composite networked technology. This certainly adds complexity: the scope broadens to account for user participation and construction in a network of networked technologies. But technologies are becoming larger and less concrete. Network power scholarship will provide supporting analysis in this study. While each can be standalone frameworks for analysis, they will be used in conjunction with domestication to examine the consequences and effects of network adoption and how this feeds back into the experience of Cuban Internet use. Examining power within networks is to look at specific actors, rules and regulations, and use of relations, social or otherwise (Castells, 2011). This can manifest itself in various ways, particularly as it relates to relations and unveiled through change. This chapter further develops domestication alongside both the Norwegian and British tracks, continuing exploration beyond the individual and evolving domestication in new ICT contexts/configurations, by proposing the concept of networked domestication. The proposed concept builds upon this movement noted by Haddon (2016) to demonstrate new applications of domestication theory and handle the increasing complexity of the technocultural environment. It is the examination of media constellations of a single technologies, analysed from the perspective of a composition of technologies in a network as one technology experience. While this study still focuses on individual users and not a collective of users, it places a particular emphasis on the individual relations to other actors in the domestication process. It also looks at the Cuban Internet as both singular and collective groups of technologies. It will draw principally from network tracing and translation vis-avis ANT, using domestication to understand decision making, attitudes, decisions in how users navigate the Cuban Internet. This, as described, comprises three primary networks among other supplementary networks, although everyday Cubans may have exposure to two. The following chapter will examine how users would comprise their own Internet composition under this definition. 300

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Thus, we seek to answer two questions: R1: What did the process of Internet access and adoption look like in the early days of the Cuban Internet in Havana in 2017 and how did individuals formulate and change the Cuban Internet experience? R2: How does the networked domestication analysis of this modular Cuban Internet and entertainment experience contribute to the development of the domestication approach?

Research design In November and December 2017, 27 informants were interviewed in a Havana suburb, alongside eight other expert informants: two former EPS distributors, three hackers (to varying degrees), two mobile phone shop employees, and an SNET local administrator. Informants were selected based on their use of the local Wi-Fi park and were approached at the park; others were referred. To preserve informant privacy, the suburb and park name have been excluded and informant names have been changed. As an exploratory study with a limited sample size, findings are not generalisable to the wider population. Moreover, this suburb has one main Wi-Fi park as opposed to the many Wi-Fi spots to be found in central Havana, which may intensify community and network effects. While recruitment took place at the park and through referrals, respondents gradually suggested to reschedule to talk in their homes for privacy. This allowed for additional observation of the use of SNET and home computing, EPS use and its consumption, and in-home Internet via nano-stations and Wi-Fi repeaters. Key informant interviews also took place in-home from referrals; except mobile phone shop owners, which were done on location. Various sites of interaction were visited; in addition to in-home observation, the author also spent time in Wi-Fi parks, mobile phone shops, and ETECSA shops due to necessity and to document the process. Actor-networks were thus documented “in the very instances of their ‘weaving’” (Dimitrievski, 2013: 23) through referral contacts and tracing actors discussed in interviews.

Methodological considerations and limitations Researching geopolitically sensitive regions like Cuba requires careful preparation to ensure project success and informant safety (Morgenbesser & Weiss, 2018). After initial research and discussions with foreign tour operators in Cuba to gain an outsider experience navigating Cuba, contact with a local was made. Conversation with the contact took place over several months to gage their understanding of the topic and community. Competency beyond linguistic capability is an important quality in interpreters when doing cross-cultural research (Fujii, 2013). They provided in-depth insight into Havana’s Internet culture having previously worked in the sector, offering insight into social dynamics in how to engage with users and raising concerns about consent forms and informant safety, noting how the use of consent forms could raise concerns. Thus, the mutual decision was made to use oral consent reading aloud a Spanish consent form and emphasising the anonymous nature of the study. Both Zekić (2017) and Dye (2019) had also avoided consent forms during their studies. While the use of an interpreter mitigates linguistic misunderstandings for a nonfluent researcher in Cuba, interpreters can nevertheless invite issues of re-interpretation and miscommunication. 301

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Though the network of informants interviewed was largely influenced by referral and serendipitous finds, the guidance and questioning were influenced by the researcher and research objectives (Ruming, 2009). However, the issue of researcher positionality – in addition to traced actors – influencing the network must be acknowledged: the presence of a foreign researcher in a politically sensitive region creates both risk and misunderstanding. In the analysis of this content, efforts to reduce cultural bias and interpreter bias have been made, but can never be fully avoided.

Findings and discussion Findings will first examine the role of the “active user” (Ask & Sørensen, 2017) by following informants and how they establish their own networks of actors, looking at the mediators that enable access to actors. Users construct their experience via the use of various Internetlike services as composite parts, in which each part brings in different meanings, different publics and individuals. The study will then examine the everyday use of this composite Cuban Internet – a network (physical sections) of networks (each service module) of networks (services within each module). Here, a deeper investigation into the components as actors will be explored. While the Norwegian branch of domestication explores symbolic sense making, this section leans more heavily on the British branch, using the moral economy (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992) to examine the value exchange within the greater context of the user’s life. Through their habits and everyday use, we observe how users accept and reject values in different ways to generate a sense of ontological security. Lastly, we examine how parts of the networked actors disrupt and effect change within this larger sociotechnical ensemble. Together, this analysis will demonstrate the role of tracing the network and the network itself in the networked domestication process.

Composing your own Internet – if you can afford it There are several ways Cubans can create their own Internet. It may be simply accessing the local Wi-Fi park; it may involve a complex configuration of several services, networks, and physical locations. By tracing the network of services, the Internet produced varies, based on the mediators within an individual’s experience. Expanding outside a single service begins with context – in this case, three crucial mediators: political conditions, economic constraints (price), and social connections. These mediators shape the relationship between actors (Latour, 2005) and impact whether or not a connection will be made.

Political conditions In Cuba, political undercurrents foster and engender the technocultural environment; across the services, informants noted politics is a forbidden topic. The national laws and the terms of service established within the component networks try to align. Users commented that the Wi-Fi at the park was likely traced and to never post or talk about politics in public. EPS distributors noted the paquete never contained politically sensitive content or pornography. The same was stated about SNET. These non-state-sanctioned services were acknowledged as alegal, i.e. not quite legal, but not generally punished by law enforcement. So long as the rules outlined by each service are followed, breaking the general rule to enrol in these networks is not an issue.

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“I haven’t had problems. Everything is under control,” says Raul. “The rules are okay. Everyone is following the rules. […] Yes, at some point I’m a little worried about it. Maybe I don’t know what happens and it can affect me.” Nevertheless, these services involve an element of risk – both as a user and as an administrator or distributor. Other services that were fully illegal were noted to be at the discretion of the owner and granted only to close contacts. Any participant choosing to expand an Internet service into a larger Cuban Internet experience assumes varying levels of risk for their broader content access goals. Significantly, this also speaks to an active choice to resist or comply with legal boundaries, espousing specific values through consumption (Leong, 2022).

Economic constraints When it comes to the Cuban Internet, everything comes at a price. In a country with low monthly salaries, paying for all Internet services becomes quite costly. Enter the entrepreneurial risk takers who create hack services, alleviating cost pressures. Vendors of the hotspot Connectify resell the Internet at a lower price – a fairly common practice noted by Polson (2019) and Dye (2019). According to Irene, Connectify is sold at $1CUC at a day rate in this suburb. At volume, these services are lucrative for the vendors. Meanwhile, the limited national Internet is available for $0.10 CUC per hour. Hacker 1 explains that he exploits this service: “I have a business, but it is quite illegal. I share the (national) Internet with other people. I build tunnels out of the cheaper Internet into the ‘open’ web.” He goes on to explain that the service is sold only to trusted friends and friends of friends. It is both lucrative and a benevolent service to his close contacts to relieve price constraints. The mere existence of these services, particularly the popularity of Connectify, reinforces how important cost is to even participating in the Internet, let alone expanding one’s composite Internet. EPS and SNET are accessible by varying fee structures. For EPS, weekly prices can vary based on the day purchased – Fridays being the most expensive day with the newest releases, according to Distributor 2. Some informants explained how they paid less by copying only a portion of EPS at $1CUC per month. Gaining access to SNET requires not only a monthly fee, but investment into networking hardware that is costly. Alvaro, the local SNET administrator, described the collective effort to gain access, with everyone sharing the cost for the nano-stations and equipment, gaining admin status due to hardware networking knowledge. When and if the hardware requires repairs, all participants in this network agree to share the costs. Distributor 1 notes the cost to purchase multiple hard drives to use for simultaneous file transfer among neighbourhood clients. However, the ease of replication and file transfer put additional pressure on his business. He and a partner shared 20 clients per week, but as that began to decline, in combination with political risks for little benefit, he stopped operating. Price constraints are one way to clearly rank and track decision making and trade-offs between services. In the very construction and tracing of this network, where almost everything comes at a price, it is apparent where priorities lie.

Social contacts Gaining access to services through contacts varies in difficulty. For Connectify and EPS, vendors and distributors can sometimes find you. At other times, it’s just a matter of asking a

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few people: “There’s always someone you can ask – you can always find someone,” explains Leticia. “Around the park, anywhere. Or you’ll know someone who has [EPS], who got it from someone.” Gaining access to EPS and other services is just a matter of degrees of connection. For her, EPS became too costly during her unemployment. She now copies parts of EPS via a USB drive to get critical shows like Game of Thrones. And while social contacts can help simultaneously address economic concerns while allowing more people to gain access, this also harms the viability of distributors. Establishing the SNET set-up in this local community required Alvaro to leverage their network to fund and create the local infrastructure. Establishing the SNET network is both a communal and networked process: I knew about it, but I didn’t have the device to be connected to SNET. We collected the money to buy one device to connect SNET and now we share the connection in the community. Firstly, you need to have a nano-station device to establish a connection with the others. Or if you’re near someone with a nano-station, then you can connect with a LAN wire. And to set up? “You have to ask the admin of this zone,” Alvaro explains: First you need to search for him, asking around all the neighbours, who is the person. I knew the guy in the next town who had a main connection and so I got a switch here in my house and now people are connected to me. I was in charge by default because I made the first connection. The admin organises the network and people are all happy with the connection and the services. I look after the establishment of the stability of the connection. Lacking contacts is a challenge. Online participation in any form, but most commonly observed in Wi-Fi parks, required a level of digital literacy (both of mobile phones and connecting to the Internet). As a nation new to mobile phones, users would rely on knowledgeable family or friends nearby – or warm experts (Bakardjieva, 2005) – to help show them how to use mobile phones. Those like Irene and Javier were left to practise and learn alone. After going to the park a handful of times, without someone to help him, Javier never properly learnt to use his phone and has not gone back. Similarly to findings from Myanmarese users (Leong, 2017), digitally illiterate users motivated to get online would seek guidance via mobile phone shops to acquire mobile apps. Both mobile phone shops owners in this study noted it was not only the digitally illiterate: there was a cost trade-off to using Wi-Fi park as the Internet can be very slow. Thus $5 CUC for a large package of apps could be much more economical. Thus, while these Internet services themselves are networks, their establishment and use can require networks and experts. Where Håpnes’ (1996) use of network tracing was used to understand how gender becomes constructed through various actors in a process, this study uses tracing to interrogate how the broader concept like the Internet becomes constructed via various network technologies and services to account for variances in experience. Informants highlighted how constraints performed gatekeeping functions that enable access and establishment of one’s own version of the Internet. Enrolment exposes the power of users to expand their Cuban Internet experience or their lack of access to political, economic, social, and knowledge capital through mediators, revealing the network’s power dynamics through consumption (Castells, 2011), impacting usage frequency, access level, 304

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or even basic access. By observing an individual’s Cuban Internet unveil through network tracing, we come to understand how it becomes constructed, how people become included and excluded and by whom or what – but to what effect?

Domesticating a network, in a network The Cuban Internet introduces interesting characteristics as an object of study. Made up of several components, each component contains more users and components, each module carries its own symbolic meaning – though relational and volatile. This section looks at some of the expressed values of each service before examining a key historic moment as narrated by the local SNET administrator.

Wi-Fi parks as social Informants and scholars alike have noted Wi-Fi parks as sites of sociality. Polson (2019) in fact argues that the government’s goal is to promote the Internet for “social uses” and turns these locations into places of networked sociality. Informants supported this view in expressing the new symbolic meaning of the Wi-Fi park. “But people use imo,” emphasises Antonio, discussing the popularity of Cuba’s chat app. “People don’t say ‘I am going to the Wi-Fi park,’ they say ‘I’m going to the imo’!” This symbolic sociality underscores an inverse objectification, where both Wi-Fi users and non-Wi-Fi users like Alejandro reorient themselves towards the park – or technology – rather than placing a technology in specific space. While scholars have previously noted how the Wi-Fi park reconfigured the physical park area (Dye, 2019; Grandinetti & Eszenyi, 2018; Polson, 2019), here, where objectification has been noted to highlight the placement of technologies for symbolic meaning (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992), users reorient themselves to become associated with symbolic meaning: “I just go there (Wi-Fi park) sometimes,” recounts Alejandro, “the Wi-Fi park here has become a place not just to be connected to the Internet, but just to relate to other people.” For those with the intention to socialise online, time, however, is costly and socialising with those nearby is not a goal – though they contribute to the location’s symbolism. Despite largely the same technological affordances on SNET and the open web, the culture, publics, and ensuing symbolic value vary. When Carlos stopped using SNET, he went back to the Wi-Fi park. While the websites, he notes, had similar offerings, the sentiment changed: “There are different sites, but it’s more or less the same. I haven’t seen a large [content] difference. But what I realised is that people don’t have the knowledge, the culture of Internet [in the park]. People don’t know.”

Nanos and EPS: social and value management in the home The introduction of networked technologies in the home created new challenges for dwellers. Where nano-stations have signalled technology ownership and affluence to savvy neighbours, EPS has invited new content and values into the home to be managed. Paula has a special Wi-Fi set-up at home: If one user connects to Internet, then everyone is connected. We take advantage of that. But there have been 10 people connected in this house talking to IMO. It’s like I’m in the park now all of a sudden! People all come over. 305

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Where in-home Internet for tech-savvy Cubans enables convenience and privacy, it can simultaneously invite that which they seek to avoid: the sociality of the park. While Elena leverages close relations using her son’s in-home Wi-Fi, Paula’s nano-station has invited the curious eyes of neighbours who eventually asked for access. “We try not to say much, but you can see the illegal nano,” she admits, “but I change the password frequently.” Here, we observe the paradox of privacy signalling turning into a spot for sociality. The political climate intimates itself among actors and within specific Internet components, symbolic values change as other actors come into play. As EPS enters the home, for some parents the home becomes a site of contestation of social and moral values. While EPS states no explicit pornography, many movies and series can be quite sexually explicit. Domesticating the EPS quite literally brings in these external values (Brause & Blank, 2020), destabilising the social and propriety codes that would be mediated through television networks and parental control settings on devices. This creates additional labour within the household to protect children from inappropriate content. “No, she cannot search in the paquete. We just give her the content that she wants to see (on a USB). She cannot sit down and search in the paquete. We don’t allow that,” says Antonio. Paula also worries about EPS content: “Yes (I worry), I make the choice for her. We usually copy the paquete (onto a USB) while she’s at school.” It is interesting to note these two parents had concerns over the content for their daughters, but Santos and Enrique, both of whom have sons, decided that the EPS regulations were sufficient.

SNET: the “real” Internet experience For some informants, SNET represents the “real” Internet. While in the Wi-Fi park, Cubans call family and friends abroad using the Internet, SNET allows for more play and discovery (albeit within Cuba) by removing the price and time constraints that exist in the park. Users access local social networking sites, classifieds, chat rooms, and other services. As Raul describes: “It’s the nearest thing that resembles the real Internet for us. There are forums, social networks, chats, games, and online games. It is well conceived as a network.” By the very semantic recognition of SNET as more real than other services, it asserts a value and credibility assessment to other components. In Paula’s earlier comment, her impression of the park was relative to the “Internet culture” of SNET. This plethora of content on SNET, although certainly not as bountiful and connected as the open Internet, has gained a reputation. Martínez goes on to describe how it “reproduces much of the consumer Internet we know in the free world” (2017). This description resonates even with a non-user like Leticia: “I have heard rumours about [SNET]. It has everything! But I don’t know really. It has lot there, I hear.” For Irene, although she has a desire to use the Wi-Fi park Internet and hopes for in-home Internet, she remains sceptical of SNET: things [at home] have changed a bit because [her son] becomes exposed to many things. It’s [SNET’s] like the devil. Played a lot of games all the time, all night. My other nephews too. When they don’t have to work the next day, they played all night. Watching series and movies, too. SNET has created many copies of Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (Martínez, 2017). Although Irene also occasionally uses SNET for classifieds, she differentiates the symbolic meaning of the services by the perceived use cases: the Wi-Fi park has 306

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positive sociality because it connects family, unlike SNET. These locales and components take on new meaning in relation to each other. All users and non-users in the network thus contribute to the communal meaning of these components. SNET carries this reputation relative to the Wi-Fi park only because of the politics and pricing that hinder its technical potential. Politics of course carry some weight, but pricing and digital literacy are larger mediators as regulation against political speech and content restrictions exist on both services. SNET would also require computer ownership or access, registered at 1.29 million owners in 2017 (ONEI, 2017). This highlights the relative networked power (Castells, 2011) between services and the way in which user values, aspirations, and consumptions help to embolden certain actors over others. Motivations, perceived use, and interests play a key role in the formulation of these ensembles. The mere act of tracing one’s own network, configuring a composite Cuban Internet, helps to establish and render real the connotations and symbolic meaning of the services.

Disruption and change in the sociotechnical ensemble Meanings can change relative to other parts of the greater Cuban Wi-Fi ensemble. In this next section, we examine how parts of the networked actors disrupt and effect change within this larger sociotechnical ensemble. When a network is influenced and built upon/by powerful individuals, this can quickly alter the capabilities of the technology and the human actor-network composition, and consequently, the functional and symbolic value. This is more relevant when the network of individuals can quickly impact the technology itself and

Figure 20.1

SNET pilares (Martínez, 2017), redrawn by LAdmin1 to show the split between RoG (Republic of Game) and two other SNET regions. Additional regional labels added. Wifinet should be west of Habana del Heste (sic) (Pujol et al, 2017)

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not applicable to all technologies and circumstances. Of course, symbolic meanings from the collective user base can change over time, but the rapid nature of change is key to understanding impact. Modern technologies, including networked technologies and technologies reliant upon network effects as a product and value (both functionally and symbolically), can therefore introduce a level of volatility and uncertainty depending on the configuration of the infrastructure and power to users and administrators. As a composition of networks, the Cuban Internet is subject to change between services and within. One such exemplary cases is the SNET split of 2017, highlighting the disrupting role political changes can have when human actors play such a pivotal role in the stability of a networked technology. After showing Alvaro a drawing of SNET from the Wired article by Martínez (2017), he began to explain some of the recent changes to the network. First, he details how in October 2017, a dispute took place regarding the commercialisation of a store in the game World of Warcraft (WoW), which led to an infrastructural split of the network. “SNET is not for money,” he explained, they don’t want to make a business out of it. And this guy, the administrator (for the pilar Republic of Game (RoG)), was taking money for it. People pay for the level and weapons, but the physical money goes to the administrator. And people pay through transfer. You just send it with a code. It is like a third currency. These events have been corroborated by a report on Distintas Latitudes (2019), citing interadministrator conflicts over the store, resulting in the network split. Figure 20.1 shows an illustration made by Alvaro, showing the major group of pilares of GNTK, Comunidad Sur, and Cerro Cerrrado physically and infrastructurally partitioned the pilares of RoG/Santa Fe and Habana del Heste (sic) (Habana del Este)/Wifinet, who were in agreement on monetising WoW. Alvaro then details how the server locations and application management between ROG/ Santa Fe (Circle 1), Habana del Este/Wifinet (Circle 2), and the central pilares (Circle 3) now have implications for users’ access to applications due to the infrastructural split: “[Habana del Este/Wifinet] have social network servers in this place. So, [RoG/Santa Fe] don’t get social networks here. And [Havana del Este/Wifinet] don’t get WoW.” To rectify this, the united major pilares of GNTK and company built their own social networks to reduce dependency on Habana del Este. “And now there are some social networks here [Cerro], but the main [servers] are here [Havana del Este/Wifinet],” notes Alvaro. “Now there are two separate social networks. And people can’t connect [between the regions].” Severing relational connections meant that users on either side could not access services hosted in other circles. Operating in such political climate and under the specific rules and regulations of the network and services introduces a level of volatility and uncertainty. The rapidity of networked communications and products accelerates the impact of change. Conflicts, therefore, bring attention to the underlying authoritative nature of regulations and regulation enforcement and the actual network power. For users engaging in anti-programmatic practices, the enforcement of scripts becomes a compelling area for investigation in terms of agency and dollar votes – or network effects votes. By leaving a network, the network value can decrease  – particularly when both the functional and symbolic values are predicated and built upon human actor-networks. A few months after the split, only one user at the time of study had noticed changes – via gossip from friends, enticing him to return to SNET. “People say SNET is better now. A little bit better,” recounts Nestor, “because there is much 308

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less trouble in the network, less congestion. Everything is much faster.” Thus volatility and change is not necessarily negative – although Alvaro’s tone was largely negative in explaining the fragmentation of the network. This rupture is certainly experienced differently for individual actors within the network. As observed with smartphone speakers, networked components invite new variables from the outside world into an established system or network (Brause & Blank, 2020). The component invites the effects of other human actors with agency, rules, and their own moral economies. While Cuba may seem unique in this case study, due to its unconventional Internet configuration, we can also apply the theoretical framework to similar phenomena like Facebook, where features become so large that they in themselves become a composite network that can be “unbundled” from the application, while still existing within a product experience ecosystem. WeChat is a noted mega-app (Chan, 2015), which invites other challenges in analysing the application as a composition of functions. Through analysis of the cultures and moral economies of the Cuban Internet, varying compositions and relative meanings move to the centre of our concerns. Networked domestication and tracing offer a means to track this from a decision making and mediator perspective rather than trying to process the entire application as a whole, without overly fragmenting the analysis.

Networked domestication for contemporary technoculture The Cuban Internet has introduced an interesting set of characteristics as an object of study: as an Internet made up of several components, with each component containing more users and sub-components, it poses the methodological challenge of complexity. The Cuban Internet configuration is a complex media network that involves interrelating media, sometimes experienced as a whole, sometimes experienced through one component. This differs from some other media analyses as it can be both one technology concept and cross-media consumption. Networked domestication is not necessarily applicable to all cases of Internet access or Wi-Fi. For example, while Thomas, Wilken and Rennie (2021) note the shift to media interconnectedness and the need to take a more holistic approach to analysing Internet adoption, they chose to research the domestication of Wi-Fi as a single technology form and its role as an enabler of cross-media constellations. The Internet and Wi-Fi in the Cuban context, however, are not like in-home Wi-Fi as practised in developed nations: the Wi-Fi park, SNET, and EPS comprise a Cuban Internet configuration (Dye, 2019; Leong, 2022) and each composite part can be analysed individually or as a whole as they enable and supplement one another. Of course, the difficulty analysing complex networked media is scoping: context can always be added (Haddon, 2016). Therefore, analysis will be subject to judgement and feasibility. However, in this case study of the Cuban Internet, a networked approach seems appropriate. Haddon (2011) expressed the need to expand the scope of technology analysis to larger objects of study, accounting for network factors like the critical mass effect and network effects. In the mid-noughts, Hartmann (2006) similarly explored the methodological challenges stemming from the growing complexity of the modern technocultural environment. She called for a return to the concept of articulation, wherewith the networked configuration of large actors could be analysed from a doubly or triply articulated perspective; this however, looks deeper into one concept adding the context and ritual. We instead extend a networked domestication approach as a means to understand the 309

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relational complexity and the role of users constructing their own technological meanings. Liste and Sørensen (2015) remarked how much of domestication scholarship has focused first on the process of technology appropriation; in their study, they examine the results and outcomes of domestication to better understand practices. Similarly, the analysis of technology through the lens of networked domestication helps to understand processes, establishment of symbolic meanings, and some of the consequences of actors/ network components. This chapter endeavoured to accomplish two things. First, it unpacked the complex adoption process of the Cuban Internet in Havana, showing how very individualised approaches could be understood holistically, using elements of ANT and domestication. Second, it explored the relative symbolic meanings generated through this enrolment process and introduced and exploring concepts of networked domestication, network volatility, power and hierarchy, and change. This study highlights domestication from a network perspective, where a technology itself is networked as opposed to a standalone technology (e.g., a CD-player). This has effects beyond network effects, although network effects certainly carry importance for value and meaning creation – the more actors, the more exposure to change. Networked domestication intervenes at the level of relations and volatility, and their impact and influence on symbolic meaning changes. It shows how the networked consumption of technology carries implications from the perspective of the imaginary and exposes power dynamics in domestication. Accounting for change is also not new to domestication. Ask and Sørensen noted through collective domestication “that raiding produces feedback that may invite renewed domestication effort” (2017: 2). Usage and change can also renew the domestication process, altering the symbolic. From a networked domestication perspective, this study expands the analysis to observe how actors can impact this renewed effort. The main advantages of the networked domestication approach are the handling of complexity, to contextualise analysis in collective and networked environments (among a variety of technology factors, mediators, and actors) and individualised experiences, and to account for volatility, disruption, and change in a rapidly iterating software environment. Tracing the network allows us to clearly map where and how the volatility arises, presenting the relational meanings within the broader composite ensemble. Not all networked technology needs to be tied to networked domestication. This chapter illustrates that if networks are germane to the configuration of technology and the process of use, a deep interrogation into this characteristic can be brought to the forefront. But to achieve this, academics need the tools, analytical frameworks, updated vocabulary, terminology, and case studies. Continuing the current shift in domestication analysis, this study accounts for domestication beyond the individual (be it collective, externalised, or now networked) where motivations, perceived use, and interests play a key role. Future research will need to explore the contexts that engender different domestication modes (what was produced, and how produced meaning is maintained, renegotiated, and subject to change) and ask if other analytical tools (beyond ANT or network power) can help better understand the domestication of networked technologies.

Notes 1 This research was partially funded by a grant from the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. 2 $1Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) is pegged at $1USD, or $26 Cuban Pesos.

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21 FEELING GOOD, FEELING SAFE Domesticating phones and drugs in clubbing Kristian Møller

Introduction While personal media devices are part of and transform most parts of contemporary, everyday life, their role in nightlife leisure cultures remains under unexamined. At the same time, drug use and its effects are often also addressed somewhat fleetingly or in generalised terns in most clubbing literature. This is not surprising, given the normative and legal reality that makes most drugs “illicit”. This may incentivise cultural researchers to downplay or frame out this chemical reality. However, this creates a knowledge vacuum about the role of digital and chemical processes in clubbing practice and sociability. Identifying limitations in current theorisations, this chapter proposes and demonstrates the ability of domestication theory to not only investigate smartphones and drugs separately but as entangled clubbing infrastructures. Following the emergence of mobile devices, the internet, and social media, the domestication analytical framework has been a site of theoretical and conceptual adaptation and reinterpretation (Haddon, 2011; Hartmann, 2005). The concepts of the home, ontological security, media objects and representations, as well as moral economies, are being applied to ways of organising personal life and spheres that trouble the notions of home-society separation. As it turns out, leaving behind Silverstone’s (1994) traditionalistic orientation to the spatially bounded, singular domesticity of the family, and instead focusing on how media are made to feel safe and in line with people’s lifeworlds (see, for example, Møller & Nebeling Petersen, 2017), has proven to be useful in a broad array of social situations (Hartmann, 2020). As such, this chapter continues the tendency to apply domestication to decidedly non-domestic, non-normative practices. Much like the notion of “being at-home,” clubbing is typically understood in the literature as being a matter of singular presence within a physically and socially bounded space. Thus, processes of something similar to domestication can be assumed to be present, making it reasonable to assume its applicability and usefulness to this culture that is otherwise not recognisable as a practice of the home. Rave and club studies typically take either a cultural study or a public health approach (Anderson & Kavanaugh, 2007), each bringing out different aspects. The former attunes the research to the production of youth identity, tribal or subcultural organisation, resistance, and sexual/gender deviance (ibid.: 506). The latter focuses on rave-related risks of drug use, typically producing “problematic use” and “problem publics” along the way (Møller & DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-30

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Hakim, 2021), severely limiting its ability to engage with the social potentials of a scene. It is within this tension I would argue that the domestication approach provides a particularly useful intervention. Its suggested analytical frames target the transformation of culture as media objects and introduce their representational innovations into physical and social spaces. Crucially, questions of risk and safety are of central concern, but so are potential pleasures that accommodate these “wild” objects and representations in need of “taming.” Risk, then, is treated as a modern condition applicable to all contexts and people, thus bypassing the health approach’s slant towards the pathologisation of at-risk publics. The argument for addressing media’s role in clubbing is fairly straightforward. With their ubiquity and intense “technicity of attention” (Bucher, 2012), they are powerful agents in contemporary human sociality. Understanding how social media’s affective and social forces are handled by club-goers is an important aspect of club culture to unpack. Thinking about clubbing and smartphones from the perspective of domestication asks us to consider and integrate analyses of how devices circulate, their specific representational flows in and out of the club, the risks and pleasures associated with them, and the moral economies that work to govern these devices. This chapter explores different axes along which clubbing scenes are organised spatially, affectively, and morally. What a club is, very much relates to its physical boundedness to everyday life, enforced by its temporal displacement and expansion. With the power of domestication research’s attention to placement work (such as the TV belonging in certain spaces of the house in certain ways), this chapter will interrogate clubbing activity as it relates to different zones or areas, and how smartphones are related to these areas and the flows between them. Somewhat overlapping is the attention to the different moral economies that converge and compete in clubs, informing the cultural formations around dancing, drug-taking, etc. Empirically, this chapter is based on four semi-structured interviews with gay men in their 30s and 40s attending the same Berlin techno club and scene. The interlocutors were found through a combination of personal networks and snowballing, and the interviews were carried out between August and December 2021. The close-reading of hour-long, transcribed interviews was facilitated by coding in the programme Atlas.ti. The interview guide and the first coding were based on the same pre-established thematic orientations towards drugs and smartphones, and the domestication concepts of object/representation, moral economy, and safety/risk. Inspired by a concurrent reading of club, rave, and domestication studies, close-readings revealed complimentary themes, most prominently sociality, club space architecture, and questions of control. With only four interviews of members of somewhat similar backgrounds attending the same scene, their analysis is indicative and illustrative of themes possibly relevant for a range of clubbing and rave scenes and practices. Sampling such a tight cluster heightens the ability to reach analytical saturation, which is reflected in the fact that I was able to find support for analytical points across most or all interview transcripts.

Smartphones and dance clubs in the literature Reviewing the literature on nightlife and the night-time economy, very little has been written on digital media devices’ role in the production of rave and club cultures. An exception is Karenza Moore’s pioneering study of (non-smart)phone use in dance club culture (Moore, 2006). Here she traces mundane practices and meanings assigned to the phone following its use before, during, and after a night out. Crucially, she finds that phones are used to procure drugs, connect with old and new acquaintances, and feel safe on the way 314

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to and from the venue. However, in the literature technologies that get the most attention are not the personal ones, but the ambient, spatial presence of techno music, and how it affects what happens on the dancefloor. Inspired by Baudrillard, Vitos (2017) proposes that the machinic and inhuman qualities of hyper-regular and replicable programmed techno music are “experiential disintegration of temporality” (ibid.: 138). In his study on embodied techno space, Martin Zebracki suggests that “bodies-in-(e)motion sense the space in interplay with digital content that is electronically transmitted as sonic waves” (Zebracki, 2016: 114). A more symbolic and subcultural approach is found in Goulding and Shankar’s comparison of the DJ’s social position to that of the “shaman” in that their control of the music creates movements between loss and return to self in the crowd of participants (Goulding & Shankar, 2011: 1445). From a public discourse perspective, Vitos (2017) notes that news media play an important role in the establishment of moral panics that have historically been attached to rave and club culture and drug use, and have given credence to the worldwide illegalisation of drug possession and use. This, in extension, marks techno scenes as problematic (ibid.: 141), creating the ground for counterpublic identification (Warner, 2002) around “defiant consumption” (van Ree, 2002). Thus, news media often contribute to the normative and legal marginalisation of club drug culture, making the drug-related harms within such scenes less a question of public health but rather a legal and criminological one. It is in this context that “counterpublic health” strategies enacted by non-institutional actors in such scenes become key, something that Kane Race has accounted for in sexualised drug use scenes among gay men (Race, 2018: 166). As such, media representations of clubs and drug use create a hostile surrounding or context that increases physical and normative risks for club-goers and narrows the social space in which club owners can operate. From a domestication viewpoint, the management or taming of drug risks in club scenes are woven together with the borderline-criminalisation and thus limiting of resources that the normative outside creates. Any use of smartphones in these spaces should therefore be considered in relation to how it contributes to counterpublic health work, as well as how it handles the leakage of visibility that threatens the practice and scene. A few works beyond the health literature have focused on drug effects, with Bøhling succinctly describing how this can be approached from the perspective of assemblage: …the use of drugs (in this case MDMA and cocaine) might be interpreted as something that augments the body and mind of the subject (biologically and psychologically) to become more responsive to the affective flows of the club assemblage. (Bøhling, 2014: 375) This reads like a response to Kane Race’s call for research to ask: “What, in a given encounter, is a drug-using body capable of?” (Race, 2009: location 3573). However, smartphones’ role in clubbing as a practice is largely absent in the literature, with most mentions being only brief and generalised. For example, Fitzgerald notes how, in the mid-1990s, the practice of calling a number would be a gateway to the last-minute reveal of a party location (Fitzgerald, 1998: 46). Conversely, phones-as-gateways are also a liability in clubbing. For instance, Biehl-Missal describes how, at the famous Berlin club Berghain, phone cameras are being covered with stickers at the entrance (2019: 21). This signals that media use and their distribution to other publics is considered problematic by the venue owners. Further, Brown and Gregg (2012) examine the role of social media traces within young women’s drinking and party cultures. Their findings challenge the narrative of regret, contending that “Facebook’s 315

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mode of witnessing allows an appreciation of the extent to which young women carefully organize the routes and the itineraries for hedonistic consumption” (ibid.: 363). While there are very real, gendered risks, the study highlights how through significant domestication work in controlling the digital aspects of such risks, Facebook can actually sustain and reinforce access to drinking pleasures. Generally, however, the invisibility of personal social media technology in the literature draws a picture of smartphones and their mediation as neither central nor valued infrastructures for club cultural practice. In the instances that smartphones are addressed, their effects are subject to vague, theoretical, and grand speculations, such as: the use of carry-on technology, most saliently the smartphone, could be used by participants in techno events, if permitted at all, to stir an ‘extended body’ experience […] participants’ live mobile phone behaviours (e.g. videotaping, photo-taking, messaging) might (un)intentionally trigger gendered/sexualised inter-corporeal (e)motions on the spot, which can be frank or contrived and hence potentially detract from an ‘authentic’ clubbing experience. (Zebracki, 2016: 114) Media effects on authenticity and presence are considered along with a crude enhance/ detract-dichotomy. What this extended body would look like, what kinds of externalities are adopted into a body, what struggles are related to this assemblage, and with what outcomes or horizons of possibility, remains unexamined. Further, Zebracki argues that technology is integrated into clubbing “to such an extent that technological interfaces of the (gendered/sexualised) cyborgian body have nearly become invisible in techno(logy)-space” (Zebracki, 2016: 114). Here, the cyborg figure is used to argue that club technologies broadly annihilate or make inconsequential the hierarchies of gender and sexuality that culture at large otherwise imposes on the body. This runs quite contrary to the intent of Haraway’s mobilisation of the figure, which analytically typically is used to denaturalise embodiment and thus intervene in the politics of its assemblage, which would otherwise go unnoticed. This misreading is symptomatic for clubbing literature’s rudimentary understanding of technology’s role, and thus presents a case for the value of applying media theory. Arguably, domestication analyses is a particularly promising framework, as it pays keen attention to how media do not in fact disappear into the subject or surrounding but are active and often unruly, difficult agents within a given moral economy.

Domestication beyond media In studies of media and communication, domestication analysis has been instrumental for understanding that the way people live with media is a question of physical and normative negotiation of the socio-material conditions produced by society at large. Similar concerns can be found in club studies, which interrogate such cultures across music, drugs, spatiality, experience, dance, temporality, and pleasure (see, for example, Duff, 2012). Figures and theories of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) are often used to handle this heterogeneity: John Fitzgerald considers the rave assemblage (1998), Frederik Bøhling night club, alcohol, and sexuality assemblages (Bøhling, 2014, 2015), and Robert Shaw urbanism (2014). Media assemblage is missing, though Vitos (2017) provides a theoretical gesture towards the “media ecology of the dance floor” (Vitos, 2017: 144).

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While musical mediation at parties – and also the circulation of media signals in day-to-day environments – originates from outside the physical limits of the body, drugs mediate internally by influencing neural activity (as secondary mediators reprogramming the primary mediator of neurotransmission), prescribing a deeper and more convincing immersion into one’s virtual environment. (Vitos, 2017: 144) Generally, the literature on clubbing is expansive and diverse in its thematic and material orientations, working across different scales: from the chemicals in bodies and the club space geography, to the societal structures that surround and govern it. Such an ecological approach is useful for thinking about clubbing with smartphones as it intertwines with the affective and social processes of drug use. Similarly, considering clubbing from a domestication approach will yield analyses that cut across scales and technologies, as well as draw together material conditions and affective processes. While assemblage more radically breaks down foreground/background and text/context constructs than the domestication approach, several other club studies take a similar human-centred approach through the focus on experience: clubbing or raving (Goulding et al., 2002, 2009; O’Grady, 2012), aesthetics and dance (Biehl-Missal, 2019), and the physiological (Duff, 2008). Like domestication studies, many club studies use (auto)ethnographic accounts (Garcia, 2013; Moore, 2010; Tan, 2013; Zebracki, 2016). While operating from a more humancentred phenomenology, domestication analysis is similarly adept at bringing together the different scales at which pleasure and danger are produced, assimilated, and felt. As noted, Silverstone’s notion of “home” (1994) has been challenged and made peripheral in the domestication literature, which allows us to consider clubbing as a site of intense media struggle and feeling. This bypasses the normatively prescriptive notion of “ontological security” to instead think more broadly and dynamically about clubs as physical and social sites that, in the face of risks and challenges, are nevertheless made to feel safe enough. Further, in a somewhat radical departure from other domestication studies, the primacy of media is challenged by including drugs in the repertoire of objects that are interrogated. On a practical level, placing drugs as context would betray the importance of such substances as broadly agreed upon in the literature. More interestingly, this intervention arguably addresses a shortcoming in domestication analysis itself. At its core, it is an analysis of and across different sites and scales – most instructively across society, media industry, media devices, representations, and (home) spaces. Crucially, attention to what counts as a body, as well as the chemical and social processes that make up what we understand as bodily sensation, is glaringly absent. Considering this, domestication analysis is not at its root attuned to the increasing medical and chemical bodily interventions at the highest societal level (Clarke et al., 2003; Rose & Novas, 2005; Zola, 1972). When studying clubbing practices where drug use is a key component, adapting domestication to include this scale of analysis is therefore key. With this amendment, the analysis will draw from domestication and assemblage to trace objects, risks, and moral economies not only across subjects but also through them.

Partying with phones The interviewees are all aware that the affective and social potentials of the scene are threatened by the “addictive” power of social media developed and fine-tuned by extremely

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wealthy companies to intervene and grab attention. These digital economies of attention compete with the physically grounded aesthetics and experiences of clubbing: … the use of mobile phones is a very thin line in clubbing, which is a very helpful thing […] At the same time, it can be very annoying and very disturbing. (Tobias) … when you are high, you are easily connected to these things like social media. And it’s not fun at all. (Hans) You want people to be present. (Per) Using your phone in the club is understood as tempting but often a “not fun” interference into the pleasure of the scene, and something one should try to avoid both for oneself and for others. Phones pose a real risk to pleasures in that they can distract from core aspects of clubbing. As Tobias addresses it: “[when] I see people getting in some kind of spin with the hook-up apps or social media in a club, I’m trying to make them aware of what they’re doing.” Overall, however, the affirmative and safety potentials of keeping a phone on you are deemed more important than the risks of getting into social media “spins.” As Hans notes, “if you are able to limit that and just check the important things and not start checking Instagram or Facebook, then it’s fine.” Despite these concerns, interviewees produced opposing narratives of the extreme usefulness of smartphones for achieving the kinds of social and drug pleasures that clubbing promises: Because I’m sending messages of course to my friends, we stay in contact if we are not standing together. (Hans) I use my mobile phone in clubs to stay in contact with my very inner circle of friends. To check on them, where are they. And especially how they are… to meet up again to re-dose. (Tobias) Sometimes I chat with friends at home who wanted to be at the club. Or if they live in a different city and they wish they were at the club. (Per) While the digital components of clubbing sociality are bracketed and partial (“Stay in contact,” “check on them”), this is generally in line with Duff’s finding that phones help in the “affective engineering of the course and intensity of the drug high” (Duff, 2012: 154); they allow for impromptu gatherings on the dancefloor, minimising time spent looking for people and maximising time dancing. Thus, when communicating digitally, interviewees mostly did so with friends present in some other part of the club, or if not, with people they wished were there. Smartphones then create an infrastructure that allows individuals distributed across and beyond the club to form and maintain a clubbing sociality beyond physical co-presence. While phone use was understood to easily become a source 318

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of distraction, this kind of digitally facilitated “turning away” from clubbing was also utilised strategically: I would just like drift off and like just like go with my phone downstairs […] and then I would write with guys on like apps. And it’s kind of like a space where you kind of recharge the batteries before you go up and dance again. (Morten) Discursively, “recharging” frames clubbing pleasures as intensities that may become depleted over the night. Work is required to build them up again, and Morten uses social media and hook-up apps as communicative and representational resources for engaging his mind in ways that he deems relaxing and replenishing. The interviewees present narratives of digital and chemical entanglement, with the physical and communicative affordances of phones playing into drug use, sociability, and affectivity. Phones are useful objects for drug consumption, with screens and flash lights assisting in the handling of drugs in dimly lit spaces, and with the glass screen practically servicing as an always at-hand surface for dosing drugs in powder or crystal form. Morten notes that drug “lines” on the phone surface allow for easy evaluation of “the size of them.” Further, the note-taking and timer/count-down apps are frequently used to manage and keep track of drug use to achieve the best effects and control the risks of overdosing: I always write down how much I’ve taken and at what time, so I keep track. (Per) I set a timer on my phone […] it gives me an alarm when like an hour, or one hour and a half has passed. (Hans) Alcoholic party practices do not typically see the same degree of formalised self-surveillance, which is most likely since drugs are generally more concentrated and harder to dose. Arguably, it is the illegality of drugs that makes phone capacities supportive of, as well as threats to, drugenhanced clubbing practice. On the one hand, phones’ representational and social capacities present a risk of leakage and exposure to judgemental publics or even law enforcement. On the other hand, the multifunctionality of readily at-hand devices is invaluable for minimising the risk of overdose for highly mobile club-goers. This gets to the core of disinhibition not always being a question of being fully out of control, but often carefully planned and bracketed. Per notes that “I wanted to liberate myself from all the rules, but at the same time, I’m controlling what I take.” The right kind of phone interactions for him is not detrimental to clubbing intensities but in fact heighten them, making them more sustainable. However, at the same time, with these digital traces comes incidental effects on drug use, in that while strict timekeeping makes it easier to avoid overdosing, the timer going off is “…also a sign for you to go to take the next dose” (Hans). Thus, the phone intervention into drug use frequency might make drug effects more uniform and sustainable, but also nudge towards sustained use over time.

Dancefloor, hallway, bathroom: zoned regulation of smartphone use Clubs facilitate “leaving behind the normal rules of everyday society” (Goulding & Shankar, 2011: 1436) through their material boundedness, that is, imagined, spatial, and temporal 319

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separation from society. This separation affords the sense of privacy and a “world-apart” that allows club-goers if only momentarily, to experiment with behaviours that are deemed too risky to try out elsewhere. Take these statements: You feel like you’re in your own little bubble, where people can’t really reach you…it gives you a mental break, being on drugs, but also actually gives you a break. (Per) … letting go of time, letting go of self-imaging, letting go of the outside world. (Morten) The club as a space apart constitutes a “bubble,” an opening and possibility for different connections. With drug use being feasible and intertwined with architecture’s “outside-in” effects on bodies, drugs work “inside-out,” and together create a deep immersion into a “virtual environment” (Vitos, 2017). Much research finds that clubbing may provide temporary relief from everyday life, requirements of productivity and respectability. If separation underpins such relief, mediation of experience on social media, with its ability to reach large and sometimes unintended audiences, presents a significant challenge. As noted, the club scenes the interviewees participate in typically have photography bans in place, with entrance staff using stickers to cover smartphone cameras. While these can of course easily be peeled off, it seems like a parallel moral economy among clubbers assures that they mostly are not. As one interviewee puts it: “well, people can take off the stickers, of course, but there’s a general sense of responsibility, I think, that ravers do not take pictures.” The moral economy among “ravers” of discretion and unmediated presence gives the rule legitimacy and ensures its effectiveness. At this scale, smartphones present a challenge to the specific types of ontological security made available by club scenes, a challenge that requires taming. Taking a further cue from domestication, we may go beyond this somewhat crude inside-outside dichotomy to consider how smartphones as objects may circulate and be used in different areas or zones of the club. In the literature on the geography of clubs, such precision is underexamined. Some works do consider club architecture, phenomenologically speculating over the affective effects of spatial “flows” (Biehl-Missal, 2019) and “Ermöglichungsarchitektur” (architecture of possibilities – Rüb & Ngo, 2011: 146). From the perspective of play, O’Grady argues that the club is a “spatial construct that offers a context for moments of individual and collective transformation that are expressed and experienced performatively” (O’Grady, 2012: 86). While this brings out the dynamic between expansive experiences and spatial boundedness, it does not consider the many different types of space and function that a club comprises, seemingly collapsing the dancefloor with the entire club site. Thus, at this scale, differences in the behavioural scripting of the club’s zones are lost. Tuning in to the spatial organisation of smartphone use in clubbing practice, the interviewees draw clear distinctions between at least four zones: the dancefloor, the bars and sitting areas, the toilet, and darkrooms. The majority express that the dancefloor should be for dancing, with smartphone use generally frowned upon. Thus, interviewees were careful about having their phones out in this space: It generally annoys me when people are, for example, next to me on the dance floor, are using their mobile phones, and the displays are not even dimmed and stuff like this. (Tobias) 320

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Well, looking at the smartphone when high can be a little challenging because the light is very bright. Especially [on] ketamine, which can distort your sight […] I usually keep it in my fanny pack. (Per) Here we see that the moral economy governing smartphone use on the dancefloor is anchored in part in physical, sensual challenges related to bright screens in dark spaces and drug-induced visual sensitivity: because of the proximity of bodies and devices within a dark space, along with the sensitivity of chemically modulated perceptions, the issue of screen light pollution easily transmits to surrounding club-goers. In these instances, judgements of inconsideration can be made (“the displays are not even dimmed”), judgements that are further justified by some clubs’ formal recognitions of “no phones on the dancefloor.” However, phones are still used but precautions are made: Per reported “going out in the hallway,” and Tobias explains: If I need to use my phone, then I definitely leave the dancefloor. Just go to the next wall, turn my back to the dance floor and type quickly […] go to the bar area, sit down somewhere, it’s even better for you, you’re not stressed, and you’re not annoying to other people. (Tobias) Beyond the dim lighting and the chemical distortion of faculties, the bright screen is a disturbance not only because it stands out, but because of its communicative affordances and connotations; it gestures towards an orientation beyond the club space, thus disturbing the sense of containment which defines the capacities of clubbing. Excluding prominent phone use on the dancefloor from the moral economy thus sustains this narrative and the experience of separation from normative publics, as well as the potential that this holds. In extension, because of the low interference with dancing, the central mode of clubbing, smartphone use in hallways and bar areas is not policed in the same way. In these spaces, phones can be used to connect club-goers without objection, because drug use is at least officially not supported by the spatial and economic infrastructure of clubs. With toilet stalls offering the least vulnerable location for illegal drug consumption, phones become important infrastructures for organising flows of collective assemblage in these spaces. Thus, the interplay between drug legislation, club rules, and user risk minimisation imbues the toilet area and stalls with social significance: … you have to go to the toilet because you’re not allowed to take drugs in public. (Per) Going to the toilet together taking drugs is part of the party […] you collect each other, you find each other and then you are at least every hour, one and a half hours, together in a small room talking about what happened. (Hans) …it becomes a very social toilet experience. (Tobias) …it’s like this collective moment. I feel like that’s where you feel really close to your friends somehow… I think that’s a kind of nice ritual. (Morten) 321

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Analysing at this granular scale it becomes clear that smartphones not only need to be tamed but are also key to the assemblage of a ritual of convening and sharing a pleasurable activity. Smartphone communication plays a crucial role in temporally and spatially converging pathways and, in turn, the synchronisation of chemical bodily modulation and the clubbing experience. Strategic usage of smartphones is key to the assemblage of communal experience as well as chemical intensification.

Competing moral economies As has become clear, clubbing pleasures derive, in large part, from a sense of suspension from everyday life, which, in turn, requires smartphone use to be carefully configured so as not to disturb this distinction. Taking a step back, Tobias reflects on what makes a party feel good. Using the term of a shared “codex,” in the sense of a code of conduct, he summarises it in the following way: …how are you approaching someone? How are you approaching someone in a sexual context? in a drug context? in a behaviour context? in a scene on the dance floor? […] I think a really nice vibe of a party, is […] the concept of the party understood by everyone? (Tobias) Party pleasures are heightened when there is a sense of a shared moral economy about the values of the scene and a sense of how to behave to maintain these values. While behavioural scripts vary between zones and situations, as the previous section carved out, they all fall under the same script of care and respect. Openly typing on mobile phones on the dancefloor is a disturbance. Venues banning photography or pushing for patrons to leave their phones at the coat-check may seem like an intervention motivated by the same moral economy. However, some interviewees point out the disparities of interest between venue owners and patrons: I don’t like the clubs like [sex focused club] when they ask you to leave the phone at coat check […] I always need my phone in case I need someone. (Hans) Because I mean, you would set up those rules to either protect yourself [the club owners] or to protect the club-goers […] I think when a club tries to prevent people from bringing [smartphones] in, they have a problem with the crowd itself. (Tobias) Are you able to use smartphones to make your own experience better and safer, or is phone use limited in order to keep others safe from non-consensual documentation and sharing? On the surface, these rules negotiate concerns about care for self and others. As such, they seem to be variations on the same moral economy. However, rules for smartphone use are put in place and governed not by patrons themselves, but by those who control the venue space. While controlling intersubjective surveillance might assimilate to moral economical scripts of care, club owners have the other possible motivation of avoiding the bad press and legal ramifications of having the use and consequences of illegal drug use documented and circulating broadly. Thus, for venues, rules on phone use are as much a question of 322

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navigating the political and legal landscape as they are about keeping patrons safe. Crucially, the rules draw legitimacy and ultimately effectivity through their alignment and alliance with certain moral economies of club-goers. Smartphones’ ability to create digital traces is not only useful for the negotiation of personal safety in drug use. In line with Brown and Gregg’s findings on drunk Facebook posting (2012), some interviewees express how digital recordings can be sites of intense feeling and reminiscing, by way of revisiting clubbing sensations. On his note-taking practice Per notes that: “it’s also some sort of memorabilia. Giving me warm feelings of what has transpired.” Beyond personal and positive use, this sort of digital witnessing can also be a tool for social memory, as in the case of Facebook postings. Tobias speaks of once in a while breaking the moral economy of digital privacy when seeing a scene that is particularly evocative of the “vibe” of the evening: “This is sometimes sexual situations; this could be someone dancing alone on an outdoor dancefloor; this could be someone sitting in a sunray and having a certain expression.” In that case, in taking pictures he is careful to point out that “this is happening just with the consent of people. And I would never publish it. And I would send it to the people involved and keep it for me.” The capture and circulation of memories is tightly controlled. Sharing the picture with those it documents signals that he sees this memory object as belonging to them both and that sharing it reinforces their communal bond. An opposite way that smartphone documentation can play into the reproduction of communal bonds is when it is used as a correctional tool. Speaking about a friend who repeatedly overdoses at clubs but then seems to forget that it has happened, Hans says: I did it once. I took a picture of a friend to show him later what he looks like and I was so shocked by the picture that I deleted it. (Hans) Using pictures pedagogically like this is, on the one hand, in line with the moral economy of using drugs safely and without negative consequences for others. On the other hand, it breaks with the shared understanding of keeping club practice undocumented and thus safe from the harms of leakage to other publics. It indicates that within moral economies of clubbing there are tensions of safety, care, and responsibility that cannot be uniformly resolved. By the same token, smartphone use cannot be said to fully align with or disturb such moral economies, but participates in the negotiations of these tensions, sometimes heightening their problematisation, and at other times diffusing them.

Conclusion Infusing the domestication approach with assemblage theory’s attention to material emergence, this chapter has interrogated the normative, spatial, and practical organisation of media and drug use in club culture. I have demonstrated that domestication analysis’ scalability and integration of practice and normativity provide a much-needed intervention into what is found to be theoretical blind spots in the club studies literature. Domestication theory not only introduces media sensibility in a field sorely lacking thereof, but also allows for its joint interrogation with drug use – another key, yet underexamined, infrastructure of clubbing. This is achieved by attuning the framework to a broader spectrum of materials by including biochemical, intrabody transformations that domestication analyses otherwise forego. The concept of “moral economies” has been shown to be very useful for understanding the use of smartphones and drugs when clubbing. In the moral economies of clubbing, 323

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smartphones were important in the control of drug use, sociability and affects, being particularly useful for negotiations of safety, care, and responsibility. Similarly, drug use was a site of domestication in that its use was considered risky, yet with the right ways of taming, its effects could be domesticated and enjoyed safely. Several heterogenous ideals and positions within a single club scene or culture competed, with smartphones playing a decisive yet complex role in their contested enforcement and entrenchment. Phones were seen as potentially expanding addictive media culture into club spaces, thus being in direct opposition to the value put on containment, immediacy and unmediated presence in clubbing practice. However, at the same time, phones were also found to be extremely useful for establishing and maintaining the affective orientations and modes of sociability valued in the moral economy of clubbing. Social media and hook-up apps, while typically coded as distractions, sometimes served as breaks for “recharging.” Clubbing was characterised by movements between different degrees and forms of interaction, with smartphones strategically used to support momentary turning away. Phones were also found to be practical in the controlled use of drugs, in that they as physical objects allowed for better dosage, evaluation, documentation, and timekeeping. From the domestication approach’s attention to spatial organisation emerged a more granular understanding of phone practices and moral economies as varying between the dancefloor, the bars and sitting areas, the toilet, and darkrooms. The centrality of dancefloor affects for the clubbing experience led to phone use in this area to be more tightly controlled and scripted, requiring among other things bodily orientation work to minimise distraction. Conversely, areas of less importance were widely used for phone communication. Phones were key to the assemblage of a ritual of convening to dance and the social, chemical modulation of the senses, and flows of movement between zones were deeply dependent on technological intervention. Venue instated interventions domesticating phone use should be considered in relation to the legal and political risks they face in the society in which the clubs operate. The degree of alignment between moral economies of club institutions and their patrons affects the legitimacy and thus effectiveness of such rules. Photographic documentation played into the reproduction of communal bonds through pedagogy. Photographs served as memorabilia that allowed positive memories and feelings to be revisited. Conversely, photography potentially served as correctional instruments of witnessing when (drug-affected) behaviour was deemed detrimental to individual and communal safety and enjoyment. Since its formulation, domestication theory has been a site of ongoing reinterpretation and incremental innovation. In this tradition, this chapter’s particular reorientation makes it applicable not only to non-domestic phenomena but also to non-normative practices of identity and sociability transcendence. This focus on change as pleasure and the default situation stands in stark contrast to Silverstone’s notion of ontological security. Considering the robustness of the analysis, it should be abundantly clear that the value of this reorientation allows research to become sensitive to the many ways safety, pleasure, risk, and control is defined, made meaningful and take form in different situations across different populations. What counts as safe and affirmative life is simply not the same for everybody. In line with Berlant’s analysis of intimacy (1998), ontological safety’s singularity of perspective veers uncomfortably close to reproducing standards of behaviour and social organisation that allows only those most aligned with dominant scripts of whiteness and heterosexuality to be read as living the good life. As such, the practice of critiquing and adapting domestication theory is as much an ethical question as it is a practical one, with this chapter’s reconfiguration of domestication

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analysis hopefully inspiring its use to understand and affirm the many ways that a good life with media and other material infrastructures can be led.

References Anderson, T.L. and Kavanaugh, P.R. (2007) ‘A “Rave” review: Conceptual interests and analytical shifts in research on Rave culture: A “Rave” review,’ Sociology Compass, 1 (2), 499–519. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00034.x. Berlant, L. (1998) ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue,’ Critical Inquiry, 24 (2), 281–286. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 448875. Biehl-Missal, B. (2019) ‘Filling the “empty space”: Site-specific dance in a techno club,’ Culture and Organization, 25 (1), 16–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2016.1206547. Brown, R. and Gregg, M. (2012) The pedagogy of regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women. Continuum, 26(3), 357–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.665834 Bøhling, F. (2014) ‘Crowded contexts: On the affective dynamics of alcohol and other drug use in nightlife spaces,’ Contemporary Drug Problems, 41 (3), 361–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/009145091404100305. Bøhling, F. (2015) ‘Alcoholic assemblages: Exploring fluid subjects in the night-time economy,’ Geoforum, 58, 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.11.012 Bucher, T. (2012) ‘A technicity of attention: How software “makes sense”,’ Culture Machine, 13, 1–23. Clarke, A.E., Shim, J.K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J.R. and Fishman, J.R. (2003) ‘Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and US biomedicine,’ American Sociological Review, 68 (2), 161–194. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duff, C. (2008) ‘The pleasure in context,’ International Journal of Drug Policy, 19 (5), 384–392. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2007.07.003. Duff, C. (2012) ‘Accounting for context: Exploring the role of objects and spaces in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs,’ Social & Cultural Geography, 13 (2), 145–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 4649365.2012.655765. Fitzgerald, J.I. (1998) ‘An assemblage of desire, drugs and techno,’ Angelaki, 3 (2), 41–57. https://doi. org/10.1080/09697259808571983. Garcia, L.M. (2013) ‘Crowd solidarity on the dance floor in Paris and Berlin. Musical Performance and the Changing City Post-industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States,’ in F. Holt and C. Wergin (eds.) Musical Performance and the Changing City, London: Routledge, 241–269. Goulding, C. and Shankar, A. (2011) ‘Club culture, neotribalism and ritualised behaviour,’ Annals of Tourism Research, 38 (4), 1435–1453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.03.013. Goulding, C., Shankar, A. and Elliott, R. (2002) ‘Working weeks, Rave weekends: Identity fragmentation and the emergence of new communities,’ Consumption Markets & Culture, 5 (4), 261–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/1025386022000001406. Goulding, C., Shankar, A., Elliott, R. and Canniford, R. (2009) ‘The marketplace management of illicit pleasure,’ Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (5), 759–771. https://doi.org/10.1086/592946. Haddon, L. (2011) ‘Domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life,’ Canadian Journal of Communication, 36, 311–323. Hartmann, M. (2005) ‘The triple articulation of ICTs. Media as technological objects, symbolic environments and individual texts,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 80–102. Hartmann, M. (2020) ‘(The domestication of ) Nordic domestication?’ Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 2 (1), 47–57. https://doi.org/10.2478/njms-2020-0005. Møller, K. and Hakim, J. (2021) ‘Critical chemsex studies: Interrogating cultures of sexualized drug use beyond the risk paradigm,’ Sexualities, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607211026223. Møller, K. and Nebeling Petersen, M. (2017) ‘Bleeding boundaries: Domesticating gay hook-up apps,’ in R. Andreassen, K. Harrison, M. Nebeling and T. Raun (eds.) New Media – New Intimacies: Connectivities, Relationalities, Proximities, London: Routledge, 208–223. Moore, D. (2010) ‘Beyond disorder, danger, incompetence and ignorance: Rethinking the youthful subject of alcohol and other drug policy,’ Contemporary Drug Problems, 37 (3), 475–498. https://doi. org/10.1177/009145091003700306.

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Kristian Møller Moore, K. (2006). “Sort Drugs Make Mates”: The Use and Meaning of Mobiles in Dance Music Club Culture in K O’Hara and B Brown (eds.) Consuming music together: Social and collaborative aspects of music consumption technologies, Springer, 211-239. O’Grady, A. (2012) ‘Spaces of play: The spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive,’ Dancecult, 4 (1), 86–106. https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04. Race, K. (2009) Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs, Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390886. Race, K. (2018) The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV, London: Routledge. Rose, N. and Novas, C. (2005) ‘Biological citizenship,’ in A. Ong and S. Collier (eds.) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Wiley, 439–463. Rüb, C. and Ngo, A.-L. (2011) ‘Das Berghain – Eine Ermöglichungsarchitektur. [Bergahin – An Architecture of Enabling],’ Arch+. Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, 201/202 (March), 146–151. Shaw, R. (2014) ‘Beyond night-time economy: Affective atmospheres of the urban night,’ Geoforum, 51, 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.005. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Tan, Q.H. (2013) ‘Flirtatious geographies: Clubs as spaces for the performance of affective heterosexualities,’ Gender, Place & Culture, 20 (6), 718–736. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2012.716403. van Ree, E. (2002) ‘Drugs, the democratic civilising process and the consumer society,’ International Journal of Drug Policy, 13 (5), 349–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0955-3959(02)00112-3. Vitos, B. (2017) ‘The dance floor experiment: Researching the mediating technologies and embodied experiences of electronic dance music events,’ Popular Music and Society, 40 (2), 131–150. https://doi. org/10.1080/03007766.2015.1094903. Warner, M. (2002) ‘Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version),’ Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88 (4), 413–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630209384388. Zebracki, M. (2016) ‘Embodied techno-space: An auto-ethnography on affective citizenship in the techno electronic dance music scene,’ Emotion, Space and Society, 20, 111–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.emospa.2016.03.001 Zola, I.K. (1972) ‘Medicine as an institution of social control,’ The Sociological Review, 20 (4), 487–504.

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PART V

Contextualising domestication?

Contextualising domestication? Introduction Niklas Strüver

Context in domestication research has been a highly contested good. Why dilute a study with considerations of other things that at first glance might not matter to the exploration of a specific media object? As part of daily practices, technologies or media objects are inherently situated in usage contexts and therefore are inherently relational (Silverstone, 2006: 233). The TV – as probably the most iconic object of study for domestication theory – in isolation is a device that is continuously sending some form of content when turned on and connected to its larger network of broadcast. There might be information about the broadcasted programmes (for example, the airing times), but as an informant on the actual usage, this does not yield much. Supplemented with patterns and practices of TV usage (for example, at which time are all interested inhabitants home to watch a preferred broadcast), the picture of the role of the TV becomes clearer. However, only when considering the whole sociomaterial context that the TV is embedded in (for example, how many people fit in front of the TV at once, what practices are being carried out simultaneously or how is watching the TV institutionalised in a society), the intricacies and relationalities of daily practice become tangible (Silverstone, 1994: 38/85). The same holds true for modern media objects, perhaps even more so. The domestication of digital devices like smartphones (Vincent & Haddon, 2018), or voice assistants (Brause & Blank, 2020) and the smart home (Strüver, 2023), includes a myriad of entities that are involved in the usage and wider construction of everyday practices. With increased involvement of various technologies, services and conventions in the usage of media objects, the number of contexts that can have an impact on domestication processes rises, giving researchers new avenues and approaches to topics. This further emphasises situating digital objects and their surrounding practices in different contextualities, as they are shaped by these and reshape them in a continuous process. The articles in this section reflect the variety of possibilities to explore context in the usage and domestication of digital media objects methodologically as well as thematically. Wang performs a literature review on the methods dominantly used in domestication theory studies, finding that a large share of studies use self-reporting methods (like usage diaries). Informed by this, an alternative mixed-methods ethnographic approach is presented using the case study of Chinese mothers who accompany their children abroad. While the children get a school education, the mothers rely on ICTs to maintain relationships to their ‘previous life’ and navigate new social contexts of a foreign country. Henriksen in her DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-32

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chapter studies situational domestication in public places and showcases how users domesticate technologies situationally, according to the context of their own devices and understanding of the rules of a social situation. The free Wi-Fi in a café, for example, is a transformation of public space that shapes how publicness is experienced, depending on the negotiation of the situation and the norms that are applied to it. Karlsen, however, explores the concept of reverse domestication, which describes the (intentional) decoupling of media objects and users. In examining a digital detox camp that helps to create distance to various media objects, the author underlines how important it is to embed case studies in wider societal debates, stressing how the study shows which parts of media use users are generally less happy about. Ask in her chapter investigates the bridge between domestication and game studies, the main point of reference being the computer game World of Warcraft. Here, the practice of play is embedded in the social context of the households, as well as contexts of coordinated communities of players. To facilitate long hours of play, younger players need to appease their parents outside of the allotted gaming hours in order to be allowed to play. In a coordinated game like World of Warcraft, this is crucial, as certain types of play are only achievable with a certain amount of people. The contexts of home and game conflate. Hjorth et al. also double down on the idea of gaming and domestication in their contribution. The authors show how the domestic household can influence practices in games such as Minecraft and vice versa. The context of the family and its arrangement of private and public spaces are pivotal to the understanding of how players in the family approach certain aspects of the game. Practices like furnishing a room and building a home in-game are affected by the collective engagement of families in games like Minecraft. In the final chapter in this section, Haddon gives an overview over three core ideas that inform domestication studies: time, perception in the evaluation of ICTs and the interactions with others. Using three case studies of digital devices and their associated practices, the author shows how these core ideas influence the domestication process. Simultaneously, a theoretical and methodological argument of the richness, variety and innovative capacity of domestication research in general is developed.

References Brause, S. R. and Blank, G. (2020) ‘Externalized Domestication: Smart Speaker Assistants, Networks and Domestication Theory’ Information, Communication & Society, 23 (5), 751–763, doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1713845. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating Domestication. Reflections on the Life of a Concept’ in Berker, T. et al. (eds.) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp.≈229–248. Strüver, N. (2023) ‘Frustration Free: How Alexa Orchestrates the Development of the Smart Home’ in Hector, T.M., Waldecker, D., Strüver, N. and Aal, T. (eds.) Taming Data Practices - On the Domestication of Data-Driven Technologies. Special Issue of Digital Culture & Society, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 99–123. Vincent, J. and Haddon, L. (eds.) (2018) Smartphone Cultures, London: Routledge.

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22 UNDERSTANDING AND RESOLVING THE “CONTENTCONTEXT CONUNDRUM” IN ICT DOMESTICATION RESEARCH Yang Wang Introduction Over the past several decades, the increasing accessibility, affordability and rich functionality of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially mobile devices and the internet, have emancipated people from temporal and spatial constraints, and brought unprecedented flexible experiences of social communication (Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Licoppe, 2004; Turkle, 2011). As ICTs have encroached so intensively in people’s quotidian routines, the multifarious roles they play in various realms of users’ life experiences demand closer investigation for a more complete understanding of their social impact. Technology domestication theory (Berker, Hartmann, Punie, & Ward, 2006; Morley & Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992) provides an appropriate framework for understanding the adoption and use of ICTs across various everyday life contexts as well as the mutually constructive relationship between the technology and the user over time. Specifically, the domestication process involves a reciprocity of “consuming” and “being consumed” in which the user tries to “tame” the technology for their own needs, while, in turn, the technology manifests its “agency” to sustain, reflect, or reform the environment in which it has settled. The concept of “double articulation” within the domestication framework emphasises the uniqueness of ICTs as both objects in their physical presence and conveyers of media contents (Hartmann, 2006; Livingstone, 2007), which serves as a departure point for understanding and overcoming the “content-context conundrum” put forward in this chapter. Content-context conundrum describes the long-standing fissure between the investigation of content consumption routines on ICTs (e.g., ICT devices and platforms used, whom to communicate with, and messages exchanged) and contexts in which ICT use behaviours take place (e.g., spatial constraints, temporal arrangements, emotions and attitudes, and relevant social norms). Extant domestication studies tend to focus exclusively on the contents or contexts of ICT domestication, or investigate these two aspects separately, without effectively connecting them in a real-time manner (Lim, 2016). Now that we are virtually enveloped by ICTs, more encompassing approaches are required to bridge this fissure and better capture the interplay of contents and contexts in empirical domestication research.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-33

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To this end, I carried out a literature review of 86 empirical ICT domestication studies to identify relative strengths and weaknesses of different research methods (e.g., interview, observation, diary, and survey) in analysing content- and context-related aspects of domestication, and discuss potential methodological design to overcome the content-context divide in extant domestication research. Based on findings from the review, a multi-method ethnographic approach of “content-context diary” cum participant observation was designed to apprehend ICT domestication behaviours in tandem with their space-time and sociocultural milieus. This chapter also presents findings and reflections derived from a case study applying this innovative approach to explore ICT domestication by a group of Chinese migrant mothers.

Technology domestication theory and double articulation of ICTs Technology domestication theory developed by Roger Silverstone and his colleagues (Silverstone et al., 1992) provides a useful framework for understanding the adoption, integration, and meaningful use of technologies in everyday life. Domestication is a metaphor describing the process of bringing unfamiliar technologies from the public realm into the fabric of private life (Berker et al., 2006; Morley & Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone et al., 1992). This process is characterised by the dynamic reciprocity between users and technologies where the user attempts to “tame” the technology for their own benefits, while the technology manifests its agency to shape the environments they inhabit (Bakardjieva, 2006; Lie & Sørensen, 1996; Silverstone et al., 1992; Sørensen, 2006). According to this framework, the domestication of a new technology usually goes through four phases: appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Silverstone et al., 1992; Sørensen, 2006). Appropriation is a “pre-adoption” phase wherein users begin to imagine possible usefulness and application of the technology before purchase and adoption. Once adopted, the technology is spatially and temporally inte­ grated into the socio-technical settings of the user’s life, referred to as objectification (physical arrangements of the technological artefact) and incorporation (temporal integration of the technological functionalities into daily routines). In the last phase of conversion, the “domesticated” technology is inscribed with personal meanings and articulates the user’s identities to the external world. The domestication of new technology usually spans a long time period, and manifests varying degrees of success in being completely “tamed.” Eschewing technological determinism models, the domestication perspective foregrounds the active role of users in defining and shaping their own technologies, through developing and negotiating meanings, forging comfortable and compatible use habits, and integrating the technology into various everyday contexts (Bakardjieva, 2006; Frissen, 2000; Livingstone, 2007; Silverstone & Haddon, 1996). Domestication theory has been recognised to be particularly useful for studying ICTs. The concept of “double articulation” in this theory points to the dual role played by ICTs as both objects in their physical presence and conveyers of media contents (Hartmann, 2006; Livingstone, 2007; Silverstone & Haddon, 1996; Silverstone et al., 1992). According to this concept, ICT domestication is articulated along two interdependent dimensions. The first articulation focuses on the role of ICTs as objects, which describes how technical artefacts, such as the television and home computer, are designed with certain material features, made into consumption objects, and then introduced and incorporated into spatial settings of the household. The second articulation points to the role of ICTs as media platforms enabling content exchange between private and public realms. The smartphone, for example, can 332

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bring contents such as news and messages from all over the world to the user, while it also allows the user to convey his/her contents and values to the public.

“Content-context conundrum” in ICT domestication research In empirical research, to capture the dual role of ICTs and the complexity of the domestication process, attention must be paid to both the contents circulated through technical devices and the contexts in which ICT devices are located and content consumption behaviours take place. Specifically, contents produced, consumed, and exchanged are crucial for understanding the “media role” of ICTs (the second articulation) while spatial, temporal, and socio- cultural contexts surrounding ICT consumption are indispensable elements of the “object role” (the first articulation), both determining whether, why, and how ICTs are domesticated. In ICT domestication research, analysis of media contents covers both detailed information exchanged or consumed via ICTs and users’ content consumption behaviours. Compared to centralised, public contents on “traditional” mass media such as television and broadcasting (Lull, 1990; Morley, 1992), contents circulated on “new” ICTs like the internet and mobile phones are relatively difficult to capture due to their decentralised, diversified and private characteristics. Specifically, it is highly intrusive to access detailed contents on personally owned ICT devices, such as home computers and smartphones, and particularly difficult to capture these contents in a real-time manner within their real-world contexts. Therefore, except for some studies employing data logging applications to collect precise contents (Aune, 2002; De Reuver, Nikou, & Bouwman, 2016), domestication studies examining personal, mobile ICTs tend to focus more on users’ content consumption routines, such as their use frequency, types of platforms and applications used, types of contents exchanged on certain platform, audiences of communication, and so on (Brause & Bland, 2020; Cummings & Kraut, 2002; Harwood, 2011; Matassi, Boczkowski, & Mitchelstein, 2019; Nimrod, 2016; Watulak & Whitfield, 2016). Contexts of ICT domestication not only refer to the immediate space-time milieus in which the domestication process occurs, but also encompass social norms, family dynamics, power hierarchies, as well as emotional negotiations surrounding the introduction and daily use of ICTs (Bakardjieva, 2006; Haddon, 2006; Morley & Silverstone, 1990). Previous domestication research has delved deeply and intensively into a broad range of context-related aspects of ICT domestication, including but not limited to spatial arrangements of ICT devices (Flynn, 2003; Holloway & Valentine, 2001; McDonald, 2015; Quandt & von Pape, 2010), schedule management and deliberate temporal arrangements surrounding ICTs (De Schutter, Brown, & Vanden Abeele., 2014; Frissen, 2000; Matassi et al., 2019; Richardson, 2009), motivations, attitudes and emotion related to ICTs (Clark, 2014; Habib & Cornford, 2002; Watulak & Whitfield, 2016), digital skills, competency, and assistances (Lehtonen, 2003; Stewart, 2007), as well as rules, norms, relationships, and hierarchies that shape or being shaped by ICT domestication (Correa, 2014; Enevold, 2014; Lemor, 2006; Lim, 2006; Willett, 2017). Although extant domestication studies have provided profound insights into both contents and contexts in relation to ICT domestication, a “content-context divide” remains conspicuous, as current studies mostly investigate these two aspects in a separate manner, or simply privilege one aspect over the other (see also Lim, 2016). From the lens of double articulation, these studies tend to focus exclusively on the “media role” of ICTs and delve into content-related issues such as what messages the users are sending or receiving, to whom, 333

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on what platforms and at what frequency, while overlooking the “object role” of ICTs and contextual concerns such as when and where the ICT devices and/or platforms are used, in whose presence, with what impacts on the users’ social relationships, etc., or the other way round. Even if some studies investigate both the contents and contexts of ICT domestication, they often address these two aspects separately, without attending to the real-time interactions between specific content consumption practices and the spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded. For instance, to examine people’s work-from-home experiences, a study may probe into their ICT use routines for video conferencing such as the type of digital devices and software they are using, the colleagues they frequently talk to, as well as frequency and typical contents of their video calls, at the same time also provide insights into the domestic contexts of virtual meetings such as the locations and room arrangements, family members around and their influences on the quality of online interactions, and potential distractions by family duties. Nevertheless, the research may elide the real-time and nuanced interplay between specific ICT use practices during video conferencing and the contextual conditions that shape these practices, such as at what time of a day and at whose presence a user choose to turn on/off the webcam, emotions deriving from certain mediated conversation, online audiences’ reactions to offline disruptions by family members, multi-tasking during virtual meetings, etc. This leads to a static view in which ICT domestication is reduced to rigid modalities of when, where, and how the ICT is used and with what consequences, failing to capture dynamic contextual nuances that elicit heterogeneous experiences from different users. The growing prevalence of mobile ICTs, especially the smartphone and internet, has further aggravated this “content-context conundrum” implied in domestication research. In particular, the highly private nature and space-time flexibility of these portable digital devices renders both detailed contents exchanged via these devices and contexts of ICT consumption hardly visible and accessible to people other than their owners, letting alone drawing real-time connections between contents and contexts (see also Hartmann, 2006). In view of this, more encompassing methodological approaches are required to effectively grasp daily routines and contents of ICT domestication in tandem with corresponding contextual nuances in a real-time manner.

Research methods of ICT domestication studies: a literature review To better understand and resolve the content-context conundrum, a literature review was conducted with 86 empirical ICT domestication studies to outline the different research methods employed by extant domestication research and provide advice on potential methodological designs that could effectively capture the real-time connection between contentand context-related aspects of ICT domestication.

Review procedures and literature overview The publications reviewed in this chapter were mainly sourced from the databases of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar using keywords of “domestication,” “domestication theory,” “ICTs,” and “technology.” Only empirical studies using technology domestication theory as an analytical framework, focusing on ICTs and written in English were included. Non-empirical publications (e.g., literature reviews, theoretical/methodological papers, and studies that rely solely on documentary or secondary data) as well as studies that did not 334

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use the domestication framework (including those only mentioned the concept of “domestication” but did not use the theoretical framework to guide data collection or analysis) or examined technologies other than ICTs (e.g., robots, energy technologies, and domestic appliance without media functions) were excluded. Moreover, considering the main focus of this review on methodological approaches, publications without clear description of research methods were also excluded. In the cases when multiple publications were generated from the same study, only one publication was included in the sample. A total of 86 empirical studies that met the above-mentioned inclusion criteria were analysed based on the reading of the full text and systematic data extraction, with a particular focus on the methodological approaches they used and perceived strengths and limitations of different research methods (e.g., interview, observation, diary recording, and survey) in studying content- and context-related aspects of domestication. Other basic information about these studies, including the ICT(s) being investigated, research samples and settings, as well as main topics and findings, is also reviewed to assess relative advantages/disadvantages of each method and delineate a holistic landscape of methodological constraints across all the studies. The studies included in this review were conducted in a wide range of social settings. Originally developed to analyse technologies in the moral economy of the household, the domestication theory has been most intensively applied in the domestic sphere (Haddon, 2006; Silverstone et al., 1992). In line with this tradition, a large majority of studies being reviewed in this chapter took place in the home, covering a variety of household types such as nuclear families (Frissen, 2000; Kiesler, Zdaniuk, Lundmark, & Kraut, 2000; Lim, 2006), single-parent households (Lemor, 2006; Madsen & Kræmmergaard, 2015), and immigrant or transnational households (Correa, 2014; Madianou, 2012; Yoon, 2016). Beyond the domestic sphere, the domestication theory has also been deployed to examine ICT use in workplaces and businesses (Haig-Smith & Tanner, 2016; Harwood, 2011; Pierson, 2006), educational and learning (Habib, 2010; Vuojärvi et al., 2010), healthcare (Copelton, 2010; Pols & Willems, 2011; Stokke, 2017), as well as macro-level environments such as nationwide analysis (Bolin, 2010; Brosveet & Sørensen, 2000; Cummings & Kraut, 2002; Olsson & Viscovi, 2020). As for the types of ICTs involved, these studies have focused on a wide variety of ICT devices and platforms, including home-based devices such as televisions and home computers (Aune, 1996; Habib & Cornford, 2002; Ling & Thrane, 2001; McDonald, 2015), mobile devices such as mobile phones/smartphones and tablets (Bolin, 2010; Komen, 2020; Nimrod, 2016), the internet (Bakardjieva & Smith, 2001; Hynes & Rommes, 2006; McDonald, 2015; Scheerder, van Deursen, & van Dijk, 2019), digital games (Enevold, 2014; De Schutter et al., 2014; Flynn, 2003; Willett, 2017), online platforms and mobile apps (such as social media and e-shopping platforms) (Matassi et al., 2019; Watulak & Whitfield, 2016), as well as other smart ICTs for various everyday life needs (such as smart watch and smart toys) (Brause & Blank, 2020; Brito, Dias, & Oliveira, 2018). Some studies adopt an encompassing view to examine the domestication of multiple ICTs in certain settings (Frissen, 2000; Harwood, 2011; Lim, 2006; Richardson, 2009).

Methodological strengths and limitations of domestication research The domestication approach has traditionally cherished qualitative and ethnographic methods due to its strong emphasis on in-depth explications of symbolic meanings and dynamic social relationships involved in daily technology consumptions (Berker et al., 2006; 335

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Haddon, 2011; Hartmann, 2006). A clear preference for qualitative research over quantitative investigation was also uncovered from the current literature review. Specifically, a variety of qualitative methods have been employed, including different forms of interviews, focus group discussions, self-reported media diaries, observation, phone logs, tours of the domestic spheres and virtual spaces, as well as ethnographic case studies. For all the advantages of qualitative approaches, quantitative methods are also required to study ICTs in macro-level social settings and provide insight into the structural elements of domestication, such as ICT use patterns, satisfaction, influential factors of diverse use routines, etc. (Bakardjieva, 2006; Quandt & von Pape, 2010). Some of the studies included in this review have employed survey techniques to gather quantitative data and draw a more comprehensive picture of ICT domestication. In empirical studies, each method has its distinct advantages and disadvantages in analysing the manifold processes of ICT domestication. Based on findings from the literature review, I will evaluate several frequently used methods in terms of their relative strengths and weaknesses for studying ICT domestication, with a special focus on their potential of overcoming the content-context fissure in extant domestication research.

Interview and focus group The interview method is particularly effective for in-depth investigation into people’s subjective meanings, experiences and opinions (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). In the context of domestication studies, interview techniques allow contextual interaction between the interviewer(s) and interviewee(s), and therefore provide an edge in exploring users’ personal values in relation to their daily ICT use. According to this review, the interview is the most widely and intensely employed qualitative method, which has been applied in a broad range of forms, ranging from the semi-structured interview (Brito et al., 2018; Harwood, 2011; Holloway & Valentine, 2001) and the in-depth interview (Brause & Bland, 2020; Lim, 2006; Quandt & von Pape, 2010) to focus group discussions (Habib, 2010; Haddon, 2017; Madsen & Kræmmergaard, 2015). These interview methods were used to glean qualitative data about both users’ content consumption routines on ICTs and contextual information such as space-time arrangements of ICTs and the negotiation of rules, relationships and powers in relation to ICT use. For all the evident merits and usefulness of interview methods to ICT domestication research, an exclusive reliance on subjects’ self-reported and retrospective articulations renders interview data insufficiently granular for capturing precise details about either media contents exchanged via ICTs or the contexts of ICT consumption, letting alone drawing real-time and meaningful connections between contents and contexts. Specifically, interviews usually require participants to recall their experiences and feelings that happened long ago or over a long period of time, which determine that their narratives tend to be sketchy and equivocal since precise details of specific circumstance are likely to fade out from memory over time (see also Hartmann, 2006). Moreover, as many important details may remain unconscious to the participants themselves, the self-reported data gathered from interviews sometimes omit seemingly trivial nuances that are actually of academic significance. For example, when a full-time mother is asked to recall her ICT use at home throughout a whole day, it is highly possible that she only emphasises watching a movie on the laptop, while overlooking the frequent, piecemeal browsing of the smartphone since it is perceived as “too boring to remember.” However, it is precisely the unconscious distracted browsing that reflects her strong reliance on ICTs. 336

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Observation From this literature review, I identified two typical roles of observation in extant domestication research – as main methodological framework or as a supplementary and auxiliary approach. In the former cases, immersive and prolonged participant observations or ethnographic observations are conducted, usually with small samples such as one or several households, to probe deep into the dynamic transformation processes and power relations concerning ICT domestication (Copelton, 2010; Flynn, 2003; Karl, 2007; McDonald, 2015). These observations are usually highly comprehensive and interactive, characterised by a combination of multiple qualitative methods and the establishment of strong rapport between researchers and participants. In the latter cases, observations are employed as complements to other methods, mostly interviews, to gather background and/or additional information (e.g., spatial settings of the domestic space) or merely to familiarise researchers with the research settings and subjects (Brito et al., 2018; De Schutter et al., 2014; Hynes & Rommes, 2006). Within these studies, observations mostly happened randomly and/or on a short-term basis and did not contribute equally to key research findings as other data collection methods. As one of the key methods of ethnography, observation allows an insider’s view into people’s quotidian life, thereby has been widely appreciated for capturing rich, authentic and contextualised information and interpreting complicated cultural behaviours of social actors with enhanced accuracy (Gans, 1999; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). For ICT domestication research, immersive and intensive observation is among the most promising approaches to overcome the content-context conundrum proposed in this chapter. Specifically, situated participation into the natural settings of ICT domestication bestows researchers real-time insights into how ICTs are actually being used within diverse social contexts, for what purposes they are appropriated and incorporated, what kinds of implications they have for a user’s life experiences, whether and how the use routines have transformed over time, etc., which cannot be fully grasped through short-term, self-reported methods such as an interview. Meanwhile, observational methods can also locate specific contents exchanged over ICTs in their immediate space-time, relational, and socio-cultural contexts, thereby closing the content-context divide. Although observational methods have proven to be particularly revealing, they are hitherto not applied to study contents and contexts of ICT domestication in a systematic and interrelated manner. As discovered by this literature review, extant ICT domestication studies mostly prefer to conduct superficial and short-period observations rather than long-term, intensive ethnographic observation, and regard observational methods as marginal supplements to “more efficient” and structured methods like interviews and surveys. In the small number of studies that carried out in-depth ethnographic observations, the emphasis was exclusively on contextual dimensions of ICT domestication, such as space-time arrangements of technical devices, symbolic meanings of ICTs and relationships and powers negotiated, while the characteristics of contents consumed as well as the interplay between contents and contexts are rarely analysed. One potential reason behind the underutilisation of observational methods is the exorbitant human and financial investment required for immersive and prolonged observations. In addition, studying home-based or mobile ICTs usually involves observations in private and exclusive spaces, such as the home and workplaces, which brings about privacy concerns.

Diary recording Media diary or time-use diary is another frequently used technique in ICT domestication research. Subjects participating in this method are typically required to record their daily 337

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ICT use behaviours and other relevant information over a period of time, with a pre-given diary that includes a series of structured and/or open-ended items. In this literature review, the diary method was found to be deployed in many studies to capture both content- and context-related elements of ICT domestication, including types of ICT devices or functions used, frequency and main contacts of mediated communication on ICTs, spatial locations of ICTs, implications of ICT use on family relationships, and so forth (Enevold, 2014; Stewart, 2007; Watulak & Whitfield, 2016). In these studies, diary recording is seldom used as the only data collection method, but rather employed simultaneously with other methods such as interviews, observations and surveys. Diary recording is one of the most promising methods for bridging the fissure between the investigation of contents and contexts. A properly designed diary on the one hand enables a thorough and accurate recording of detailed contents circulated via ICTs, which are not easily obtained even through immersive observations, on the other hand it also permits the capture of real-time contextual information about ICT use that would otherwise remain subconscious or fade away in memory over time. A continuous diary-keeping method makes possible a simultaneous approach of data collection wherein specific contents on ICTs are bound tightly to the immediate contexts in which they are consumed. Despite its numerous merits, media diaries have not been deployed to its fullest potential in current ICT domestication studies. First and foremost, media diaries in extant research tend to frame content- and context-related information of ICT domestication as different sections of investigation, thus stripping ICT use behaviours of their contextual meanings. Moreover, as a purely self-reporting method, diary keeping may end up with inaccurate and insufficient data if the subjects record the diary selectively or perfunctorily, or unconsciously omit seemingly trivial but meaningful details of their ICT use experiences. The (semi-) structured designs of diaries further add to the insufficiency of data collection as only information about given items or questions are recorded, while novel and unexpected discoveries can hardly emerge.

Touring, mapping, and phone log Some studies have also drawn on interactive tours into the physical and virtual spaces of ICT domestication. Tours in physical spaces usually take the form of close observation in the spatial settings where ICT devices are located and used, often including photo-taking, sketching or mental mapping of the devices, physical environments surrounding the devices (e.g., the desk and digital accessories), and sometimes also the people using the ICTs (Flynn, 2003; Frissen, 2000; Kiesler et al., 2000; Quandt & von Pape, 2010). Tours in users’ virtual spaces are also widely employed to trace their ICT use behaviours and histories, such as logs of communication traffics, folders, internet bookmarks, and accounts of certain platforms (Bakardjieva & Smith, 2001; Kiesler et al., 2000; Siles et al., 2019). Most of these tours were characterised by intensive interactions between the participants and the researcher where the participants described their ICTs, typical use habits as well as meanings of ICTs to them and their families, while the researchers asked questions at times to clarify or probe into interesting issues. Some studies also resort to digital data logging functions or software installed in ICTs to gather precise details about users’ ICT use behaviours or contents exchanged (Aune, 2002; De Reuver et al., 2016). In empirical ICT domestication studies, these touring and logging techniques are often incorporated into interviews or observations to provide in situ and visualised insights. They share similarities with the diary method in terms of the potential for bridging the 338

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content-context gap. A thorough tracking of ICT use histories enables rich and precise knowledge of the contents being consumed, while an observational tour in the physical settings of ICT use and the users’ explanations of their use behaviours provide crucial insights into contexts related to ICT consumption routines. Compared to the diary method, touring and logging have a special edge in accommodating researcher-subject interactions, which allows a deeper probe into the users’ subjective views and gives rise to the emergence of unexpected findings. Meanwhile, however, retrospective data collected through these methods fall short of drawing real-time connection between ICT use traces and accurate contextual information related to these traces, which results in the separation of contents and contexts in analysis. Therefore, to realise the potential of these methods in resolving the content-context conundrum, immediate contextual information should be collected simultaneously with logging data on ICT use behaviours.

Survey Various forms of surveys, including online survey, face-to-face questionnaire, computerassisted telephone interview (CATI), etc., are also widely employed by ICT domestication studies. Some studies use the survey as the main data collection method to investigate ICTs on a relatively large scale, usually focusing on structural and behavioural dimensions of domestication such as type of ICT devices or applications used, motives and habits of ICT use, and influential factors of (non)use (Bolin, 2010; Brosveet & Sørensen, 2000; Cummings & Kraut, 2002; Matassi et al., 2019; Olsson & Viscovi, 2020). Other studies take the survey as supplements to qualitative methods to identify eligible subjects, collect demographic and other background information, adjust qualitative research designs, etc. (Frissen, 2000; Komen, 2020). Although domestication research has a long tradition of prioritising in-depth, qualitative investigations, the adoption of quantitative methods and mixed-method designs is necessary and laudable as they expand the scope of domestication studies from micro-settings to macro-level contexts, which has improved representation and generalisation of research findings. However, as a highly structural method, the survey falls short of gleaning nuanced information about either media contents or social contexts of ICT consumption, thus showing little potential in solving the content-context conundrum proposed in this chapter.

Methodological constraints behind the “content-context conundrum” As revealed by the above literature review, given the increasing significance of ICTs in private and public cultures, methodological innovations in response to their changing roles are hitherto insufficient, with most ICT domestication research relying heavily on the selfreported method of interview. Although interviews and other self-reported methods like diary recording have made considerable contributions in eliciting subjective information and interpreting the complexity of ICT use, they usually fall short of grasping precise details about either the contents exchanged via ICTs or the contexts of ICT consumption due to memory biases and selective disclosure of the participants. For example, during an interview with a female migrant about how she uses the smartphone to maintain long-distance conjugal relations with her husband, she tends to describe how frequent they talk to each other and the main topics they usually discuss over phone calls, but the specific contents of each call as well as where these calls took place, anyone else around, her emotions during the conversations, etc., are easily slip from memory and difficult to recall in precise details. 339

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In addition, these retrospective methods also “strip” specific contents or content consumption routines of the immediate contexts in which they are embedded, hence divesting them of their original symbolic meanings and cultural significances. In the above case of female migrant, even if she managed to remember detailed contents of many phone calls with her husband and typical spatial, temporal, and social setting surrounding these calls, it is scarcely possible for her to match each specific phone call with its immediate contexts, in terms of the location and spatial settings, her mood and feelings, the presence of other people, the concerns that affect the quality of conversation, etc. As a result, these contextual nuances that shape and at the same time being shaped by ICT use practices are overlooked or their complexity not fully captured. With regard to researcher-administered methods such as participant observation and tours into virtual spaces of ICTs, their promising potential in bridging the content-context divide have not been realised in extant empirical efforts. For example, observational research has hitherto focused almost exclusively on context-related dimensions of ICT domestication, such as space-time arrangements around ICTs, motivations and perceived satisfaction of ICT use and symbolic powers negotiated, while shedding scant light on the characteristics and nuances of detailed contents exchanged on different ICTs. Even in studies that have delved into both content- and context-related elements of ICT domestication, these two dimensions are often investigated as separate research problems, without being connected in a real-time manner. In view of these methodological constraints in extant ICT domestication studies, a more encompassing approach is required to maximise the merits of both subjective self-reported methods and objective researcher-administered methods, so as to effectively apprehend detailed routines of ICT domestication in tandem with their contextual nuances in a realtime manner.

Overcoming the “content-context conundrum”: a case study As an attempt to overcome methodological limitations and bridge the content-context divide in extant ICT domestication research, I developed an innovative form of researcheradministered media diary, namely “content-context diary,” and incorporated it into the process of ethnographic observation. This approach of “content-context diary cum participant observation” was applied to a case study on ICT domestication by a group of Chinese migrant mothers, and showed effectiveness in capturing the real-time interplay of contentand context-related aspects of domestication in various everyday life settings. Migrant mothers involved in this case study are commonly referred to as “study mothers” or “peidu mama” who accompany their school-age children to pursue education abroad while leaving their husbands behind in China (Huang & Yeoh, 2005, 2011; Wang & Lim, 2018, 2020). Becoming de facto “single mothers” after transnational relocation, these migrant mothers rely heavily on ICTs to maintain intimate relationships back home and at the same time acculturate themselves and their children to new social contexts of the host community. As international migrants and members of transnational households, they have to juggle the complicated terrains of social, cultural, familial, and technological differences between the home and host society on a daily basis, which makes immediate, relational, and sociocultural contexts particularly important in shaping their ICT use experiences. In the case study, I conducted participant observation with 40 Chinese study mothers in Singapore. Each participant was shadowed for two full days, one weekday and one weekend day, each day lasted for eight to 12 hours. The observations were conducted in 340

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various everyday settings such as their homes, workplaces, malls, and children’s playgrounds. Participants were requested to go about their lives as they usually do, while I observed and took note of their daily ICT use routines and contextual information with the content-context diary that was designed to record both content- and context-related aspects of ICT domestication (see Figure 22.1 for an example of the diary). Content-related aspects included ICT devices or platforms used (e.g., the smartphone and WeChat), correspondents, topics and/or detailed contents exchanged or consumed (e.g., a conversation about the child’s education with the husband), types and features of content exchange or consumption (e.g., text messages with cartoon emojis), etc. Context-related aspects encompassed space-time settings of ICT use (e.g., after dinner and in the bedroom), attitudes and emotions (e.g., showing joy/ anxiety), other people and their behaviours (e.g., the child doing homework), subjective explanations about meanings, purposes, and social norms of certain ICT use behaviours (e.g., muting the phone for fear of disturbing the child), etc. In the case of some circumstances that were not convenient for me to present (e.g., late night or early in the morning, the bedroom, and exclusive workplaces), I asked the participants to self-report their ICT use routines and context information on blank diary pages. I would then conduct interviews with them at the earliest possible time to probe deeper into contextual details as well as their subjective perceptions and emotions according to diary entries, so as to reconstruct the contents and natural settings of ICT use before they slip from their memory. The self-reporting option served as an effective alternative of in person observations, which reduced intrusiveness of the research and make it more easily acceptable by the participants.

Figure 22.1

Example of content-context diary

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Apart from participant observation, I also conducted semi-structured interviews and informal, “probing interviews” with these study mothers, with the former carried out before and after the observation to obtain a general understanding of their life situations and ICT use experiences, while the latter happened throughout the fieldwork, whenever an interesting or complex issue “popped up.” These probing interviews, characterised by short, improvised, and open-ended conversations, were integrated into the observation process and provided additional contents or context details in the diary (see examples of a participant’s answer to my improvised question in Figure 22.1). Adding further details to the observation and diary were photos and screenshots taken of participants’ ICT devices, frequently used software, spatial arrangements surrounding ICT use, as well as detailed contents shown on their screens (e.g., webpages they were browsing, posts on social media, and snippets of their mediated conversations with different people). As discovered by the literature review, each research method has different advantages and drawbacks in capturing precise content- or context-related information of ICT domestication and drawing real-time connection between the two. This multi-method ethnographic approach, which makes the best of both self-reporting, subjective and researcher-administered, objective methods, opens up a promising avenue for resolving the content-context conundrum clouding extant ICT domestication research. Firstly, the approach allows a “live,” accurate recording of both content- and contextrelated details of ICT domestication. Immersive observation of participants’ quotidian ICT use routines in their natural settings provides precise and in-depth insights into how ICTs are actually being used in terms of detailed contents consumed or exchanged, when and where, for what purposes, with what implications for users’ emotions and relationships, etc., which could easily elapse from the participants’ memory thus hardly be fully captured through self-reporting and retrospective methods like interviews. Meanwhile, the content-context diary incorporated into the observation process guarantees the real-time, thorough, and accurate recording of all these details. As compared to self-reporting diaries filled up by the participants, this researcher-administered diary has the advantage of identifying and retaining significant yet seemingly marginal details that the participants themselves are oblivious to. Secondly, this ethnographic approach also attends to the real-time interplay between contents and contexts of ICT domestication. In particular, the juxtaposed design of the content-context diary kept me sensitive to the broadest possible range of contextual nuances whenever a piece of content or an ICT use behaviour was noted down, which firmly situates ICT use behaviours within their spatial, temporal, relational and socio-cultural milieus. For instance, when a video call is observed and recorded in the diary, I would pay close attention to when and where the call took place, who else was in the same room during this period, the participant’s moods and emotions, as well as any potential factors that could affect her ICT use experiences, and, in turn, any consequences that had or might be triggered by certain behaviours during the call. Moreover, the combination of diary, probing interviews and photo/screenshot taking throughout the observation ensures simultaneous grasp of both precise content details and subjective meanings articulated by the participants. In the case of Chinese study mothers, this approach allowed me to go beyond a gross generalisation of “ICT use styles” among these migrant mothers and delve deeper into why ICTs are (not) used in specific circumstances, the contextual factors that either empowered them or constrained their opportunities of benefiting from ICTs, as well as how their ICT domestication experiences were shaped by and at the same time shaping parent-child negotiations and long-distance family intimacies (Wang, 2020; Wang & Lim, 2018, 2020, 2021). 342

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Discussion and conclusion As a special type of technology that plays the dual role of media platforms and objects in their physical existence, ICTs require the investigation of both media contents they conveyed and contexts in which the technological artefact inhabits to obtain comprehensive understanding of their domestication process (Hartmann, 2006; Lim, 2016; Livingstone, 2007; Quandt & von Pape, 2010). Although extant domestication research have proved to be effective in tracking both contents and contexts of ICT domestication, a content-context divide remains to be bridged, wherein these two aspects are often analysed separately in empirical studies, with few being able to thoroughly examine both in equal measure and capture their realtime interactions (Lim, 2016; see also Livingstone, 2007). This fissure, which emerges in line with the long-standing binary opposition between the text-oriented approach of reception studies and the context-oriented perspective of audience studies (Hartmann, 2006; Morley, 1992; Quandt & von Pape, 2010), often reduces the dynamic ICT domestication to rigid patterns of how and why an ICT is used, while overlooking the inconspicuous contextual nuances that create different experiences and outcomes from integrating the same ICT into everyday life. The increasing prevalence of always-on, private-owned mobile ICTs brings more diverse and flexible experiences of ICT consumption, which renders the interplay between contents and contexts even more complicated and elusive (Hartmann, 2006; Lim, 2016). Now that we are virtually enveloped by mobile ICTs, we need to adopt a more encompassing approach to capture the complexity and dynamics of both contents and contexts of ICT domestication, in terms of the typical settings in which users consume different kinds of media content, on which devices and in whose presence they do so, and the online and offline interactions surrounding ICT use, and so forth. However, as discovered by the literature review in this chapter, current ICT domestication research tends to rely heavily on self-reported methods such as interviews and participant-filled media diaries, which not only falls short of grasping precise content and context details, but also strip specific ICT use behaviours and/or contents of immediate spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded. For the purpose of transcending these methodological limitations and resolve the content-context conundrum, I designed an encompassing ethnographic approach of “content-context diary” cum participant observation to study the complexity and dynamics of ICT domestication by a group of Chinese “study mothers.” This approach, making the best of subjective, self-reporting methods and objective, researcher-administered methods, allows direct exposure to both content and context details of participants’ daily ICT use, thereby contextualising every use behaviour or content snippet within the original milieus from which it is produced. In empirical studies, drawing real-time connections between contents and contexts can provide rich insights into how ICTs are actually being used (or not used) in real-world settings of domestication, as well as how certain ICT use practices are affected by seemingly peripheral life conditions, and, in turn, creating different experiences for similar users. In this chapter, the review of prior literature and sharing of the case study provides a blueprint for future methodological advancements that can be made for ICT domestication research. Despite the potential theoretical and methodological contributions of this approach, there are noticeable limitations that need to be refined and resolved in future studies. Primarily, as faced by all kinds of ethnographic and observational research, this approach is very time-consuming and resource-intensive, which impinges its potential to be made scalable for a larger and more diverse study sample. This limitation can be partially 343

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transcended by combining in-depth ethnographic methods with large-scale and structural data collection techniques such as survey and automatic data logging and analysing software.

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Yang Wang Morley, D. (1992) Television, audiences and cultural studies, London: Routledge. Morley, D. and Silverstone, R. (1990) ‘Domestic communication – technologies and meanings,’ Media, Culture and Society, 12 (1), 31–55. Nimrod, G. (2016) ‘The hierarchy of mobile phone incorporation among older users,’ Mobile Media and Communication, 4, 149–168. Olsson, T. and Viscovi, D. (2020) ‘Who actually becomes a silver surfer? Prerequisites for digital inclusion,’ Javnost – The Public, 27 (3), 230–246. Pierson, J. (2006) ‘Domestication at work in small businesses,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 205–226. Pols, J. and Willems, D. (2011) ‘Innovation and evaluation: Taming and unleashing telecare technology,’ Sociology of Health & Illness, 33 (3), 484–498. Quandt, T. and von Pape, T. (2010) ‘Living in the mediatope: A multimethod study on the evolution of media technologies in the domestic environment,’ The Information Society, 26 (5), 330–345. Richardson, H.J. (2009) ‘A “smart house” is not a home: The domestication of ICTs,’ Information Systems Frontiers, 11 (5), 599–608. Scheerder, A.J., van Deursen, A.J. and van Dijk, J.A. (2019) ‘Internet use in the home: Digital inequality from a domestication perspective,’ New Media & Society, 21 (10), 2099–2118. Siles, I., Espinoza, J., Naranjo, A., et al. (2019) ‘The mutual domestication of users and algorithmic recommendations on Netflix,’ Communication, Culture & Critique, 12 (4), 499–518. Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and the domestication of information and communication technologies: Technical change and everyday life,’ in R. Mansell and R. Silverstone (eds.) Communication by design: The politics of information and communication technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 213–228. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces, London & New York: Routledge, 9–17. Sørensen, K.H. (2006) ‘Domestication: The enactment of technology,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.) Domestication of media and technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 40–61. Stewart, J. (2007) ‘Local experts in the domestication of information and communication technologies,’ Information Communication and Society, 10 (4), 547–569. Stokke, R. (2017) ‘“Maybe we should talk about it anyway”: A qualitative study of understanding expectations and use of an established technology innovation in caring practices,’ BMC Health Services Research, 17 (1), 657–669. Turkle, S. (2011) Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, New York: Basic Book. Vuojarvi, H., Isomäki, H. and Hynes, D. (2010) ‘Domestication of a laptop on a wireless university campus: A case study,’ Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26 (2), 250–267. Wang, Y. (2020) ‘Parent-child role reversal in ICT domestication: Media brokering activities and emotional labours of Chinese ‘study mothers,’ Journal of Children & Media, 14 (3), 267–284. Wang, Y. and Lim, S.S. (2018) ‘Mediating intimacies through mobile communication: Chinese migrant mothers’ digital “bridge of magpies”,’ in R. Andreassen, M.N. Petersen, K. Harrison and T. Raun (eds.) Mediated intimacies: Connectivities, relationalities and proximities, London: Routledge, 159–178. Wang, Y. and Lim, S.S. (2020) ‘Digital asymmetries in transnational communication: Expectation, autonomy and gender positioning in the household,’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 25 (6), 365–381. Wang, Y. and Lim, S.S. (2021) ‘Nomadic life archiving across platforms: Hyperlinked storage and compartmentalized sharing,’ New Media & Society, 23 (4), 796–815. Watulak, S.L. and Whitfield, D. (2016) ‘Examining college students’ uptake of Facebook through the lens of domestication theory,’ E-Learning and Digital Media, 13 (5–6), 179–195. Willett, R. (2017) ‘Domesticating online games for preteens – discursive fields, everyday gaming, and family life,’ Children’s Geographies, 15 (2), 146–159. Yoon, K. (2016) ‘The cultural appropriation of smartphones in Korean transnational families,’ in S.S.  Lim (ed.) Mobile communication and the family: Asian experiences in technology domestication, Dordrecht: Springer, 93–108.

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23 SITUATIONAL DOMESTICATION Personal technology and public places Ida Marie Henriksen

Introduction: café society Long before the COVID-19 pandemic started, people used to visit cafés on a regular basis and such cafés had a central place in cities and urban life. They provided a place for people to take time out from their busy lives. Oldenburg (1989) describes the café as a “third place,” between the first place (home) and second place (work) – a place outside home and work that produces collective identity and spontaneous local communities. This definition builds on Jürgen Habermas’ description of how, in the 1800s, coffee houses in England and France became places in which politics and social issues were discussed (Habermas, 2002), and even though they were a place for only men at that time, they marked the start of the public sphere, in which debates and journals exist in the form we know them today. Oldenburg (1989) describes third places as neutral places, occupied by all kinds of people and where conversations were among the main elements in the 1980s. This is a rather romantic view of the café, but nevertheless it was a place in which one could either meet other people, often those one knew, or one could be in solitude without feeling alone or detached from urbanity and city life (Holm, 2013). At the same time, the café represented both stability and change. Today, in 2021, the café is characterised by the digitalisation of our everyday life through our use of personal technology, such as smart watches, smartphones, and laptops. This has blurred the distinction between first place (home), second place (work), and third place (café). This blurring represents a change since the start of the 2010s, when it affected the “digital bohemians” and the “creative class,” or what Hartmann (2009) names the precarious digital workers. Nowadays, it affects almost all of us in the Western world in some way or other, because mobile technology and the infrastructure of the Internet means we are just one click or notification away from work duties and family obligations, also when visiting cafés.1 With the COVID-19 pandemic and the related use of track-and-tracing apps, it has become common practice in Norway for users of mobile devices to scan QR codes when they are in public places, including QR codes on café tables,2 in order to be contacted. In some places like Brussels in December 2021 (Mones, 2021), one needed a smartphone to show a digital COVID certificate or pass in order to enter a café. The “delicious mystery” of being incognito in the city or in the cafés, as Walter Benjamin (1983: 54) describes it, is now a thing of the past. In the 1800s, the café was a place for public discussions between strangers DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-34

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(Habermas, 2002), but today we now have the possibility for discussions via different platforms on the Internet and instead of ordering food from a waiter we can use a QR code to place an order (e.g. in cafés and bars in Trondheim). How we act in cafés has changed with the COVID-19, but also over the last ten years and much of this change has been connected to the development of faster Wi-Fi and to smaller and lighter laptops and smartphones. Both current society and technology development are framing not only how we act and interact with the physical, which in this case is the café, but also how we interact with the technology we use. The kind of situation in which technology is a part defines the situation and the social norms of whether or not personal technology can be used. The latter point is the main focus of this chapter, in which I seek to look through the lens of the Trondheim model of the domestication concept in order to understand the following question: How does personal technology impact how actors understand the rules of a social situation? The café can set the physical and social frame for different social situations, which can be described as situational domestication. The different situations shape how café visitors, such as romantic couples, businesspeople, mothers, the social visitors, and those who work on laptops, enact different visitor roles in the physical area (Henriksen et al., 2013). In this chapter, I analyse the social situation of those who work on laptops and visitors who go to cafés to use their smartphones for social purposes. The findings are used to show how the technologies impact the actors’ understandings of social rules in public spaces.3 However, I first discuss the concept of domestication.

Domestication In science and technology studies (STS), the concept of domestication builds on understandings of how new technology can destabilise and restabilise existing actor-networks (ANTs) (Ask and Søraa, 2021). Domestication analyses in the field of STS question how and with what impact technology is taken into use. In this chapter, I look at the role technological objects have in defining what kind of social situation develops. As a concept, domestication can be used as a sensitising concept, meaning that it is good to employ the concept in our thinking because it gives us a place from which to start our analyses (Andersson, 2016; Charmaz, 2003). However, the concept of domestication can also be used as part of a methodological approach in which we start from a concrete research question, such as done by Carter et al. (2013) in their article “The domestication of an everyday health technology: A case study of electric toothbrushes.” They applied Silverstone et al.’s (1992) four stages in how the household adopts the technology: (1) appropriation, whereby an object is made physically and mentally available to the individual (from commodity to object); (2) objectification, whereby the household presents its aesthetic and cognitive values, and the object is given a place; (3) incorporation, whereby the object is incorporated into daily routines; and (4) conversion, whereby the household’s cultural preferences are mediated to the outside world through the incorporated artefact. In other words, to understand how technology is appropriated and incorporated, it is also necessary to understand what kind of culture and patterns of behaviour the technology is entering (Silverstone et al., 1992). The model developed by Silverstone and his colleagues can be used as a deductive approach to structure empirical findings in four stages, in order to understand the adoption of technology. 348

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Similarly, the dimensional model of domestication, which is also referred to as the Norwegian interpretation of domestication (Hartmann, 2020), comprises three dimensions. The dimensions are used mainly to analyse technology appropriation by users, but they can also be used to subdivide empirical work. The cognitive dimension concerns what the individual (or organisation) needs to learn or develop skills in order to use the technology. The practical dimension concerns in what way to use the technology, as well as when to use it, and how to apply it. The symbolic dimension concerns what the meaning of the technology for users, and what kind of norms are connected to use of the technology. The three dimensions are overlapping and by analysing them separately and jointly a researcher may be able to illustrate how a socio-technical process happens (Ask Søraa, 2021). According to Hartmann (2020), the main difference between concepts of domestication held by Sørensen (2006) and Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley (1992) is that domestication is not limited to the household, it can relate to any kind of technology, and the “taming” can occur at individual, group, and societal level. In this chapter, I use the concept of domestication to understand not only how personal technology is domesticated by the individual, but also how domestication occurs in the interaction between the individual, personal technology, and the physical surroundings. Aune (1996: 102) shows how the domestication of computers is dynamic with reference to three different ideal use types of the home computer. The extender uses the home computer to give flexibility to the work-home situation, the gameplayer/time killer uses the computer for leisure, and the explorer combines work and leisure when using their home computer. Aune’s study dates from a time when the use of home computers was on the rise, but the user types have since been reflected in a study by Hampton and Gupta (2008: 842), who describe two behavioural types of laptop user in cafés: “true mobiles” and “placemakers.” The true mobile does paid work and identifies the café as a place in which to be productive (as does Hartman’s precarious digital worker, mentioned above), similar to the work extender described by Aune (1996: 103). By contrast, the placemaker uses the café as a place in which to spend time relaxing and enjoying oneself while also playing games on their laptop (similar to Aune’s gameplayer). Both types of laptop use in cafés are made possible by devolving the infrastructure of the Internet. The combination of Internet access, laptops, and smartphones has made it possible for people to “be in their workplace” anywhere (not just work and home), as long as they are connected to the Internet. The technology has also provided us with new ways of balancing solitude and sociality (Liegl, 2014). The term mobile socialities coined by Hill et al. (2021) can be used to analyse people’s media habits in relation to mobilities and socialities, and in which both smartphones and laptops provide access to different kinds of media. In this chapter, I focus on public spaces where personal technology connects the individual, the place, and the city to the World Wide Web, which, in turn, enables access to information about everything, such as information about the global economy, updates from the kindergarten, celebrity gossip and work notifications, from devices in our pockets. While researchers have not analysed how people domesticate the use of laptops or smartphones in cafes, they have analysed the impact of personal technology on social interaction in physical public spaces such as parks (Hampton et al., 2010), pubs (Porcheron et al., 2016), airports (Liegl, 2014), and even the cemetery, as a consequence of games such as Pokémon GO and virtual battles (Cartlidge, 2017). The new technology enables us to be private in public spheres and to shift between different communication layers (Tjora, 2011), but also to be public while in a private home, such as when former president of the USA Donald Trump sent tweets via the social networking service Twitter from his home. 349

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In this chapter, I use the domestication concept to understand how the situation in which the individual uses technology is an unspoken negotiation of norms. In the Trondheim model, the domestication concept highlights how domestication is disciplined through expectations and norms (Sørensen, 2006: 56). Such norms are also dynamic and are defined by the given situation. The domestication concept cannot be employed to find much information about how technology impacts the situation of which it is a part, especially in the case of personal technology. In this chapter, I follow Strauss’ definition of situation as a set of “matrix conditions (that) are foundational throughout the processual ordering that results in social orders” (Strauss, 1993: 257). According to Giddens (1991), social orders give us a sense of ontological security in public spaces. Before presenting two examples of situational domestication, in which personal technology and the café situations are the main elements, I first refer to the Chicago school of sociology to show how different approaches to defining a situation can be understood. The question of how a situation is defined was part of social sciences long before personal technology became integrated into them. Goffman (2009) uses the theatre as a metaphor to describe how the artefacts are an active part of the stages where we act our roles. Bourdieu (1986) highlights this symbolical meaning of goods and possessions, which are some of the main elements of the domestication process, wherein different situations contain different expected norms connected to different types of personal technology. In this chapter, the norms of how to act and interact with personal technology in public (frontstage) in the café are the focus.

Definition of a café situation In this chapter, I describe the café as a community institution, in which a country’s specific culture and history impact the café situation through language, power, gender, and capital, according to different analytical-philosophical approaches to the definition of the situation. The café is not one café; it is a phenomenon that can be found everywhere in big cities worldwide. Similarly, the situation is not just one situation, but many different situations that occur in the café. Here different café guests act according to the situation they are in, such as the takeaway consumer acts slightly differently than the couple that are having their first cup of coffee together or the mother who is breastfeeding in public for the first time (Henriksen, 2015; Henriksen et al., 2013). In this chapter, I concentrate on two types of situations that are normal to take part in or to observe when sitting in a café: laptop use and the use of smartphones while meeting with friends socially. Thus, the café, the individual, and the technology are not separate main elements of a situation; all of them together form the main element of the situation. Blumer’s work on symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), Schütz’ work on phenomenology and the lifeworld (Schütz, 1967), Garfinkel’s work on ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1996), and Goffman’s work on social order and social interaction (Goffman, 2009) represent different ways of defining a situation, based on the kind of qualities attributed to the subject, object, and situation.4 Following I will give my interpretation of these different approaches. Following Blumer (1969), the café visitor can be understood as self-reflective in their social interaction. In that way, the café visitor constructs the meaning of the situation and the object in the situation, and then acts accordingly. If one were to follow Schütz (1967), one would focus one’s analysis on the intersubjectivity and lifeworld of the café visitor to make sense of the situation based on their earlier experience of the situation and context of which they are a part, including their history, and social, cultural, and economic condition (Bech-Jørgensen, 350

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2005: 12–18). By contrast, according to Garfinkel, the meaning of the situation happens in context with the surrounding objects, where individuals’ actions build on other actions and are observable and accountable to others (Garfinkel, 1967). While Garfinkel (1967) provides an individual cognitive interpretation of the situation with the background surroundings, Goffman understands the social relation as a reproduction of social relations defined by the social norm and rituals (Album, 1995). In the following, I draw on Goffman’s interactionism and Schütz’ intersubjectivity to analyse how the individual café visitor defines the situation as it occurs and decodes the norms associated with the situation. The definition of the situation depends on the individual’s interpretation of the situation, where the “specifics of space, time, work, sentiment are locally in accordance with precisely when, where, how and why the interaction occurs” (Strauss, 1993: 252). Goffman (1963: 44) uses the terms dominant involvement and subordinate involvement.5 Dominant and subordinate involvements are defined by the situation. In the first of my two examples, the use of the laptop is the dominant action and the user’s interaction with the other café visitors is subordinate and kept to a minimum, as a matter of common politeness. In the second example, the social situation, such as meeting in a café when seen from an outsider perspective, is the dominant action, but one in which the smartphone offers individuals the opportunity to have a face-to-face relationship with the subordinate action. It is this change in involvement that creates concern for Turkle (2011: 280), who points out that today we have the opportunity to have contact with people all over the world, but that we rarely have each other’s full and undivided attention face-to-face. Thus, smartphones, laptops, and other personal technology give us the opportunity to have a wide range of alternative communication surfaces in the physical collection we are situated (Tjora, 2011), and it is up to those who are part of that situation to negotiate the norms of the interaction in the frame (structure) they are a part of (Goffman, 1974). In other words, the different situations that occur in the café always adapt and change depending on what is happening in the café and what material objects are at play between the individuals, and where the material objects are closely connected to the different kinds of café visitors’ roles that are being played (Henriksen et al., 2013). In this chapter, I refer to two café situations that were common in the year 2019 to show how situational domestication happens when café visitors use laptops to do paid work in a café and how those who visit the café for social purposes use smartphones in a social setting. An individual’s expectation of what kind of situation they are entering will have an impact on how they use the technology in the café. My discussion in this chapter is inspired by both a phenomenological (lifeworld) approach and an interactionism approach, but I use the concept of domestication to analyse the process of situational domestication, whereby the use and staging of personal technology affects how actors understand the rules of the social situation. In other words, I use what Haddon (2011: 312) refers to as the micro-level of domestication as my point of departure, but I also acknowledge that the micro-level is connected to a broader level of the domestication of ICT in society (Lie and Sørensen, 1996).

Empirical base This chapter is based on over ten years of studying cafés. Originally, it was not common to have Wi-Fi access in cafés. When I made my first observation, I was aiming to obtain specific information about the location of [electrical] sockets before I found a place to sit, as I did not want my laptop battery to run out of power. The year was 2007, the same year that Apple launched its first smartphone. Since 2007, there have been many technological developments 351

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in smartphones, apps, and laptops, battery capacity, and the possibility to connect devices to the Internet. Over the years, my colleagues and I observed different uses of personal technology and we conducted an in-depth study of café visitors who used laptops (2015)6 and visitors with smartphones who go to cafés for social purposes (2020). By including structured observations and spontaneous in-depth interviews (Henriksen and Tøndel, 2017), we sought to address “picayune and petty” issues (Goffman, 2010: 247) related to social interaction that otherwise might go unnoticed.7 The interviews gave us insights into the experiences and reflections of the individuals during their time in the café, such as when they were working on their laptop or spending time with friends, and sometimes glancing at the screen on their smartphone.

Two café situations Those who have ever been to a café might have noticed at least two types of café visitors with personal technology: the person with a laptop in the corner of the café and those who are part of a group of people who look at their smartphone screens when meeting socially, primarily to have a conversation. In this analysis I aim to show (1) how situation domestication happens and (2) how situation domestication is connected to the social interaction.

Situational domestication 1: the café worker species Those who belong to the café worker species create their own private office space in the café by placing their mobile phone on one side of their laptop and their coffee cup on the other side (Figure 23.1). Generally, “café offices” do not have many other options for positioning office supplies because the tables are often too small. There is variation in the order in which the coffee is purchased and placed on one side of the machine, the machine is switched on, and the mobile phone is put on the other side of it, yet at the same time there is something of a ritual about the act when the worker leans down towards their laptop and disappears into the work and other communication surfaces. Almost before they remove their laptop

Figure 23.1

The café worker species in the background, sitting with their laptops, smartphones, and coffee, and concentrating on the day’s work tasks (Photo: Ida Marie Henriksen, 2017)

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from the backpack, the observer can notice that the observed person is an exemplar of the café worker species. The main is the Wi-Fi, the second is that it is close to my home, the coffee is the last thing … If the Wi-Fi does not work, I am leaving, even if they have the best coffee. (Leha) According to Laurier et al. (2001), who carried out an ethnography of a neighbourhood café, by looking at how different artefacts are arranged on the café table, it is possible to say something about the interaction between café visitors, and between visitors and staff. They refer to the tabletop as “a sequential phenomenon.” Hampton and Gupta (2008) found that café-based workers more or less used their laptops as “portable involvement shields.” In that way, those who were working on their laptops signalled to staff and other visitors that they did not want to be disturbed. To some extent, the portable involvement shield offered café-based workers an opportunity to focus on their work, but that was not the main reason why the same workers described the café as a “space of productivity” (Hampton & Gupta, 2008: 839). The findings from our analyses are similar to those of Hampton and Gupta (2008). We found three main reasons (practical, efficiency, and atmosphere) why people went to a café to do paid work on their laptops (Henriksen and Tjora, 2018). First, the café was a convenient place in which to work: it was close to home, it was located between two meeting places, or the café provided access to Wi-Fi and electrical sockets. For some café visitors, the laptop was a natural part of spending time in a café: “I don’t go to a café without my computer” (Ethen). Second, the café environment facilitated concentration and efficiency, which the café-based worker did not experience at home. Additionally, the visitors enjoyed the feeling of being seen by others (collective social control), of being away from domestic duties, and found it enjoyable to be in the vicinity of other people without needing to interact with them. Clair described the experience as follows: [There’s a] control factor. I know that no one can see my screen, but all the same there’s a feeling that when there are other people around you have to do a little better than you would otherwise. I don’t have any other explanation for it. The third reason why people went to a café to do paid work on their laptops was that they enjoyed the atmosphere in the café. The right amount of people and the right level of buzz inspired people to be in a work zone: “I think it’s because there’s plenty of movement here, with lots of people coming and going. You drift off into the zone like that” (Dominic). Furthermore, the café visitor’s role as a working visitor helped to create a “stage,” where they were to do paid work and other café visitor would notice that in some way. Interestingly, when the majority of café visitors become workers on laptops, it is possible to observe place-making domestication. To clarify how this happens, I draw on Silverstone et al.’s four-stage domestication process (Silverstone et al., 1992) to show how work done on laptops is “made at home” in cafés.

The café worker species’ place-making domestication of the café The first stage in situational domestication, appropriation, is about making a commodity into objects or, in the case discussed in this chapter, how the cafés are available, both physically and mentally, for the café worker species. Different cafés have different possibilities 353

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for appropriation, such as access or no access to wireless Internet services, accessible power outlets, and seating arrangements that facilitate working on laptops. In 2021, cafés in general in Norway offered free Wi-Fi as part of their services. However, free Wi-Fi access was not readily available in 2012, according to Ethen, who explained how he used to spend time searching for a good café where he could work: “[At café X] the coffee is too expensive and [there is] no Wi-Fi!” or at café Y there were “too many prams at this café. Where should a poor man with a laptop get his coffee?” Aiden wanted to use the café as a place to do paid work, which was a common part of the café culture in some countries at the time. Aiden, who was from Milan, stated the following while in a café in Canterbury, England: “In Milan it’s different. You don’t go to cafés to work … Actually, in America there is more culture of sitting down and working.” Ball (1973) claims that all social activity is in one way or another spatially localised, and that the café has both physical possibilities and limitations, where the appropriation stage is about either knowing or knowing what to look for when searching for a suitable café in which to work on a laptop. When finding a suitable café, the second stage, objectification, focuses on the cognitive value of the café, such as good tables to work at, cafés with the right level of “productive buzz,” and avoiding places that do not welcome customers who buy one cup of coffee and sit for three hours. While the first stage is about identifying opportunities, the second stage is about experimenting with those opportunities to find out what will best suit the individual. In the latter phase, the person who plans to work on their laptop acquires practical and cognitive knowledge of various cafés’ suitability for their working habits. The preferred cafés may be similar in this regard, but they differ from those that the individual prefers to go to in order to date someone or to meet friends. In the third stage, incorporation, each café worker establishes their own “café-as-office” practices as part of their regular routine. Different workers have different strategies, which Hampton and Gupta (2008) identify as true mobiles and placemakers. Placemakers may be open to forms of communication, such as smiles and nods, while true mobiles tend to use personal technologies as involvement shields. During the fourth and final stage, conversion, the café as a place is transformed into a place to work, rather than purely for social exchange. Some cafés may be experienced as such working places for much of the day, while others fall into a daily schedule in which the café-as-office dominates only during certain hours. One observed example of the latter was the low level of noise at the start of the day when workers on laptops were staring at their screens. Closer to lunchtime, the environment changed, as there was more noise due to new visitors arriving to eat lunch. After lunch, the café-as-office situation was re-established, with a quiet buzz. The situation when the café-as-office dominates is a situational domestication. Significantly, the situation of café-as-office dominates only when all four stages – appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion – have been reached. Furthermore, the situational domestication occurs when the café-as-office dominates and, in that way, also causes other café visitors to lower their voices and respect the environment as a place for work, which is somewhat ironic, given that the buzz is one reason why people visit a café to work. The laptop work practices are socially negotiated in some cafés and not in others, as the amount of time spent working on a laptop, the time of day, and type of café determine whether the situation domestication can occur. Situational domestication brings domestication out of the home and into public spheres. Thus, the concept of situational domestication, can be used to show how the use of personal technology can change current norms in public places. In such cases, the use of the laptop technology domesticates the situation in the café. In my second example of situational domestication, the situation domesticates the use of technology. I return to this point later in this chapter, but first I discuss social café visitors and their smartphones. 354

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Situational domestication 2: social café visitors and their smartphones In the following, I focus on a common café situation in which time, place, personal technology, and individual action not only maintain social norms, but also make new ones and change existing ones. In this example, I use situation domestication to understand the dynamics of when and when not to use smartphones in a café when the purpose of the visit is to be social, not to work. The social café visitor may also be a café worker species or a takeaway customer on other occasions. When a person enters a café for social purposes, to spend time with someone he or she knows, the unspoken rules of how to behave regarding the use of the smartphone are different from those adhered to by takeaway customers and the café workers species (Figure 23.2). Two local women in their twenties have just bought coffee and muffins. When I sit down, they start ‘snapping’ [taking photos on mobile phones] the coffee and muffins. They spend a little time on this task. When the snaps have been sent [distributed to Snapchat contacts], both say ‘OK, that’s it’ and put their phones on the table with the screens facing up. (Observation MS11) When observing the women shown in Figure 23.2, it seemed that their café visit was a well-established and rather routine practice: buy coffee or food, allocate some time to take a photo of the food, circulate the photo on social media or send it to someone, put the smartphone on the table with the screen facing upwards, and then engage in focused social interaction with each other face-to-face. Towards the end of the café visit, the smartphone would be returned to its former usage. At that point, the phone might be used to check the time or the bus timetable before leaving, or to note the next appointment with each other on the phone’s calendar. Some café visitors had a particular pattern of behaviour in the final minutes before leaving the café: social interaction face-to-face, followed by face-to-smartphone, and

Figure 23.2 Two friends sharing a smartphone screen at a local café in Oslo (Photo: Ida Marie ­Henriksen, 2017)

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then face-to-face. Regardless of the pattern, all social café visitors used their smartphones in some way when leaving the café. The smartphone was used in a manner to signal the end of the café visit in a tactful way. The unspoken pattern of interaction between the smartphone, the individual, and the physical space can be understood as five modes of what Henriksen et al. (2020) call smartphone practices. The first mode, phone-face transition, happens during entering and leaving the café, as well as during breaks from one’s companions (e.g. to go to the toilet or to the counter). The second mode, screening for urgency, is a way of glancing at the phone in order to manage the shift between face-to-face and mediated communication in a polite manner. The situation in the café and when using the smartphone determines the importance of whether it is acceptable to allow the smartphone to interrupt the social interaction. As an example, if staff at the kindergarten were calling, it would be acceptable to answer the call, but it would not be acceptable to check a snap from Snapchat. The third mode is ignoring or been “phubbed” (that means snubbing someone in favour of using the smartphone) by others. One interviewee said “It is very uncomfortable, since I feel left out, that the person doesn’t really want to interact with me” (Daniella). Individuals who phub others seem to do so for various reasons, most commonly because they interpret the situation differently. When the café visitor role is not clearly defined as a social encounter, individuals in the group might misinterpret each other and the situation, particularly with regard to the role of the smartphone. To establish a common understanding, those who are phubbed might pick up their own smartphones, in ways that makes smartphone use appear contagious. The fourth mode, smartphone as contagious, is when they are used in social situations and refer to when one among a social group of café visitors starts to fiddle with their phones. Observations revealed that when one such visitor started fiddling with his phone, others in the social group quickly started to do the same. The observed behaviour can be seen as a reaction to phubbing and this was confirmed during the interviews. When one individual in the social group is “left alone” by another person’s smartphone use at the table, that individual will very often become occupied with his/her own smartphone, as a way of accepting being phubbed (second mode) and at the same time re-establishing a certain symmetry in the social order. Thus, the social interaction between café companions continuously defines or negotiates the norms concerning the use of smartphones. One accepted use is screen sharing, as shown in Figure 23.2. This fifth mode use of smartphone among social café visitors highlights the various nuances of public smartphone use in social interactions in cafés. Since the smartphone is a part of everyday life, the five modes illustrate how the smartphone today has been domesticated and integrated into the interaction order (Goffman, 1963). The five smartphone practices in interactions, such as being social in cafés, show how personal communication technologies are essential parts of social actions and add quality (e.g. by providing images, information, and facts) to social encounters in the situation if used in a socially acceptable way.

Situational domestication of the social café visitor smartphone use Smartphone situational domestication happens when the norms of smartphone use are negotiated between individuals in the café situation. The negotiation takes into account that the specifics of space, time, work, and sentiment in accordance with precisely when, where, how, and why the interaction occurs (Strauss, 1993: 252). From this example, it is tempting to understand that the social situation domesticates the smartphone use. This means that the individual’s use is domesticated through the negotiation of three processes that are built on the five modes of smartphone use as a practice (i.e. connected to the social situation of which 356

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they are a part). The first process is interaction suspension (to take a pause in the ongoing conversation), the second process is the deliberate shielding interaction (to withdraw from the conversation), and the third is accessing shareables (sharing something on the smartphone). The three processes of using smartphones in social settings in cafés show how personal communication technologies are essential parts of situations in which social actions take place. The smartphone can add both to the quality of the interaction (e.g. as a source of images, information, and facts) and to potential conflicts when it is used as a means to withdraw from the ongoing conversation or to take a pause from it.

The situational domestication of technology Domestication is a way of understanding how technology becomes part of people’s everyday life, traditionally in the household. However, in this chapter, I have aimed to show how situational domestication can appear, such as when the café becomes a working space during some hours of the day or when the social café visitor takes a pause from the ongoing conversation. As a concept, situational domestication can be used to show that not only do we domesticate the technology at home or just the technology itself (de Reuver et al., 2016), but also how individual use of technology domesticates different social situations. In this chapter, I have followed the domestication approach to highlight, through two examples of situational domestications in cafés, how domestication is about understanding how personal technology becomes a part of situations in everyday life. The technology as an object can redefine the norms of the situation in a public place. This happens when individuals interpret their own situations and what kind of interpretation processes they are a part of within their cultures and communities (Brinkmann, 2012). The latter is an interpretation process that, according to the interactionists, does not occur alone, but in interaction with the technology, individual, and the situation where a negotiation process of the social structure is being played out (Strauss, 1978, 1993). Situational domestication as an extension of the domestication concept can help us to be more aware of how the technology are domesticated differently in different social situations where we use personal technology. This chapter started by actualising the café as a good case for analysis in order to address the following question: How does personal technology impact how actors understand the rules of a social situation? My aim in using the term “situational domestication” with reference to the “café working species” and the “social café visitor with a smartphone” has been to show how personal technology has a crucial role in how individuals interpret their own situation and what kind of interpretation process they are a part of within their cultures, communities, technology, interaction, time, and space, and where the norm is renegotiated in an unspoken manner through the interaction with other individuals, in this case in the café space. Although I have used Silverstone et al.’s domestication approach (Silverstone et al., 1992), the concept of situational domestication can also be understood as part of what Sørensen (2006) names collective domestication. It is in the negotiation of the collective that the norms of acceptable use of personal technology in social and public setting are practised and we are on stage to perform a civilised use of technology. When the civilised use is not taken backstage, to one’s home, it is possible that the use of personal technology will interfere with personal relationships due to different understandings of the social situation, as found by Roberts and David (2016), in their article My life has become a major distraction from my cellphone. Expanding the domestication concept to take into account the situation gives researchers the opportunity to explore the context of the technology and how the technology is part of how some norms of action are socially and technically constantly negotiated. 357

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Aksel Tjora, and Marianne Skaar for co-authoring the articles this chapter builds on. I would also like to thank Vivan Lagesen and Knut Holtan Sørensen for commenting on an earlier version of this chapter and the editor, Maren Hartmann, for helpful critical comments. Finally, I would like to thank Catriona Turner for her language editing.

Notes 1 In the time between Habermas’ cafés and today’s cafés, there was the phenomenon of Internet cafés in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where stationary computers were available for a fee to users who wanted to access the Internet. 2 In Norway, the practice has been common upon entry to all public buildings since February 2021 because of the infection tracking of COVID-19, but this stopped as a routine in 2022. 3 This chapter is based on combined findings from analyses presented in previous publications by me and my co-authors (Henriksen et al., 2020; Henriksen and Tjora, 2018). 4 How the meaning in a given situation is framed and how we interpret our framing have long been philosophical questions (e.g. De Beauvoir, 2001). 5 Goffman has not been referred to in STS because he does not use technology as the starting point of his analyses, but as Trevor Pinch (2010: 412) points out, “Goffman’s examples are often replete with technologies and materiality in general” and “These objects and how they are arranged and change, turn out to be important to the way social interaction is performed on stage … The interaction order is materially staged” (Pinch, 2010: 423). 6 We held 23 focus group interviews and 18 observations in cafés in Trondheim (Norway) and Canterbury and London (England). 7 To look for controversy is very characteristic of STS and breaking with norms (Garfinkel, 1967) to provoke controversy can be exciting.

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24 THE DIGITAL DETOX CAMP Practices and motivations for reverse domestication Faltin Karlsen

Introduction People increasingly express ambivalence towards their own media consumption and a need for cutting down on media use (Brennen, 2019; Ytre-Arne & Das, 2019; Ytre-Arne et al., 2020). A rapidly growing field, often referred to as digital disconnection research, has emerged as a response (Lomborg & Ytre-Arne, 2021). This field comprises research on various types of disconnection and digital detox practices both initiated by individual users (Aranda & Baig, 2018; Baumer et al., 2013; Jorge, 2019) and to some extent on people disconnecting as an organised activity (Hesselberth, 2018; Syvertsen, 2020). Emerging commercial undertakings such as digital detox apps, digital detox retreats, and disconnection tourism have also seen increased interest from media scholars (Beattie, 2020; Schwarzenegger & Lohmeier, 2021; Sutton, 2017). The broadest fellow denominator of these activities and products is the aim to inhibit the use of media technology. What motives people have for inhibiting use, however, ranges widely; from elderly people who are sceptical of digital media (Helsper & Reisdorf, 2013) to people who refrain from using Facebook to signal moral superiority, as a “conspicuous non-consumption” (Portwood-Stacer, 2013). As Moe and Madsen (2021) argue, disconnection is not only about the media but is linked to a range of other discourses, such as the quest for a more health-bringing life, as a mean to foster concentration and on an existential level: to resist the attention economy and regain focus on what matters more in life. To understand the growing trend of disconnection as a cultural and social phenomenon and as more than a sum of individual choices, focus on broader normative discourses is therefore warranted. This chapter focuses on disconnection practices and discourses with the digital detoxinspired camp Underleir as its main case. The concept “digital detox camp” covers a diverse set of arrangements aiming to discourage the use of digital media technology. Commercial resorts that are providing various digital detox experiences have grown rapidly, with the U.S.-based camp, Camp Grounded, as an important forerunner (Sutton, 2017, 2020). There are also self-organised camps that are not primarily commercial endeavours but emerge from some form of collectively expressed need to take a break from digital media. The camp I am analysing in this chapter is commercial in the sense that the participants must pay for

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-35

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expenses, but the idea for the camp originated in a social network site called Underskog and is a result of a collaborative exchange of ideas in a non-commercial setting over several years. Commercially run digital detox camps, such as Camp Grounded, provide important sources to understand disconnection discourses and practices. From a domestication perspective, the current case, Underleir, is interesting, as it provides an opportunity to follow the development of a set of norms and practices over time, linked to a specific place. In domestication studies, the process of negotiating norms and practices is often more revealing than the endpoint. In this respect, Underleir, arranged annually since 2014 and subject to gradual adaptations, is an apt case. The main theoretical approach for this analysis is media domestication theory with special attention to the concept reverse domestication (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016). Reverse domestication is, put shortly, the process of creating distance to media technology both normatively and practically.

Background and theoretical framework Domestication theory was first introduced during the 1990s to recontextualise audience studies of television in a broader framework (Morley & Silverstone, 1990). The aim was to create a better understanding of how media technologies were shaped by social and cultural aspects. The focus in domestication studies is the household, following the process of acquiring a new medium and the negotiations that go on between members of the household concerning why, how, and when the medium should be used. This process consists of four steps or dimensions named appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992: 19). These dimensions have a cognitive side as well as a more practical side. Appropriation marks the phase where new media technology becomes available, and where members of the household negotiate whether and why it should be acquired. Objectification concern what sort of place the medium shall occupy both mentally among household members and physically in terms of placement. Incorporation concerns temporal aspects, including what amount of time and at what hours it should be used. Gaining a prominent placement in the household and being frequently used by the whole family, such as a television in the living room, ascribe the medium a certain level of importance and reflects the values and norms of the household. If the domestication process runs its course, the medium finds its place and becomes an integrated part of the household’s routines, to finally reach a taken-for-granted status, to reach conversion. When the theory was introduced, portable media were few and the household was a natural locus of study. In the following decades, the theory has been adapted to changes in how we use media technology. According to Martínez and Olsson (2020), it is possible to discern at least two different overarching trajectories of the theory: first, researchers have applied the theory to studies of a continuous stream of new media technologies, and secondly, it has been brought to use for studies of social and cultural shaping of media technologies in other contexts than the household. The current analysis falls into both traditions, but the main difference from traditional domestication studies is that the social context is other than the household. The context is an annually recurring digital detox event at a camp in the western part of Norway, where a network of friends or like-minded people follow a set of norms and practices where media use is inhibited. This can be framed as an instance of “situational domestication” (Henriksen & Tjora, 2018: 354 – see also Henriksen in this book), or as a “third place,” distinctive from home (first) and work (second) ( Jeffres et al., 2009). A third place can be public spaces like cafes, libraries, and pubs where “collective and spontaneous, location-based communities” 362

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emerge (Henriksen & Tjora, 2018). It can also be described as a “temporary intentional community,” where a group of people congregate around common interests or beliefs for specified amounts of time, after which they return to their separate lives, usually embedded in mainstream culture (Williams, 2009). The annual “Burning Man” festival is an example of this kind of community. From the onset, and as noted earlier, media domestication theory focused on the process where norms and practices pertaining to a new media artefact are negotiated. The dimension conversion implies that it reaches an endpoint, or at least that this may eventually happen. That media use may be reshaped or changed throughout life is nevertheless also recognised in domestication studies, and concepts such as re-domestication and dis-domestication have been introduced to address such processes (Haddon, 2006; Sørensen, 1994). Typical reasons for people to turn away from earlier media habits or to alter media routines are that circumstances in their life change, for instance, when a family splits up or when a new household is established (Russo Lemor, 2006). These circumstances, however, differ from the camp we are analysing as the camp consists of participants who intentionally aim to alter or inhibit their own media use. I have therefore applied the concept reverse domestication for this analysis. This concept builds on domestication theory but describes the opposite process: the process whereby people disentangle themselves from media technology they find invasive (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016). As pointed out by Sørensen (2006), media technology that is once “tamed” cannot again become wild, as experiences cannot be completely erased. Accordingly, reverse domestication is not about making the media completely external, but rather constitutes a reflection on the “cognitive and practical strategies for distancing and withdrawal” from media technology (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016: 29). In this respect, the concept of reverse domestication aligns with reflections from disconnection studies where connection and disconnection are not seen as a binary pair but a spectrum of practices fluctuating between embracing and refraining from use of specific media technology (Light, 2014; Syvertsen, 2020). To go offgrid and become permanently disconnected in today’s mediatised society is also not really a feasible option (Bucher, 2020) and people more commonly negotiate and recalibrate their routines to handle or restrain their use of media technology in everyday life or in particular domains, such as work (Fast & Jansson, 2019; Karlsen & Ytre-Arne, 2021). The camp Underleir highlights how disconnection is negotiated and conducted on a practical level and my ambition with this chapter is to illustrate the relevance of a disconnection perspective for domestication theory.

Methods and material This is a “multi-sited” ethnographic study comprising both an online and offline part (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Marcus, 1995). The main empirical material stems from a field study of the camp Underleir in 2019 where two researchers (Trine Syvertsen and myself ) conducted participatory observation on a four-day field trip. We had informal talks with 30 of the participants – of about a total of 50 – and conducted in-depth interviews with three participants and one of the organisers. The demographic at the camp was mixed and included people from a range of occupations, as well as a handful of students. The age ranged from teenagers to people in their 60s, but the majority was in their 30s and 40s. The large majority also participated without partners. The initiative to the camp came from one of the participants of the Norwegian social network site Underskog in 2014 and has been arranged annually since then. To trace the origin 363

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and development of the camp, we analysed online discussions on this site from its inception in 2014 to the sixth instalment in 2019. We included discussions on Facebook dedicated to the camp from the same period. This combination of offline and online material allowed us to better contextualise this camp event, providing us with an outline of how norms, rules, and activities evolved over time. Fieldnotes, the interviews, and online data were coded and analysed in Nvivo. In our participatory observation, we focused on how the camp was organised temporally and physically, in addition to the social interactions and conversations taking place. Before the field trip we obtained permission from the organisers to conduct the study. At the start of the camp, the information was repeated to the participants, emphasising that if any of them did not want to take part in the study, they could tell us and we would refrain from talking to them about anything concerning our study. No one expressed any need for this. All of the informants are anonymised except for the leader and initiator of the camp, Eir Husby, who has approved the use of quotes from the interview. Online material is easily obtainable and should therefore be used with caution. The gravity of the topics being studied is another aspect to consider when deciding on the level of anonymisation. The main topic of the current analysis concerns media use and not sensitive topics such as political affiliation, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Nevertheless, as a measure of caution, we have refrained from using longer direct quotes and several statements are paraphrased. It should be noted that the material is translated from Norwegian, which also makes it harder to identify the source of a statement.

Analysis – from online discussion to offline experience This analysis is structured in two parts. The first concerns the origination of the camp, what was the inspiration for the camp, and how the guidelines and visions for the camp were negotiated among the participants. The second part – which comprises the bulk of the analysis – concerns the camp event itself. In this part of the analysis, I will look closer at how the camp was structured temporally and spatially, in line with domestication theory. The analysis will revolve around the presence – or rather the absence – of both digital and legacy media during the camp and how media norms were negotiated. Before I commence on the analysis, I will shortly introduce the origin of the camp. The one incident that most directly led to the initiation of the camp was a podcast about Camp Grounded that was picked up by a Norwegian woman, Eir Husby, in 2014. She later became the main organiser of Underleir. While, as we will see, the design of the camp was a collaborative effort, Camp Grounded was an important source of inspiration. I will therefore describe Camp Grounded in some detail. Disconnection holidays and digital free resorts, including camps, have been on the rise for a few years, and Camp Grounded is part of an international trend of tech free holidays. The three-day camp is organised by the Oakland company “The Digital Detox,” which was founded by Levi Felix and Forest Bronzan. They have a background in the tech industry and initiated the camp to find a better balance between life and technology in their “tech-obsessed home culture” (Wysocki, 2019). The Digital Detox launched a ten-person digital detox retreat in 2012. The following year, they organised the first Camp Grounded with 300 participants from around the world. The camp garnished public attention and has been organised annually since, with a few exceptions, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. On their website, Camp Grounded is advertised as “the summer camp you remember from childhood, but for adults” (digitaldetox.com, n.d.). To ensure a tech-free experience, 364

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all kinds of technology must be left at the entrance when entering the camp. Besides being alcohol- and drug-free, other important rules state that one is not allowed to use real names, only nicknames, as well as talk about work or reveal one’s age. The reason given is that it would “give people assumptions about that person.” The transformation the individual must undergo at the threshold of the camp resembles a rite de passage (Turner, 1969), but instead of the trials involved in a religious rite the passage, or a military boot camp for that matter, Camp Grounded is about leaving everyday worries and technological entanglements behind and instead experience a period of playfulness and exploring new sides of yourself (Sutton, 2017). During the camp, the participants can choose from a long list of playful and physical activities, including the “FOMO-free-playshop” where they can engage in archery, yoga, rock climbing, and impro theatre among other things (Sutton, 2017). The planned 2020 instalment of the camp, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, included more than 50 different activities (digitaldetox.com, n.d.). The participants are in general not allowed to wear watches during the camp and the schedule of activities is taken care of by counsellors. One of the organisers explained that the choice to remove time at the camp was that “when you don’t check the time, it seems to expand” (Sutton, 2017). Many of the participants talk about the use of digital media in a language specked with food metaphors, likening digital media to snack, processed food, or sugar reminiscent of danah boyd’s concept of “infobesity” (boyd, 2009), and describe the camp as a more nutritious and healthier alternative. It should be noted that Camp Grounded is firmly rooted in a U.S. context with an affinity to Californian counter-cultures, where ideas of “intentional communities” and “ecovillages” have been a phenomenon at least since the 1850s (Sutton, 2020). In this tradition, spirituality and ideals of less technological dependant and utopian societies are central. The camp also draws inspiration from earlier types of retreats and festivals such as Burning Man where communality and self-expression are important components. At Underleir, we see clear resemblances to the rules and ideals at Camp Grounded but also significant differences. Both share an ambition to enhance a positive, playful, and socially relaxing atmosphere. On their website they state that “We believe all grownups would benefit from more playfulness, closeness to nature and learning new practical skills” (underleir. no, my translation). They also encourage participants to put away their phones and “meet people face-to-face” (underleir.no, n.d). The rules directed towards media technology are more lenient than on Camp Grounded. Instead of a total ban on smartphones the rules state that “during classes and specific group activities you will be asked to put away the smartphone.” They further explain that the reason they want people to be offline is because “it is so incredibly difficult to play with someone while simultaneously checking Facebook” (underleir.no, n.d.). Illustrative of the ambivalent approach, they emphasise that if you are going for a long hike in the mountains, you should always bring your phone as a security measure. Eir, after introducing the idea of a digital detox camp at the social network site Underskog, quickly received positive and enthusiastic responses. Many of the respondents expressed the need to disconnect from media technology and to get away from the digital toils of everyday life. The idea of a camp struck a nerve and Eir told us during the interview that she was overwhelmed by the positive responses and the fact that people said they would like to take part in the camp without hesitation, long before the concept was outlined in any detail. She also explained that they had to make the rules more pragmatic than those at Camp Grounded to better fit the Norwegian context. Regarding domestication theory, my focus 365

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is on the development of the Underleir camp, including its rules. This was a collaborative process where a group of people negotiated what would later materialise as the camp, both physically and normatively. As mentioned in the introduction, this stands in contrast to most commercial digital detox resorts, including Camp Grounded. Looking more closely at the initial discussion of the camp on the network site Underskog, we get a better understanding of the collaborative dynamic of the process which eventually materialised as the camp, including what rules they should conform to. In these discussions, many participants expressed how this resonated with earlier camp experiences of various kinds, usually from childhood, but also experiences from political camps, religious camps, and yoga resorts. Additionally, the typical Norwegian, or Scandinavian “leirskole” (camp school), which is a camp every pupil in Norway must attend once a year, was a common reference point. A broad set of camp experiences was therefore part of the basis for how the camp was later realised. There were, however, also quite a few people without any camp experience, who were nonetheless enthusiastic about the idea of a digital detox experience. But as Eir explained, “you don’t need that many people with camp skills before it becomes a nice experience for the rest as well.” While the need to disentangle from technology was a recurring topic in the initial thread on Underskog, much of the discussion revolved around what kind of activities they should include, ranging from free activities, self-organised activities, to activities organised as classes. In 2014 and 2015, the suggestions included more than 200 activities, an impressive number given that the ordinary number of participants is between 40 and 50 people. The types of activities provide a good picture of how they envisioned what the camp should be, while they also reveal something about the social strata of the participants. Activities closely related to the playful and recreational aspirations of the camp included boccia, football, croquet, frisbee, kayaking, and swimming. A long list of creative activities was suggested, including dancing, painting, drawing, impro theatre, choir, voodoo doll-making, Mongolian larynx singing, and beading. Many of these activities point back to carefree childhood activities. Others diverge from the typical summer holiday and indicate a certain level of cultural capital among the prospective participants. A third group of suggested activities concerns practical skills and handicrafts, such as bicycle repair, sewing, weaving, building a wood house, smiting, first aid, wood cutting, and how to back a car with a trailer. A fourth group involves food preservation or cooking, such as how to make jam, yoghurt, ginger beer, cheese, and a long number of different types of flatbreads, to name a few. In this category, we find a high representation of traditional food preparation and many of the prospective participant expressed keen knowledge of quaint traditional Norwegian handicraft or culture, such as food traditions found only in one specific valley. It has a certain flair of nostalgia and also expresses a wish to preserve cultural traditions. Many of these activities also point forward, expressing a wish to live a more sustainable life, perhaps also a more “authentic” life by getting a better idea about how everyday objects work, can create things from scratch, and focus on things that do not involve a screen. While digital detox was the trigger of the camp, the discussion shows that the ambivalence to digital technology is also tied to other discourses and trends, such as environmental concerns, self-sustainability, and “slow” movements. Conversely, participants also expressed a wish to learn exactly these kinds of skills, and a general wish to have more “life skills” as one person expressed it. In total, the rules that emerged from these discussions can be regarded as a light version of Camp Grounded: they include restrictions on digital media, but not a total ban. At Underleir, 366

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the participants can use their real first name instead of a fictional name but are also dissuaded from talking about what kind of job they have. Underleir shares the same ambition of creating a playful and socially stimulating experience, but the references are more often from Scandinavian outdoor living and camp experiences than spirituality and utopian societies, although they are also present. To delve further into the camp experience, I will now turn the focus toward the camp event itself.

The camp event – a week of disconnection In this part of the analysis, the camp event itself is the main object of analysis, and our participatory observation from the camp is the main empirical source. The analysis will follow the four dimensions of domestication theory: appropriation, incorporation, objectification, and conversion (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992), with a focus on the reverse process and the concept reverse domestication (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016). But first I will provide a short introduction to the camp. The camp is located at Øksendal in the western part of Norway in a beautiful green valley with snow-capped mountains. The camp lasts for a week and participants are expected to stay the whole period to enjoy the full experience. The participants come from many parts of Norway; some are also from other European countries. The camp site is originally a hotel consisting of two buildings; one older lodge built in 1899 as a hunting resort and a newer building with simple rooms more typical of a mountain resort from the 1970s with bunk beds and bathrooms and showers for sharing. The hotel has a large outdoor area with one space allocated to tents and lawns where different activities take place, such as yoga, wood cutting, various ball games, and outdoor meals. Further away from the buildings are areas dedicated to other activities, such as a field for archery and dry murals. There are several seating areas inside and outside. Handicraft tools and creative tools such as paint and painting paper are available for free use.

Reverse appropriation – what to bring and what to leave behind In the context of Underleir, the reverse appropriation started, as we have seen, online in advance of the camp. Appropriation, to obtain a medium, is the first dimension in domestication theory and literally means to “make one’s own” (Oxford English Dictionary). Reversing this process would most acutely mean getting rid of the media artefact, by throwing it out or giving it away, or by removing apps or programmes. Removing a medium would also imply to revive the discussions that led to the purchase in the first place, aiming to ascribe a new, usually more negative, meaning to it. One central aim of the guidelines at Underleir was to minimise the use of digital media, most concretely smartphones and social media. Easily recognisable in this discussion is the distinction between digital and analogue media. A suggestion to use computer games if the weather fails is quickly turned down, as this would involve using a screen. Traditional board games are, however, regarded as appropriate. This dichotomy between digital and analogue activities – that may otherwise share many resemblances – is typical of self-help guides concerning media inhibition; it is seen as; it is seen as important to have more “authentic” experiences (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016; Syvertsen & Enli, 2020). During the camp we witnessed that the rules were in no way set in stone and that the use of media technology was subject to explicit negotiations: discussions about what was allowed and what was not cropped up on several occasions. In one instance, a group of 10–12 people 367

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who was congregated in one of the living rooms, had a playful discussion of a question no one seemed to have the right answer to. After a while one person stated “I have to google it” and started searching for information on her smartphone, which she had in her pocket. This was commented on by other participants and set off a discussion about how or whether use of a smartphone was allowed. One participant thought that using social media was different from retrieving information and that accessing information was considered OK (afterwards, but not during a discussion), and conversely that communicating with someone outside would imply too much of a transgression. If the camp was considered a micro cosmos with self-defined boundaries to the outside world, these would be examples where the boundary had certain cracks.

Reverse incorporation – idiosyncratic camp time We enter the camp a day before the official opening, but people have already started to arrive. The next day, in a ceremony marking the start of the camp, all participants congregate on the lawn for a formal flag-raising. In this case, the flag is an old duvet sheet raised while we “play” the national anthem by strumming the lips. Besides the concrete manifestation that we are entering “camp time,” the informal, tongue-in-cheek performance signals a playfulness we will experience more during the next few days. While the camp lasts, there are a few, but important, measures that organise the camp temporally. The meals arranged at 09:00, 13:00, 17:00, and 21:00 are essential, also in a social sense, as they pull participants together from various classes, games, conversations, or other activities they take part of. As many of the participants do not wear watches, similar to participants at Camp Grounded, they serve as a temporal guideline, signalling when activities have to stop. During meals, participants often mingle and sit and eat with others than those from their classes and in this respect, the meals also prevent the formation of static groups. Since no one, at least officially, communicates digitally, the participants are prevented from checking the schedule for coming activities, and the meals became an important hub for exchanging information about changes in the programme, to raise suggestions for upcoming activities and other vital information. According to Eir, a success factor of the camp is that the organisers remove many of the choices people must take on a regular basis in effect “facilitating playfulness” resulting in an experience of time reminiscent of childhood when adults took care of time. In the domestication framework the incorporation dimension concerns temporal aspects and the inclusion of media in the routines and rituals of everyday life. At the camp, the participants are removed from the (media) rituals that otherwise structure their days, making room for developing new – albeit temporary – rituals and routines. A point that is frequently mentioned when time spent on media is discussed is that social media and smartphones are designed to make people lose track of time, often conflicting with other needs and activities (Ytre-Arne et al., 2020). Correspondingly, advice on how to minimise use often revolves around how to develop new routines or to cut down on certain types of media, such as only using social media in short time slots (Karlsen & Syvertsen, 2016). At Underleir, the experience of escaping tight schedules and interruptions is commented on by many of the participants. Social media is often described as the culprit and a surprisingly high number of participants tell us that they have, or earlier had, responsibilities for updating or overseeing their job’s social media accounts. They can seldom focus on one task at a time but must be alert and ready to respond to external demands.

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While the participants can choose freely what to spend their time on, the majority engages in some form of organised activity during the day, such as yoga, crocket play, fishing, and bathing. Some of those who attend classes, such as wood cutting and archery, tell us that they experience a focus they seldom experience in everyday life, where media intrude on other activities. Words like “meditative,” “focused,” and “relaxing” are repeatedly used, in contrast to everyday life which consists of “checking,” “scrolling,” and “an endless list of tasks that must be dealt with.” Temporally speaking, the camp enables the participants to exchange their normal media routines with activities with a different pulse, in an environment with fewer interruptions, including self-interruptions, and where time management is taken care of.

Reverse objectification – the absence of media Objectification is closely related to incorporation, but concerns space rather than time. Where you place the media artefact physically or how much room it is allowed to take in, for example, conversations signals the level of importance of the medium. The rules pertaining to digital media were not only negotiated during our stay but, as we have seen, were developed over time from camp to camp and online in the intermediate periods. Smartphones were generally prohibited the first year of the camp but were later accepted if they were used as tools, for instance as cameras. We observed, as mentioned, instances where rules were transgressed, such as people googling for information. In some cases, this created tension between experienced participants and newcomers defending their breach as exceptions, arguing that certain uses were not in breach of the spirit of the rules. The general impression was that some of the participants had different interpretations of the underlying intentions of the rules, what sort of activities they were meant to inspire, and what values they promoted. To what degree a space could be occupied by a medium, or whether a medium could be used in a particular space, followed a certain pattern. Media were generally not allowed in common spaces but were accepted in individual ones. We observed participants playing Pokemon Go outside of the camp and were told in conversations and during interviews that people checked their smartphone in their bed. This emphasises the impression of the camp as a space of reverse objectivation, but also that the parameters could be transgressed and that private use of digital media was allowed. As stated, smartphones were not completely absent but rare enough so that we reacted when we saw one. The camp organisers, the “red shirts” (as they wore the same type of shirts to be recognisable by participants), communicated via walkie-talkie, so that the ongoing, internal coordination was taken care of without the use of smartphones. Collaboration with external partners was another matter and deliveries of food, for instance, had to be coordinated by smartphone and we could occasionally see organisers communicating with the outside. In addition to the absence of most digital media, such as smartphones and tablets, legacy media such as television, radio, and newspapers were generally also absent. Although not so noticeable at first, this absence influenced the social interaction between the participants, as it was a noticeable lack of information about current affairs and no discussions about Trump, Brexit, or other topics that were hot at that time, at least as we witnessed. The absence of digital and live media reinforced the impression of being separated from the outside world. Much of the conversation was playful and creative, and since the participants could not talk about their work life, their social status and private life outside of the camp held very few details. Who they were, and what happened outside of the camp, became of smaller concern.

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Reverse conversion – not only media technology Conversion means that the medium is not only incorporated into everyday life but has blended into it and obtained a “taken-for-granted” status. The media technology has become part of the identity of members of the household and how they express themselves to the outside world. What was imminently noticeable at the camp was that the participants talked about the absence of media in connection to their identity and a large set of norms. One cluster of topics was the feeling of freedom, the opportunity to act childish, have fun, and to develop new creative skills. As a woman sitting at the beading table expressed it: “where else could you see adults sit and bead?” Many participants stated that the opportunity to engage in these activities, and to be social in a friendly setting, was just as important as the absence of media. When media abstention was explicitly mentioned, many explained that engaging in physical activities gave them a sense of focus and flow they couldn’t experience in their daily life when digital media was available. Normatively speaking, this was coupled with the value of being able to engage more deeply in a subject, compared to the “shallowness” of media use. It was further described as an opportunity to have more “authentic” experiences than the media could offer. In many ways, the norms described by the participants mirror general media debates and traditional concerns for people’s mental health, their ability to concentrate, and more generally how media might erode democracy and societal institutions (Carr, 2010; Syvertsen, 2017). In addition to this, however, the participants also clearly expressed the importance of being in a creative space where you could have fun, reminiscent of earlier times with fewer demands and pressure. In this sense, the camp provided an opportunity to escape stressful jobs and the demands of adult life, just as much as a life without digital media. To be able to “reverse” a conversion, the media user must question the “taken-forgranted” status of media technology. One way to achieve this is to question its importance or value; another is to value other aspects of life higher or focus more on other activities. During the camp, the latter was easily achieved. The long range of alternative activities to indulge in served as an inexhaustible well of stimulating input, much like smartphones and laptops may otherwise do. The camp can be described as a testbed for reverse domestication, but the question is to what extent new-found interests will stick. Many of the participants describe the camp as an alternative to ordinary life and express a heartfelt need for change. Attending classes rekindled old hobbies and many participants expressed a wish to be able to continue also after the camp. They speculated whether incorporating activities such as jogging, joining a band, knitting, or learning a language would replace time spent on time-demanding media such as Netflix and social media. Others were more reluctant, stating that the demands of everyday life might simply be too strong. As one participant expressed it during an interview after the camp: “I think I have become more conscious about my media habits, but I haven’t really changed any. The job and everyday life are the same and then things become the same.” The fact that many participants have attended the camp several times also indicated that it offers something they do not find elsewhere in everyday life.

Concluding remarks A question emerging from this study is whether a temporary, short-lived event can be framed as a site for domestication. One point in support is that the camp is an annual event; even arranged during the Corona summer of 2020. The negotiation of the norms pertaining to 370

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media use is also not only unfolding during the camp but online when former and coming instalments of the camp are discussed. Although the camp can be described as a “situational domestication,” it is culturally and normatively also connected to wider trends in society (Sutton, 2020). An in-depth study of a digital detox camp is revealing, but we should not forget the wider debate about media use and disconnection it is part of. Another question this study raises is where media domestication happens these days. To what extent does context matter? The mobility of media technology means that boundaries that were once clear are more blurred, such as work versus private life (Karlsen & Ytre-Arne, 2021; Wajcman, 2015). One driving force behind the wish to disconnect is that media interruptions follow people wherever they go, as does the responsibility to handle the interruptions. Underleir is an example of an arena that breaks this pattern. It is a location where the participants know that the intrusion of media technology is drastically reduced, and it happens at a specific place at a specific time. As such, the camp might be an example of a site for situational reverse domestication. To turn the question concerning context on its head, we might say that the somewhat rare spaces where media resistance is cultivated today are in some sense, as important as the arenas for domestication once were. While people appreciate, and indeed use, media as never before, it is interesting also to look at places and times where they can escape the media. Studying reverse domestication in one context, such as this camp, tells us something about other contexts, for example, what part of their media use people are less happy about. Employing a reverse domestication perspective may therefore reveal the potential downsides of reaching a taken-for-granted status. It highlights activities and values that the media may have replaced, why they are experienced as intrusive, and what the media is not the best substitute for.

Acknowledgments The author is grateful for Trine Syvertsen’s collaboration in this study and feedback on the chapter. I would also like to thank the participants and organisers for their help during the study.

Funding This work is supported by The Research Council of Norway, grant number 287563.

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25 UNPACKING PLAY A domestication perspective on digital games Kristine Ask

Introduction What can the domestication perspective offer the study of games and play, and what can domestication research learn from game studies? Domestication concerns itself with the appropriation of media and technology and highlights how they are shaped by the context of their use. The perspective centres negotiations of meaning, practice and learning as central to what a technology “is” and what is “does.” Domestication rejects technologically deterministic approaches and embraces everyday life as a key site for sociotechnical processes where technology is “tamed” from uncertain and wild into meaningful and stable. In the STS version of domestication, used in this chapter, the theory also draws inspiration from actor-network theory. Here, the taming processes are understood as work performed in aligning and stabilizing human and non-human actors along practical, symbolical and cognitive dimensions (Sørensen, 2006; Sørensen et al., 2000). What work is involved in stabilizing games and players? In this chapter, I will discuss the mutually beneficial relationship between studies of domestication and studies of play based on research from game studies, while also drawing heavily on my own research on the domestication of games, particularly of the collaborative online game World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004). This chapter starts with a short historical account and outline of the societal domestication of games, while the discussion is structured around the three dimensions in the STS model of domestication to explore games and play as meaning (why do we play?), as practice (where, when and with whom do we play?) and as learning (how do we learn to play?).

Digital games: from the margins to mainstream In the 1950s, computers were so large, so expensive and so complex that they were only available to select groups of expert users working at universities and in the military. They were understood to be large calculators with the capability to do computations humans could not (Levold & Spilker, 2007); yet, computers were never never only calculators. Even in these early machines, you would find digital versions of classic board games like tic tac toe, chess, checkers and tennis (Wikipedia, n.d.). Initially, these games were for academic purposes, a way to explore, test or showcase technical capabilities and they were not shared 374

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between institutions. Spacewar, made for the PDP-1, was one of the first games made solely for entertainment, and the first to be shared widely outside its research group (which in 1962 meant selling a whopping 55 copies). Spacewar was made by students and researchers that considered themselves hackers or “computer bums,” who saw another purpose than utility in the tools they were working with (Graetz, 1981). In this sense, the very existence of digital games may be understood as a domestication of computing technology, where a room-sized, transistor-based science-machine was “tamed” as a technology for play. In the 1970s, the first commercially available games and game consoles were introduced to the public – with Pong being one of the iconic games of this time. As computing turned mainstream over the next two decades and computers moved via offices and public spaces into people’s homes, so did digital games. Some 50 years later, in 2022, there are approximately 2.95 billion players worldwide (Statista, 2021), Steam as the major distribution platform for games hosts more than 30,000 games (Bolding, 2019) and the games industry is estimated to be valued at USD 173.70 billion in 2021 (Mordor Intelligence, 2022). An important factor driving growth in the last decade is what game scholar Jesper Juul has coined “the casual revolution” ( Juul, 2010); a break from early design ideals where games were primarily made for dedicated players with high levels of skills and specialized equipment. Instead, by making games that were quick to pick up, affordable to play and easy to fit into everyday life (for example, as puzzle games on your phone on the way to work or party games to be played with friends) games were redefined as a technology for “everyone.” Not only did this shift represent a major change in how games were made and used, it is also a reminder that what we consider to be key characteristics of play and players are subject to change. On a global scale, the above numbers show that digital games have moved from the margins to the mainstream, and are currently a very common hobby/interest, a central cultural expression, as well as big business. We may interpret these numbers as an indicator that digital games have been domesticated on a societal level. However, the widespread uptake and use of digital games does not automatically mean that digital games are domesticated. For domestication to be complete (to the degree it is ever complete), there must be stability in interpretation and use. While we are seemingly heading in that direction, there are still many examples of ongoing negotiations and controversies with and around games when we approach them on a micro-level. This indicates that domestication studies are still needed to understand the ways in which games are being integrated into everyday life if we are to understand the role of games and play in society.

Digital games as friend or foe In addition to the widespread use of games, a sign that digital games are being domesticated on a societal level is the tapering down of media panics. A media panic is a moral panic about the effects of new media technology that is characterized by emotionally charged and polarized views, where the medium is seen as either “good” or “bad” and children are seen as especially vulnerable (Drotner, 1999). Digital games have been the subject of several media panics where deterministic narratives about the power of games to cause violence, addiction, mental illness and social exclusion have framed games as a potentially dangerous technology (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008). While these concerns have proven to be unsubstantiated, the stereotype of the gamer (someone young, white and male, who lacks social skills, is unattractive, overweight and professionally unsuccessful [ Juul, 2010; Stone, 2019]) is reflective of previous fears about the consequences of gaming. The negative stereotypes, combined with 375

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a toxic gaming public where women and minorities are excluded, mean that many players do not consider themselves “gamers” because of how the gamer identity is linked to toxicity, sexism, racism and harassment (Shaw, 2012; Stone, 2019). This shows how our interpretation of technology is linked to our perceptions of use and users, and emphasizes the need for user-oriented perspectives like domestication. We are now in the fading-out phase of the media panic where resolutions are found, or in the parlance of domestication we can say that games are no longer seen as “wild and dangerous.” However, that games have been framed as harmful in public discourse for a long time, still has consequences for many everyday negotiations about games and play. This is particularly visible in research on parental mediation of play. Drawing on their own past, and an imagined future, parents attempt to balance perceived risks and rewards when choosing what games and game practices they allow (Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Even parents who find claims about addiction and violence to be laughable, must position themselves against concerns about the (perceived negative) consequences of play (Ask et al., 2021). Such research reminds us that macro narratives about games, even if they are unfounded and tapered down media panics, are still shaping domestications and demonstrate the need to continually consider the wider cultural context for the appropriation of games. The sensitivity for normative aspects of use also makes domestication well suited to investigate how macro scale discourses about technologies are integrated and negotiated into everyday life. To explore how we may understand digital games from a domestication perspective, the next section will address three areas of game studies research, mapped onto the three dimensions of domestication articulated in the STS model (Sørensen, 2006; Sørensen et al., 2000). These three dimensions do not only represent productive analytical avenues to study how a technology is appropriated; they also reflect three different strands of academic enquiry in the multidisciplinary field of game studies. How to understand play (the symbolic dimensions) has a clear link to humanities, drawing heavily on fields like literary and media studies. The practices of play (practice dimension) contain key contributions from the social sciences in the study of play as a social phenomenon, while the knowledge aspects of play (cognitive dimension) are primarily based on work from game-based learning – which may be seen as a subfield of both game studies and pedagogy. We start with the symbolic dimension and the meaning of play.

The meaning of play: the heterogeneity of fun The symbolic dimension of domestication is about meaning; how the technology is interpreted, and what values and meanings are associated with use. Domestication presumes that all technologies have interpretative flexibility, meaning they can be interpreted and used in different ways, and that establishing meaning is central to how a technology is used (Pinch & Bijker, 1987). For the study of digital games, this means asking how games are interpreted and what meaning play holds. While understanding play might have limited relevance for non-play research, the way play lets us conceptualize technology use as marked by fun and enjoyment offers insights into non-utilitarian use. Game designer McGonigal (2011) summarizes the appeal of games as spaces for (a) urgent optimism, where challenges are welcomed rather than shunned, (b) social relationships, where problems are shared and solved together, (c) blissful productivity, where hard work is rewarded and optimization enjoyable, and (d) epic meaning, a feeling that what you do matters. These qualities are not inherent to play, but McGonigal does well in capturing the promise of games and highlighting aspects of play that makes it treasured – including 376

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how play transforms everyday life into something “magical” or at least less mundane. This transformation aspect has been a recurring theme in studies of play that can be traced back to “The magic circle.” The magic circle is a central, and highly criticized, concept within game studies (see e.g. Consalvo, 2009). First introduced by anthropologist Huizinga (1955) in his seminal work Homo Ludens (though only mentioned six times in passing – see Stenros, 2014), the magic circle describes play as something bounded and separate from ordinary life. The magic circle has an appeal in its ability to capture how play can feel like something outside the ordinary, as something special, precious and potentially epic. Even if scholars disagree on the level of boundedness of play, the idea of play as a social contract, framing or agreement that allows for playful meanings and activities to take place (and that to some degree separates play from non-play) remains. The magic circle helps explain how play can transform a stick into a sword, the floor to lava and a hand on the shoulder to a freeze-ray. As play is defined by situations and relationships, not specific people or things, the magic circle places great value on context and processes of meaning-making. This resonates well with a domestication perspective which emphasize the relationship between meaning, materiality and practice. The experience of being inside the magic circle, of being engaged in play, is often described as immersion. Immersion is the pleasurable experience of being surrounded by another reality, the feeling of being transported into a simulated place where attention shifts towards the fictional (Murray, 1997). It is not unique to games, and might as well happen when reading a book or watching a movie, when you “get lost” in the story. Of interest to studies of technology, is how immersion does not have to be based on fiction. Thon (2008) proposes a multidimensional model where immersion can be experienced through presence in a game world and interacting and moving within it (spatial immersion), from engaging with challenges and puzzles in the game (ludic immersion), through the games’ unfolding of a story and/or emotional investment in the characters (narrative immersion) and/or attention to other players as co-players or competitors (social immersion). A central contribution here is how immersion does not rely on a story, but can be produced through systems – something that should be of relevance to scholars interested in how deep involvement with (non-game) technologies and technological systems can be enjoyable and have meaning in and of itself. While immersion attempts to explain the ways in which players become engaged with games, it is an approach that tends to start with games rather than players. From a player perspective, Yee (2006) proposes that we may understand player motivations as belonging to three major categories: achievements (about advancement in the game, mastering mechanics and competing with others), social (about socializing with others, friendship and teamwork) and immersion (discovery and exploration as well as roleplaying and escapism). In a similar vein, Kallio et al. (2011) distinguish between three player mentalities; social mentalities that emphasize play as a shared social endeavour, casual mentalities concerned with relaxation and killing time, and committed mentalities about having fun though immersive- or sportslike experiences. Both typologies treat immersion as one of several motivations or mentalities, showing that immersion is not a mandatory characteristic of play (and that immersion is a contested concept used in different ways). However, more importantly, such models show that play is a heterogenous activity that encompasses many different meanings. Ask and Sørensen (2019), in a study of three player guilds (communities) in World of Warcraft, found that even within a subset of player communities in a single game, there was variations in the interpretations of the meaning of play. The groups were categorized as casual (play for relaxation and socialization), hardcore (play as dedicated and competitive) and moderates (balancing in-game progress and real-life commitments), reflecting three 377

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different meanings play held for them (I will return to these three groups in the next sections to show how meaning influenced both organization and learning). Where some highlighted the ability to play without having to make commitments and simply spend time with friends (casual), others found meaning in the success enabled by total dedication and intensive training (hardcore) – indicating that enjoyment is varied and complex. Empirical research on player practices, especially play that is transgressive (that pushes or oversteps boundaries) has value in showing that play is not only about “good times.” Players can seek distress and discomfort as part of the play experience and find that the very discomfort they feel gives the experiences authenticity and thus make it more meaningful (Bjørkelo, 2018). Play can also be about optimization and reaching set goals, where play is less about the experience of playing the game and more about the mastery of the system and the outcome it produces (instrumental play) (Taylor, 2006). There is also “dark play,” which describes a form of play that does not rely on a social contract between players and can instead be one-sided and potentially dangerous (Stenros, 2019). Player practices like trolling, where players deliberately sabotage and annoy other players, is a staple of most game communities (Cook et al., 2018). In these forms of play, fun is still important and may even be a key motivation, but it is achieved through means that we generally do not consider play-like, or even enjoyable, and thus may be easily overlooked if use is extrapolated based on the games alone or narrow ideas about fun. In summary, play is a form of bounded activity that allows activities and artefacts to gain new meaning when pertaining to play. Research on players and play finds a wide spectrum of possible meanings play can have, and that a single game can hold widely different meanings among different players. Moreover, play encompasses activities that, at least on the surface, do not appear playful or fun. From this research we learn that “having fun” or “enjoyment” is not an adequate description when explaining the meaning of use, as “fun” includes many possible and contradictory meanings and interpretations. What it means to have “fun” needs to be unpacked and explained as driven by different motivations, mentalities and by evoking certain emotions, even if the technology being studied is not a game. For research on play, a takeaway from domestication studies is how meaning is linked to context. Player typologies and studies of motivations tend to exclude contextual aspects (though Kallio et al., 2011, is an exception), and is thus unable to describe how such preferences and motivations develop – inadvertently creating an impression that these preferences and motivations are inherent in either players or in the game. In the next section, about the practice dimension, we will further explore how context shapes play.

The practice of play: appreciating the mundane The practice dimension of domestication details patterns of use, with a particular emphasis on patterns that have stabilized as routine. This includes practical considerations such as when a technology is used, how often and for how long, where and with whom. For studies of play, this means questions such as when and where do you play, with whom do you play and what other technologies are used when playing. In studies of play in families, the importance of the home and everyday life as context of play is highlighted. Parents invested in gaming would do their best to encourage children to play, filling their home with game consoles and titles (Ask et al., 2021), while other would do their best to dissuade children from playing. Where some parents strictly adhered to PEGA ratings (system for content warnings and age appropriateness for games), others give their

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children access to adult games to “toughen them up” for the world (Siyahhan & Gee, 2016). In studies about the domestication of the home computer in the 1990s, the placement of the computer in the basement or under the stairs signalled how unimportant computers were (Aune, 1996). In a study of gamer-parents and how they domesticated games for their family (Ask et al., 2021), the placement of games and game technologies in the living room conversely signalled how treasured games were to them and their view of games as a communal and social technology. These parental choices produce different contexts for use, where not only access to games, but the possible meanings and practices related to games varies, something domestication’s sensitivity to context is suited to help unpack. In my research on World of Warcraft and everyday life (Ask, 2011), the teenagers interviewed in my study highlighted the link between play and non-play activities. The teenagers were still living at home with their parents, and in order to play in the time intensive and committed way that they desired (with hour-long play sessions several nights per week), they had strategies to keep their parents content and approving of play; responding quickly if called upon, doing extra chores around the house and speaking positively about the effects of gaming. One made sure to clean the kitchen counter every day when he got home after school to keep his mom’s “happymetre” up, as he was mostly free to do what he wanted for the rest of the day if he did. The actor-network that these players built to domesticate World of Warcraft, did not only include computers, internet, games and game worlds, but also housework, family communication strategies and parents. What the domestication perspective renders visible is not only how non-player and non-games are involved in play (to the degree we may understand them as part of player practice), but also the considerable amount of work that goes into keeping these different human and non-human actors in line, so that play can happen. While the practical dimension of domestication does well in highlighting everyday life as a context for play, the physical context for play is not necessarily the only context that matters. For online games that rely on coordinated and organized play sessions, the type of player organization (e.g., guilds, clans and warbands) one is member of is also an important context (see also Wang, chapter in this book). Just like there are great varieties in forms of play and meaning that play can have, there is also great variety in player organizations that facilitate different kinds of play. In a survey of World of Warcraft guilds, Williams et al. (2006) identified four main types of guilds, each supporting a different mentality and approach to the game: social guilds (where game goals are secondary to socialization), raiding guilds (where players organized in large groups to defeat the game’s most challenging monsters), PvP guilds (oriented towards player versus player combat) and roleplaying guilds (where being “in character” and being involved with the game world’s fiction was important). These guilds are not only tools for organizing play; they are also contexts that support certain meanings, practices and knowledges about play. As an example of how an online community also represents a context, let us return to Ask and Sørensen (2019) and the three different guilds in World of Warcraft under the “raiding guild” category. The three groups were defined through the different meanings they gave to play, i.e. casual, hardcore and moderates. These categories, however, did not only represent three different meanings of play, they were also reflective of three different ways of organizing play. The casual players had shorter play sessions, often later in the evening when kids were in bed and required few commitments from their players in a flat organization consisting of friends and friends-of-friends. The hardcore players organized play around world records, which meant that some periods they would take paid leave from work to

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play all day, while other periods were off-season. Their guild was strictly hierarchical, with the leader working fulltime to keep everything running at peak efficiency. The moderates instituted a guild bureaucracy with regular meetings between guild-officers, budgets for use of resources, recruitment strategies and performance metrics, to attempt to manage their vision of a balanced approach to gaming. For the domestication to be successful, it was not enough for play to fit into each players’ everyday life; the player community also had to do a collective domestication of the game where shared meanings and practices were developed (Ask & Sørensen, 2019). In online games, the negotiations surrounding play is not only be between player, game and everyday life – but between player, game, player community and everyday life. Domestication studies, with its nuanced understanding of context and everyday life, have much to offer the study of play. In contrast to how play has often been conceptualized as bounded (to some degree) and separate from everyday life, the domestication perspective situates play in everyday life and highlights the day to day – often mundane – considerations and negotiations that take place and shape play. Particularly relevant is how domestication is shaped by non-users (both parents and partners) and non-game activities (like chores or spending time with a partner). The study of player communities further elaborates on how play is not something that simply happens, but is reliant on organization, planning and coordination that configure both meaning and practice – a type of work that domestication is well suited to identify and address. For domestication studies, knowledge about player practices and contexts are increasingly necessary to understand how everyday life looks, as gaming is such a common hobby and activity.

Learning to play: knowing how to optimize All technologies are dependent on some skill or knowledge to be used, and the cognitive dimension of domestication directs our attention to how these skills and knowledges are developed. Addressing the cognitive dimension of play involves asking questions about how players learn to play, what expertise is developed through play, what kind of knowledge is created and used by players – as well as how knowledge and play shapes each other. In this section I will first outline how games and knowledge are intertwined, before addressing how players are taught how to play by the game, by other players and by other technologies. To be game literate and able to “read” a game, you need to be able to identify goals and rules, understand how the game works and be able to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to achieve said goals (Hsu & Wang, 2010). For those interested in how knowledge is related to technology use, games represent an interesting case as players are usually taught how to play by the game itself. It is common for games to have tutorials, hints, help buttons, manuals and even interactive training challenges to help the player understand the game and gain the necessary basic skills to keep playing. Games tend to be designed so that gameplay is made increasingly difficult and complex as the player progresses. For example, if the first challenge a player must overcome requires them to jump across an obstacle, the second challenge might be to both jump and duck, while the third challenge requires the player to jump, duck and shoot, etc. Players are expected to experiment, practice and try again if they fail. When they succeed, they are rewarded with new abilities and new content to master. The subfield of digital game-based learning (DGBL), or simply games and learning, argues that the way games design learning experiences are the application of pedagogical principles that support learning in all forms (not just learning how to play) (Gee, 2007; Squire & 380

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Steinkuehler, 2005). Furthermore, they argue that the way players teach each other how to play should serve as an inspiration for educators and schools. In online games, instructions from the game are supplemented with social learning between players. It is common for more established and experienced players to form informal mentorships with newer players. The mentor will give advice and help them navigate both game world and community (Steinkuehler, 2004). Conversations between players are a mix of social and informative, where small-talks are intermingled with knowledge about the game and its mechanics (Nardi et al., 2007). Some player communities are considered so highly supportive of the learning process that they have been described as nurturing affinity spaces where learning, socializing and fun is seamlessly integrated (Gee & Hayes, 2012). Research on such communities continues to serve as inspiration for how learning can be made more enjoyable and communal. In addition to learning from other players, an important source of gaming know-how is from player made guides, discussions, and technologies for play. Player guides and magazines (broadly described as paratexts) have always accompanied games, detailing play strategies, tips and tricks and generally informing the player about the game world and system (Consalvo, 2007). With the internet, such guides has increasingly been made by players for players. Extensive wikis, forum discussions, video-tutorials and other dedicated websites have been created to help players understand how to play – and how to improve play (Carter, 2015; Martin & Steinkuehler, 2010). One of the largest Wikipedias in the world is dedicated to World of Warcraft, with WoWpedia nearing 250,000 articles dedicated to this game alone (“WoWWiki,” n.d.). The dedication shown by player communities in creating knowledge about the games they are passionate about, demonstrates how highly gaming culture value knowledge as part of the play experience. However, the strong link between gaming and skills in game culture has also been described as a toxic meritocracy. It informs a worldview where all players are seen as having the same possibilities, making those who rise to the top “simply better” and those who are unsuccessful worthy of derision. This line of reasoning has been used to justify harassment of female players, POC players, other marginalized groups and generally people playing without the express wish to be the best (Paul, 2018). This shows how knowledge is not a neutral factor in domestication processes; what we know and how we know it is more than a question of “know-how,” it is also a process of valuation where certain ideals are promoted. One key example of player-created knowledge that is both used to inform the “how to” and the “right way to” is found in “theorycrafting.” First developed in relation to the strategy game Starcraft (Blizzard, 1998), theorycrafting is the application of mathematics and statistical calculation to game data in order to develop optimization strategies. By treating the game like a lab, players can conduct experiments, generate data, make calculations and reverse-engineer the underlying rules of the game – insights which, in turn, are used to create optimal strategies for players to improve their performance (Paul, 2011; Wenz, 2012). On the surface, theorycrafting appears to be objective descriptions of the game and its mechanics. It is, after all, a series of calculations based on data. However, theorycrafting is co-produced with specific values and ideals, like an identity tied to elitism and a discourse about play that places high value on the quantifiable (Ask, 2017). Together they inform, encourage and institutionalize an instrumental approach to play (see Taylor, 2006) where outcomes, success and competition are favoured – and where the experiential, fictional, personal and playful is toned down. I will now return to the domestication study of three different player communities in World of Warcraft (Ask & Sørensen, 2019), to show how meaning and practice are related to practices of learning and the way paratexts were accepted or rejected. For the “casual” 381

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players who are oriented towards the social and relaxing aspects of play, learning was also considered to be a social endeavour. They preferred to ask other players about upcoming changes and what strategies to use, as they considered it enjoyable social interaction – even if they had access to and the necessary skills to use other sources. The “hardcore” players who had a competitive gaming style and a guild oriented towards world records, were expected to be at the forefront of knowledge about the game. They would do their own research on how to optimize play, stay updated on current debates and were among a select group of high-profile players who would write player guides with tens of thousands of readers. The third and final group, the “moderate” players, who resorted to bureaucratization to balance competitive edge and chill attitude, also bureaucratized learning. The informal mentorships common in online games were formalized by designating a mentor to all new members during their trial period, and strategies were developed based on what more successful guilds (like the above hardcore guild) had done and presented as “homework” for players to read up on between sessions. In all three guilds we see a strong connection between the meaning of play, the organization of play and how players learn to play. For domestication scholars, games pose an interesting case to study the role of knowledge in domestication. Partly because games excel in teaching their users how to play and has player communities dedicated to producing and sharing knowledge, but also because research on players shows how knowing is distributed between humans and non-humans where player made representations and tools are shaping both meaning and practice. Studies on player generated knowledge, like theorycrafting, also shows how knowledge is never neutral – even if it positions itself as purely objective and numerical descriptions. A strength of the domestication approach is the ability to link the creation and use of knowledge during play to meaning and practice to situate knowledge in specific contexts and communities. For game studies, the domestication approach is a possible avenue to study the role of knowledge in games without having to focus on learning outcomes or contexts related to education.

Domestication as a way to see the work involved in play The three dimensions of domestication emphasize meaning, practice and knowledge as central to how a technology is used. As shown above, meaning, practice and knowing are three aspects of play that have received considerable attention in game studies (though not necessarily under those headings). What a domestication approach might add of value is the ability to bring these different strands of academic enquiry together to explore how they influence each other. It is not controversial to argue that the meaning play is intractably linked to the context of play, nor that the skills of a player shapes practice. It is, however, another thing entirely to be able to integrate these different perspectives in a single analysis. The domestication framework represents a way of doing user/player studies that acknowledges how play is configured along several dimensions at the same time – and, equally important, opens venues for analysis of how these aspects of play are mutually shaping each other. As meaning is the first category presented in this chapter, it might give the wrongful impression that meaning is the driving or deciding factor for how players organize or develop new skills. Because of this it is worth emphasizing that all three dimensions are mutually constitutive and have the potential to change each other. For example, a shift in how a player approaches game related skills, may lead to a different interpretation of the game and new ways to play. A change in guild policy and organization of play may encourage other 382

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forms of game related knowledge and new meanings. Addressing how the three dimensions intersect destabilizes the idea that play is primarily defined by the relationship between player and game, and may direct our attention to the work involved in constructing and stabilizing meaning, practice and knowledge. The domestication perspective highlights the situated negotiations and local adaptations taking place with and around games. This may help render visible how play is being produced through specific and necessary work. Making meaning, negotiating places and times to play, and learning the skills required by the game are not optional activities related to play (though they may vary in importance and complexity). We cannot separate the cleaning of kitchen counters, finding purpose or reading strategy guides from playing itself. Without these activities, without this work, play could not be the outcome. We may think of the work involved in producing play as ludic work (Ask, 2016). Inspired by actor-network theory, ludic work considers play as what is being “held together” through directed efforts in enrolling, aligning and stabilizing various actors (both human and non-human), rather than thinking that play is something that “magically” is able to hold together a wide variety of actors, activities and meanings. With a domestication perspective, we may explore the work that goes into making something fun and enjoyable, and through that identify how the magic circle transforms the mundane into something special: into play.

Conclusion Both domestication studies and game studies benefit from perspectives that highlight complexity and diversity of experience and interpretations. For those studying games, domestication is a fruitful approach, as it situates play in specific contexts. The perspective destabilizes the idea that play is something that happens in the interaction between player and game and is open for contextual factors like the influence of other users (players) and non-users (parents, partners, etc.), as well as other technologies and resources (paratexts). Instead, the domestication approach directs attention to a range of actors (both human and non-human) and practices that are not usually considered game-like or play-related yet are highly determining for the enactment of games. Domestication studies also have much to learn from the study of games and play. Game studies have shown play to be a diverse experience, and highlight how fun and enjoyment is a powerful drive for use that may also motivate a range of non-play activities in order to produce play. When studying the domestication of technologies, we should therefore consider the varied ways in which enjoyment can be derived through use and consider how/if enjoyment in itself is the purpose for use.

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Kristine Ask Ask, K., Sørenssen, I.K. and Moltubakk, S.T. (2021) ‘The struggle and enrichment of play: Domestications and overflows in the everyday life of gamer parents,’ Nordicom Review, 42. https:// doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021–0044. Aune, M. (1996) ‘The computer in everyday life: Patterns of domestication of a new technology,’ in M. Lie and K.H. Sørensen (eds.) Making technology our own? Domesticating technology into everyday life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 91–210. Bjørkelo, K.A. (2018) ‘“It feels real to me”: Transgressive realism in This War of Mine,’ in K. Jørgensen and F.K. Karlsen (eds.) Transgression in games and play, Cambridge: MIT Press, 169–186. Bolding, J. (2019) ‘Steam now has 30,000 games,’ PC Gamer, available at https://www.pcgamer.com/ steam-now-has-30000-games/ (accessed 30.03.2022). Carter, M. (2015) ‘Emitexts and paratexts: Propaganda in EVE online,’ Games and Culture, 10 (4), 311–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014558089. Consalvo, M. (2007) Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames, Cambridge: MIT Press. Consalvo, M. (2009) ‘There is no magic circle,’ Games and Culture, 4 (4), 408–417. https://doi. org/10.1177/1555412009343575. Cook, C., Schaafsma, J. and Antheunis, M. (2018) ‘Under the bridge: An in-depth examination of online trolling in the gaming context,’ New Media & Society, 20 (9), 3323–3340. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444817748578. Drotner, K. (1999) ‘Dangerous media? Panic discourses and dilemmas of modernity,’ Paedagogica Historica, 35 (3), 593–619. https://doi.org/10.1080/0030923990350303. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J.H. and Tosca Pajares, S. (2008) Understanding video games: The essential introduction, London: Routledge. Gee, J.P. (2007) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, J.P. and Hayes, E. (2012) ‘Nurturing affinity spaces and game-based learning,’ in C. Steinkuehler, K. Squire and S. A. Barab (eds.) Games, learning, and society: Learning and meaning in the digital age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–40. Graetz, J.M. (1981) ‘The origin of Spacewar,’ Creative Computing, available at https://www.wheels.org/ spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html (accessed 20.03.2022). Hsu, H.-Y. and Wang, S.-K. (2010) ‘Using gaming literacies to cultivate new literacies,’ Simulation & Gaming, 41 (3), 400–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878109355361. Huizinga, J. (1955) Homo ludens; a study of the play-element in culture, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Juul, J. (2010) A casual revolution: Reinventing video games and their players, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kallio, K. P., Mäyrä, F. and Kaipainen, K. (2011) ‘At least nine ways to play: Approaching gamer ­mentalities,’ Games and Culture, 6 (4), 327–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412010391089. Levold, N. and Spilker, H.S. (2007) ‘Kommunikasjonssamfunnet?’ in N. Levold and H. Spilker (eds.) Kommunikasjonssamfunnet moral, praksis og digital teknologi, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 15–28. Livingstone, S. and Blum-Ross, A. (2020) Parenting for a digital future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, C. and Steinkuehler, C. (2010) ‘Collective information literacy in massively multiplayer online games,’ E-Learning and Digital Media, 7 (4), 355–365. McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world, New York: Penguin Press. Mordor Intelligence (2022) Global gaming market—Growth, trends, COVID-19 impact, and forecasts (2021— 2026), available at https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/4845961/gaming-market-growthtrends-covid-19-impact (accessed 30.03.2022). Murray, J.H. (1997) Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace, Cambridge: MIT Press. Nardi, B.A., Ly, S. and Harris, J. (2007) ‘Learning conversations in world of warcraft,’ System Sciences, 2007. {HICSS} 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference On, 79–79. https://doi. org/10.1109/HICSS.2007.321. Paul, C.A. (2011) ‘Optimizing play: How theorycraft changes gameplay and design,’ Game Studies. The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 11 (2). http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/paul. Paul, C.A. (2018) The toxic meritocracy of video games: Why gaming culture is the worst, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pinch, T. and Bijker, W.E. (1987) ‘The social construction of facts and artifacts: Of how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other,’ in T. Bijker, T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds.) The social construction of technological systems new directions in the sociology and history of technology, Cambridge: MIT Press, 399–441.

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Gameography World of Warcraft. OS X, Windows. Developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, 2004. Several updates and expenaions continue to be developed for this game. Starcraft. Windows. Developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, 1998. Space War! PDP-1. Developed by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen. 1962.

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26 PLAYING AT HOME Larissa Hjorth, Ingrid Richardson, Hugh Davies and Will Balmford

During our ethnographic fieldwork into mobile games in Australian homes, one particular form of gameplay was uniquely prevalent. It was intergenerational. It was creative. It was playful. It moved ambiently in and out of everyday life. Parents, children and grandparents played. We are speaking of one of the most ubiquitous and yet under-analysed games, Minecraft (known as the digital LEGO). Drawing on these ethnographic insights, in this chapter we seek to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural practice. As 15-year-old participant Daniel from Adelaide identifies: “No matter what games I end up getting into, I will always love playing Minecraft. It’s like coming home.” One of the most urgent and crucial builds in Minecraft Survival mode is a home. Players shape and customize their Minecraft homes – often building elaborate castles, skyscrapers or dungeons in which to live out their virtual existence. Homes can be fantastical or realistic, dream-like or aspirational. Even in Creative mode where shelter is not required, most players soon use the games’ building capacity to create liveable, desirable and inspiring architectures. This is not surprising, given both the significance of domestic space in everyday life and the fact that much of Minecraft play takes place in the home. The home both shapes and is shaped by Minecraft game play. This chapter explores Minecraft play with particular attunement to the domestic environment. Much of our ethnographic fieldwork over three years was conducted in the home. The home is a complex and contested space in which intergenerational and gendered distinctions and differences around media literacy and accessibility play out. The home is often a key site of much game culture. This phenomenon has been radically reshaped in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which games became key for young people to socialize while home schooling. The World Health Organization (WHO) therefore recently revised its definition of games as no longer addictive but key to social inclusion and wellbeing (2020). In this chapter, we firstly contextualize the methods of this study, which draws from a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery project, Games of Being Mobile, exploring mobile games in the home. We then discuss the home in light of the domestication theory approach. This approach sought to understand technologies in the home as being shaped by and through existing practices and routines. We subsequently discuss the role of touchscreens in the home as part of an understanding of screen literacy and intimacy. 386

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As we have mentioned in previous work (Hjorth et al., 2020), haptic screens on tablets and smartphones play a particular role in the Minecraft literacy journey. Many players first begin on these types of screens and then graduate to PCs when they want more strategic and networked play. This section is followed by a discussion of intergenerational play. As we found in our ethnographies in the home, Minecraft was one of the few games children and parents played together. The “educational” dimension of Minecraft meant that many parents felt ok about their children’s usage – as opposed to other games that were less legitimated. This tension plays out especially in the final section where we reflect on the role of screen time and negotiation of playful identity in the home. As we argue, Minecraft extends existing spaces and contexts for collaborative creativity and social interaction in the home context. In this chapter we explore how Minecraft – as an indicator of mobile game play more broadly – is spatially negotiated and situated within the domestic space of the family home, and through the mobile device on which it is played.

Minecraft as mundane media: ethnographies of Minecraft in the home For our Games of Being Mobile project we followed ten households in each of the Australian capital cities for three years (50 households in total). This involved interviews, play session and participant observation methods to understand the rhythms of the household media during the dynamics of three years. During our ethnographic fieldwork into the use of mobile media and games, Minecraft gameplay was uniquely prevalent. It was intergenerational, creative, and moved ambiently in and out of everyday life routines. However, it is also identified as “old media” as 18-year-old university student Jason notes “Minecraft… isn’t it dead?” Describing the game as “dead,” Jason articulates how the game’s veneer of newness has worn away. It has become mundane. And this is when it becomes interesting – an embedded part of our everyday lives. This mundaneness is precisely why Minecraft offers crucial insights into more sedimented and collective informal literacies around digital and social play. Unlike new media – which is often rarefied – established and even old media practices allow us to understand the routines of mediated social and cultural practice. As media scholars such as Wendy Chun (2016) remind us, understanding new media isn’t about chasing the rapidly growing cycle of obsolescence. Rather, new media is most interesting when it becomes almost-forgotten – or as Jason identifies, “dead” – and absorbed as part of everyday and habitual rituals. Moreover, Minecraft articulates ways of bringing the old and the new media together. We examine Minecraft as not just a game but as a rich informal context of learning, creativity and literacy within the context of domestic media. For Michael Dezuanni, Joanne O’Mara and Catherine Beavis (2015), Minecraft enables the performative play across online and face-to-face contexts to be assembled and reassembled in creative and social ways. As they argue, Minecraft is indicative of new forms of digital play, leisure and childhood, and also involves a new kind of contemporary literacy (ACMA, 2010; Holloway et al., 2013; Marsh & Richards, 2013). Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1991) thinking on gender as a performativity – that is, the way repetitive iterations and rituals of gender become habitualized as embodied routines – Dezuanni, O’Mara and Beavis explore how their young female participants used “spoken language, creative digital production and Minecraft gameplay to bring themselves into being and establish social viability within classroom affinity groups” (2015: 149). Similarly, in many of our fieldwork play scenarios, the collaborative and co-design elements of Minecraft play became an integral part of the 387

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game’s vernacular. For Dezuanni et al. games such as Minecraft invoke a complex repertoire of “skills, textual practices, performance and identity work” (2015: 149). In particular, Minecraft involves not just a relationship between practice, perception and performativity (i.e. playing) but also, Minecraft as a platform affords specific forms of performativities – what Thomas Lamarre would call “platformativities” (2017). Acknowledging that each platform has its own affordances that shape, and are shaped by, the communities of practice, Lamarre’s concept allows for a more nuanced notion of performativity that recognizes the technical, haptic and material effects of the digital platform on the human body. These dimensions of platformativity are not just digital but have material elements too – from the materiality of devices to the materiality of making. Dezuanni’s research on Minecraft in terms of digital media literacy is crucial. In particular, Dezuanni argues for a framework that not only acknowledges the socio-cultural and humanist accounts of media participation, but, as he rightly identifies in the case of Minecraft, the importance of digital making practices (2016). Dezuanni compellingly outlines a materialistic and performative literacy approach to digital media literacy frameworks, accounting for digital materials, media production, conceptual understanding and media analysis (2016). These maker cultures in and around the actual gameplay are crucial to understanding new creative literacies. These creative literacies traverse digital, material and social worlds in ways that are interrelated, connected and converging. Here, the interweaving of material and digital worlds is integral in the understanding of media literacy. It also connects to the rise in maker cultures paralleling digital media ubiquity, whereby the digital emphasizes, rather than diminishes, the significance of materiality (Gauntlett, 2013).

Understanding domestic media During COVID-19, social isolation many saw their worlds converge – work, school and life. Some households where parents had banned children from screens or had strict screen-time rules had to rapidly rethink their philosophies. As the weeks turned into months and they had to juggle work, schooling and life – often within confined parameters – digital media rules and boundaries were transformed. Indeed, for many school children, games were the only way they could keep social, connected and sane. During this period, Minecraft witnessed a reawakening. For one of our 12-year-old participants, Jason, he and his friends “rediscovered” Minecraft. They would sit on the PC, chatting on Discord, while playing the game. Minecraft was both familiar and nostalgic – bringing a sense of comfort in a time of uncertainty. For the Todd family with six-year-old Edward, home life and digital media etiquette was completely rewritten. Edward had not been allowed screen time before COVID-19. During the pandemic, his mother and father allowed him to play Minecraft as a way to keep creative and social as they juggled working and schooling from home. Edward moved across media and platforms and modalities all linked by one common theme – Minecraft. From the iPad to Let’s Play (LPs, videos of people playing) on the computer to role playing Minecraft on walks with his parents, to drawing, Edward found solace in Minecraft play. COVID-19 amplified digital practices that were already happening – especially in terms of the deep connection between social play, creative literacy and quotidian performativity. As we found in our study, games play a key role in the social life of the household. They are vehicles for connecting play and sociality across members of the household as well as others co-presently online. In particular, Minecraft can provide much insight into how we understand and perceive home and place. Players can spend days building fantasy or realistic buildings, which they then 388

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inhabit with their friends. And yet little of the research into Minecraft has identified its key role in not only illustrating perceptions and practices of home life but also how that might be expanded upon through digital and social play. How does building a shelter in Minecraft reflect the player’s perception of what constitutes home? And how are ideas of what is a home and “being at home” shaped through the making processes of Minecraft? Understanding some of these questions requires providing some context – especially around its implementation in the home as part of broader domestication approaches to technology. As media scholar Leslie Haddon observes, part of the early success of games in the home from 1970s to 1990s was their attunement to the rhythms of the home as part of domestic processes (1998). Locating games within Information and Communication Technology (ICT) frameworks, Haddon argued for a conceptualization of games through a domestication theory approach. This approach, as developed by Roger Silverstone (1994), coalesced science and technology studies (STS), and cultural and media studies methods to understand the complex ways in which technologies are socially shaped by their uses and contexts (Pinch & Bijker, 1987; Silverstone et al., 1992). The domestication approach defines everyday users as “innovators” who adapt and appropriate technology from the expert context of engineers into the messiness of the social world. The approach has applied ethnography and user experience (UX) models to understand the dynamic way technologies operate within the home. For cultural studies scholars such as David Morley (2003), the home is a complex and contested space in which technologies reflect gendered, social and cultural practices. Drawing on a cultural studies concept outlined by one of the pioneers, Raymond Williams’ (1974) mobile privatization, Morley argued that technologies in the domestic sphere are deeply paradoxical. For Williams (1974), looking at the then new technology of the TV in the 1970s, technologies performed a role which allowed users to be mobile (by travelling the world electronically) while being at home. This process is what Williams called mobile privatization. From the 1970s onwards, the concept has been redeployed to think about the role of personal computers and mobile phones in the home (Hjorth, 2009; Ling & Haddon, 2003). In At Home with Computers, Elaine Lally (2002) analyses the domestication of computers in Australia from their introduction in the early 1990s, when computers became a common household item. She notes that during this period, the Australian populace largely rejected home computers as leisure objects – instead seeing them as a technology used “only for work” (Lally, 2002: 61). This observation is echoed by Goggin (2004) and Green et al. (2004) who corroborate the early resistance to new media technologies as a form of leisure within the Australian home in the form of perceived “risks, dangers, controls… and disadvantages” (Green et al., 2004: 2). Likewise, new media literature around the early 2000s frequently highlighted users’ concerns around how new media technologies might disrupt or change their life – costing them their leisure time (Goggin, 2004; Luke, 1999). The perception of risks – especially manifest in media effects models which see users having little agency or power over the deleterious effect of media (e.g. addiction) – remains a dominant discourse in media studies scholarship today (Brand et al., 2009; Kim & Kim, 2015; King & Delfabbro, 2009; Kwak, 2004; Rikkers et al., 2016; Ross et al., 2013; Song & Og, 2003). Within the Australian context, the media studies research explored the ways in which new media technologies in homes can reshape behaviours, spaces and locations (Hollows, 2008; Lally, 2002). This field of media studies – informed by the domestication theory approach – builds on scholarship examining the entry of previous media technologies such as radio and television into the home (Flynn, 2003; Hirsch & Silverstone, 2003). It argues that the domestication and physical placement of new media devices within the home impact on how that space is organized, navigated and understood and how users then deploy the media 389

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(Green, 2010; Hollows, 2008; Horst, 2012). Practical examples are seen in the evolution of dedicated media spaces such as computer desks, console hubs, and wireless routers. These technologies and the spaces they inhabit are shifting the organization and cadence of everyday family life (Green, 2004; Horst, 2012). As Canadian scholar Maria Bakardjieva (2005) notes in her study of the internet in everyday life, users both “domesticate” (Silverstone, 1994; Silverstone et al., 1992) and creatively re-appropriate (Feenberg, 1999) technologies in ways that make sense of everyday practices and rhythms. By the mid-2010s, new media technology and videogames had largely been absorbed into the household (Berker et al., 2005). Accordingly, media studies’ literature shifted to focus on the spatially and socially transformative capacity of new media. Empirically based studies of domestic environments provide examples of similar findings in other areas of media studies, particularly those examining household computers and videogame access within domestic environs. Such examinations are found in work that unites domestication approaches with ethnographic methods. A useful example of this can be found in the ethnographic work of Heather Horst, which explores the everyday uses of computer technologies in Silicon Valley homes in San Francisco (2012). In her study of domestic life in this technologically literate community, Horst unpacks the complex manner in which digital technologies influence the spatial and temporal rules and rhythms of life in the home. More recently, and to address concerns about children’s use of technologies in the home, media scholar Sonia Livingstone (2019) has investigated how parents are moving away from thinking about managing their children’s device use to collaborating on their “digital futures.” This shift from dichotomies of “good or bad technology,” Livingstone reveals the strategies and tactics of parents who were confident about their children’s technology use as part of acquiring necessary digital literacies. Within homes across the world, domestic technologies are key in reflecting the social shaping of the household – echoing the gendered, generational and socio-economic differences. These often-contesting contextures come to the forefront when it comes to games – and, in particular, when they are played on the ubiquitous mobile device. While Minecraft is a game that can be played across various platforms – PC, console, tablet and smartphone – it was usually the latter two that our participants preferred. While the portability of mobile devices allows Minecraft to be played in a variety of public spaces – their mobility in the home was usually between the bedroom and lounge room. As Dean Chan showed in his study of Japanese mobile gaming, mobile device-based videogames are frequently played in the home, just like their non-mobile counterparts (2008: 23). In our fieldwork, scuffles between siblings and parents often occurred around a mobile device – reflecting broader hierarchies of age and gender within the family dynamic (Morley, 2003; Silverstone et al., 1992). However, more gentle and co-operative dynamics between siblings engaged in mobile Minecraft play were equally found. In the next section, we discuss the role of touch in home-based Minecraft play on tablets and smartphones, and then turn to the role of Minecraft for intergenerational play and screen-time tensions.

The Minecraft touch For 12-year-old, Eileen, the touchscreen interface of her iPad allows her a tactile engagement with Minecraft that is “deeper” than keyboard control arrangements. AS Eileen notes, I find I enjoy games on touchscreens so much more because I find the whole idea of moving forward with W, going to the side with A and D, and backwards with S just not 390

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very normal for me to kind of hold. It’s just so nice to be able to like move your finger along the screen and jump. Eileen’s identification with the touchscreen is precisely due to its haptic tangibility. While fixed screens tend only to be looked at, portable screens are highly interactive, inviting swiping, flipping, pinching and other gestural flourishes. Eileen’s sentiment was echoed by many of our participants. Eileen talks about enjoying “feeling” the game – something that touching the screen allows her. As she notes in the above quote, using commands on the PC doesn’t have the same game feel and for her playing Minecraft is about touching the screen. As Schneier and Taylor note, the mobile version of Minecraft allows “particular entanglement of young players, Minecraft PE, and touchscreen interfaces that were characterized by much more haptic and spontaneous gamic performances” (2018: 17). That is, the presence of haptic play is a feature more fully realized in the mobile version of Minecraft. In our own ethnographic research, we observed how players on mobile devices touch and flick their way through Minecraft’s world, their fingers frequently obscuring portions of the screen. The mobile interface affords what Schneier and Taylor refer to as the “pleasure of gameplay… unique to the touchscreen interface since players gesticulate directly on a screen… affording a different bodily orientation” (2018: 2). For Adelaidean Eileen and her sister Chloe, weekends are a time to wake up before the parents and play Minecraft together on their iPads while sitting in the lounge. Minecraft play extends the siblings tight connection. They share and discuss techniques and strategies, often leaning over each other’s iPads to help with a task. Sitting on the couch as the morning sun creeps into the family room, the pair swipe their hands across their screens, running, jumping, mining and building in the virtual world. Their shared engagement with the open world environment has generated a repertoire of in-jokes and memorable experiences between the sisters, a space in which intimate and private understandings have formed. The sisters have created their own in-game rituals within Minecraft such as virtual “shaking hands” before starting a Minecraft session. This secret handshake is achieved by repeatedly tapping their device screen to make their characters move their arms. For the sisters, the tap-hand shake is a practised and pre-agreed gestural performance facilitated through the touchscreen device, one that “felt” like more of a handshake owing to the physical movement of their hands on their iPads. The crucial role of “touch” in mobile communication has been explored by Richardson and Hjorth (2017) investigation of haptic screens as a now habituated aspect of users’ embodiment. Likewise, Pink, Sinanan, Hjorth and Horst (2016) explore the ways in which contemporary mobile apps are touched, opened, and habitually operated, bringing further understandings of how everyday intimacy, privacy, and connection are experienced through embodied interaction with mobile media. Through grounded ethnographic investigation, Hjorth and Richardson (2014) and Pink et al. (2016) approach mobile media as tactile and bodily phenomena that users manage through gesture, touch, and manipulation, actions that leave a material trace on the screen’s surface. Also in Adelaide, 11-year-old Clara discussed her own enjoyment of using the iPad to play Minecraft. As Clara notes, “Sometimes my hands get in the way of the screen but I kind of like it too. I feel like I am actually touching the game.” For Clara, the touchscreen creates a sensation of immediacy and expressive intimacy with the game world – almost as though she is reaching through the screen. Several of our participants made similar observations of mobile devices, while the devices’ screens themselves left intimate human traces of the children’s play. And yet the experience 391

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of touching the screen can also be a generational one. While children easily took to touching tablet and smartphone screens and effectively manipulated on-screen objects, some of the older participants did not find the interface as comfortable and familiar after a lifetime of computer use. In the next section we reflect further upon Minecraft’s embeddedness in the intergenerational aspects of play.

Intergenerational and sibling play All the Hardy family members – parents Charlie and Heather and sisters Amanda (10) and Penny (6) – enjoy playing Minecraft. The family shares access to the game on Charlie’s iPhone. Although Heather and Charlie welcome the shared family interest in Minecraft, the use of Charlie’s mobile device in accessing the game often becomes contested. Most notably, Penny’s increasing desire to play Minecraft has become a point of conflict. As Charlie reports: We wake up in the morning and she asks if it is time to play Minecraft. We had a rule where she couldn’t play until the afternoon and she is literally watching the clock. I do try to restrict her since that is my device for using Twitter or the internet or whatever. Situations often arise where Charlie cannot even find his phone – one of the girls (usually Penny) has been playing Minecraft and cannot remember where she left it. This, of course, has raised some issues about the intergenerational sharing of the game, especially when it can result in the loss of a borrowed device. To resolve the situation, Charlie and Heather have established parameters for Penny’s Minecraft play, which include specific times and locations within the home where she can play (this includes no play in the private space of the bedroom) as well as leaving the phone in the communal space of the loungeroom to charge when she is not playing. An unintended side effect of the imposition of these rules is that Penny has begun to admonish her parents for their own mobile use, such as using the phone too often or in the bedroom, which she perceives as off limits. This workaround has caused Charlie and Heather to examine and justify their own device use in the home to their children. Here we see that the differing generational expectations around device use and literacy is heightened; just as children might call their parents hypocrites for their constant smartphone use for “work,” so too, as devices become a core part of education for children, the boundaries between work and play blur. We also encountered reversed scenarios with parents competing for their children’s game devices. For example, during the COVID-19 crisis, Cameron (13) increasingly found his Nintendo Switch being used by his parents as part of a fitness routine. While it impacted his gameplay, Cameron was more bemused than irritated by this (Figure 26.1). “It’s funny because they (my parents) think games are a bit of waste of time – but now they’re playing games and they don’t even know it.” Cameron has long been defending videogame play to his parents as both a highly creative and social activity. While Cameron’s parents are more circumspect about the value of videogames than he, their use of his device provides him with more ammunition to champion his own videogame play. Through play activities on shared devices like the mobile phone, the iPad and Switch, these devices become increasingly embedded as part of the home. The negotiation of device use in families often saw the development of strategies and tactics to accommodate the vicissitudes of how, when, and for how long devices and games could be

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Figure 26.1

Minecraft play in the bedroom

engaged with. These negotiations often impacted how the space of the home was shared and understood. Homes can become sites for intergenerational tensions around ambient expectations. With the proliferation of devices in the home, we also see clashes between different atmospheres. Often sound can be a key point of tension. Noise from devices, for example, was a problem for Milo. He plays Minecraft on his iPad on the living room couch but is repeatedly told to turn the volume down. Meanwhile he tells us the television is always on – often with no one watching. “I don’t mind the television being on when I play,” Milo tells us, “but it’s annoying when I get told to be quiet when the TV is so much louder than me!” However, Milo’s mother Pam likes to hear the television when she is in the kitchen making dinner. Even if she can’t see it, she likes to listen to the news in the background. In his discussion of television in the home, Silverstone (1994) notes that the presence of continuities of sound and image, of voices and music, can be easily appropriated as a comfort and a security. Pam admits that she, too, is relaxed by television voices and sound, but this appreciation is not extended to game sounds. “Too much shooting” Pam tells us. “Mum there’s no shooting in Minecraft,” Milo sighs. In Adelaide, we are sitting in the kitchen of Sarah, who, with her oldest, 15-year-old son David, is telling me about a Minecraft world she set up some years earlier for David and his younger, 13-year-old, sister Mary to hang out in. David shows us the virtual space on his inherited iPad. “We actually hardly ever use it” David tells me. “Yes, but you used to.” His mother replies. “We all play games” Sarah says, “and so I wanted to make a space where we could play together more.” For Sarah, Minecraft has itself become an extension of their small suburban home, a place where she and her family can interact with each other virtually, even if it has not been as deeply embraced as she anticipated. During the conversation, David’s younger sister Mary joins us in the kitchen and wants to show a statue she has created in the shared world. She grabs the iPad from David but instead begins altering David’s avatar to jokingly annoy her older brother. “That’s ok” he says leaving the kitchen and walking down the hall to Mary’s room, “I’ll just change your avatar too.” “You don’t know my password,” Mary yells out

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to him. “Ruffus13” David yells back. It’s the name of the family’s pet cat and the year he was born. Mary rushes to her room but it’s too late. David has accessed Mary’s iPad and entered the shared Minecraft server. He leans his body against Mary’s bedroom door preventing her from entering her own room. From the other side of the door, Mary begins attacking him in Minecraft instead. “Mum, she’s punching me,” yells David from behind the door, beckoning his mother Sarah to discipline Mary’s avatar. “Well, tell him to give my iPad back!” Mary laughingly retorts. “Stop punching yourself ” David taunts Mary, as she is actually punching her own avatar while playing through David’s iPad. It’s a robust physical and virtual play that both are enjoying. Nonetheless, Sarah eventually confiscates both iPads and returns them to their rightful users. Mary and David settle themselves at the kitchen, but their engagement in the family Minecraft space continues. Play between the teenager pair moves between collaboration and competition, often involving a spirited rough-and-tumble that occurs in both the space of the game and the space of the home. In this scenario, sibling play occurs seamlessly across the shared space of the family home and the game world of Minecraft. Tensions around power and control are played out through Minecraft. Through David’s alteration of Mary’s avatar, we see the relationship between the siblings play out. The game becomes the locus for their struggle. The actual and virtual domains become interwoven and layered giving rise to the condition of “co-presence” (Hjorth, 2007: 370). This co-presence brings into being hybrid locations that are “neither here nor there” – imbrications of physical and digital places (Hjorth, 2007: 370). These co-present settings in which players can be physically within the home and yet digitally transported to other locations, have been explored in relation to transcending national and cultural borders (Lin & Sun, 2011), and in terms of improving long distance communications and feelings of togetherness in situations where friends and/or family are separated by geographical distance. In our fieldwork, co-presence emerged as a way in which family relationships were manifested and negotiated within and across the online space of the game and the home environment.

Figure 26.2 Minecraft can be played across various platforms – here it is on the PlayStation

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Echoing Sarah’s ambitions for the family Minecraft world, Balmford and Davies (2018) argue that Minecraft co-present play in family homes may be understood as extending the space of the family home into the virtual space of the game. In this way, interactive devices such as iPads and game consoles offer a kind of actual-to-virtual architecture affording windows and doorways into digital extensions of the home. Minecraft is not just played in the home but becomes an integral part of the home as do the devices through which it is accessed. And while Minecraft is often a source for intergenerational bonding in the home due to its “educational” dimension, issues around screen time highlight the ongoing tension around uneven expectations of use. In the final section we further explore the negotiation of screen time across both spatial and temporal boundaries (Figure 26.2).

Screen time and the negotiation of playful identity While COVID-19 has seen many parents have to adapt their rules around screen time, it is an issue that continues to divide ideologies and philosophies around what is deemed “appropriate.” Key scholars such as Livingstone (2019) have identified the importance of monitoring over restriction – that is, using screens as points of discussion and dialogue rather than intergenerational conflict. Without clear industry, governmental or social guidelines on what constitutes appropriate screen time, we found a variety of parental perceptions and strategies. In Adelaide, a conversation between Peter (aged 14) and his mother Beth evidences the gradual de-escalation of rules surrounding game use in relation to Minecraft. As Peter lay on the living room floor playing Minecraft on his iPad, Beth turned to him and asked: “What was the rule Dad used to have? You can download any game as long as there’s no….” – Peter interjected mid-sentence recalling their father’s rule – “weapons, zombies, or… no guns or zombies.” After a quick pause, Peter laughed and added “but I downloaded one with weapons AND zombies.” Contesting boundaries around screen time often involve a patchwork of shared devices. Fifteen-year-old Raymond and 13-year-old Cameron are brothers who share a Nintendo switch. They also share an iPad between them, although the device is primarily used by their father Michael. Negotiating the two devices between the three of them sometimes brings challenges, but also serves as a way for Michael to keep an eye on their device use. The boys are allowed one hour of gaming per day but can earn extra screen time by using the iPad for family approved educational activities instead of game play. In instituting this plan, Michael recognizes that screens are an important aspect of contemporary life but wants to diversify his children’s use and understanding of their media devices. Michael also appreciates that while he is currently able to monitor and regulate his children’s screen time, as of next year, Raymond will have his own iPad for school, making his screen time almost impossible for Michael to monitor. His son will have to regulate his own digital activities. For Michael, the key point is to nurture an understanding and literacy within his children of diverse and appropriate technology engagement that they can carry through their lives. Kyunghee Kim and Kisook Kim (2015) provide examples of parental management of child gaming habits in the Korean context, arguing that parental influence can have a significant effect upon the gaming practices of children. Other scholarship has identified correlations between parental involvement and videogame over-usage (Kwak, 2004; Song & Og, 2003). In Australia, there has been both medical (King & Delfabbro, 2009; Rikkers et al., 2016) and social (Brand et al., 2009; Ross et al., 2013) research into this field. In much of 395

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this academic work, the focus concerns the perceived “health” impacts of excessive play in relation to videogames (King & Delfabbro, 2010). However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, much of this “media effects” debate was challenged by the recognition – even by the WHO – that games play an important role in fostering and supporting social inclusion. The role of digital parenting – that is, how the digital is deployed in, and around, parenting – becomes key to understanding these debates around screen time. For Lyn Schofield Clark, who draws on in-depth interviews with the US families, socio-economic issues often inform the ways digital media is viewed as positive and “empowering” by parents and children (2012). Deploying the concept of the “Parent App,” Clark highlights the ways in which upper income families use digital media as part of helicopter parenting and expressive “empowerment” narratives, while lower income families use digital technology to strengthen interfamilial ties and neighbourhood bonds (2012). For Sun Sun Lim, the concept of “Transcendent Parenting” best encapsulates the ways in which parents can overcome various forms of separation – such as the distance between parents and their children’s offline and online socialities (2019). As Lim notes, “For the transcendent parent, these digital ties enable and shape how they communicate with their children, and how they guide their children’s media use” (2019: 1). Lim’s work focuses on screen time within Asian cultural contexts to consider how we might develop nuanced regulations for the future that acknowledge both parent’s and children’s understandings and experiences of screen time as part of contemporary sociality and literacy. As we found in our ethnographic research, “screen time” often came up as way for parents to reinstate boundaries in the increasingly digitally ubiquitous home. It was a concept that was contested, debated and tested. In an attempt to regulate household screen time, Alex and Milo’s parents Pamela and Marcus have introduced a list of rules for the kids to follow. However, their strategy has been met with limited success. In a conversation, they try to convey the challenges they face in reducing the device use of their children. MARCUS: We are trying to limit games and internet, but it’s actually much easier to ban

them completely than to monitor, because it’s absolutely constant you know. At any minute of the day those two try to find a way to get online. PAM: Yeah, they come up with all these clever reasons and excuses. MARCUS: Yeah, but you can’t ban them either because they use them in school – or at least they say they do. PAM: No, they do – they actually have to use iPads. Since year 8 the school says they have to. But then when they’re supposed to be doing their homework and they’re playing games or watching YouTube and you tell them off and they say – “but I have to for school” MARCUS: Yeah, all the lines are blurred a bit with education and entertainment at the moment. Parents Marcus and Pam felt caught in a double bind between the care for their children and the pressures of an increasingly digital world. While their eldest child Alex professed to be “growing out” of games, the younger child Milo felt that videogames should have a place in the home alongside the television. Marcus and Pam’s concerns are not uncommon; they reflect broader media debates. Livingstone (2019) calls for an end to the “scaremongering” in relation to digital culture, suggesting that digital media can be effectively used to bring families together. In her research, Livingstone finds that parents who are calm and confident

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about their children’s digital lives share decision-making within the family, listen to their children’s views and enjoy digital pleasures together. The monitoring of digital play in the home is not just temporal but also spatial – for example, many of our children participants were prohibited from playing in their bedrooms. This allowed parents to enact an informal surveillance of their children’s playing. Much of the psychology scholarship has focused on the negative impact of videogames in children’s bedroom in term of sleep/wake patterns (Oka et al., 2008), school performance (Hale & Guan, 2015) and physical activity (Baranowski et al., 2012). The no-play-in-the-bedroom rule serves a dual purpose of improving sleep patterns as well as enacting surveillance as a form of care in relation to children’s screen activities, but is not always welcomed by children themselves. Let us return to the Hardy family in Brisbane. When we asked Amanda (10) and Penny (8) if they were allowed to play games in their bedrooms, they both responded in chorus with a begrudging “No!” According to their parents, Charlie and Heather, bedrooms were spaces for rest, and videogames were accordingly restricted to the family room. Yet there are some exceptions to these rules. For example, parents tend to be more accepting of children playing videogames together in a bedroom than of children playing alone, especially when an older sibling is present and able to act as a guiding mentor in online game spaces. Although playing Minecraft and other videogames in children’s bedrooms was commonly prohibited, we noticed myriad other ways in which Minecraft manifested in these spaces. Minecraft posters, books, branded toys, LEGO, clothing, curtains and bedding were commonly encountered in the bedrooms of our participants, particularly for the 8- to 14-yearolds. Despite the prohibitions on screen engagement there remained numerous other ways in which participants could engage with Minecraft in these intimate settings (Figure 26.3). Playing games in different spaces of the house often came with different expectations. Playing a game in the privacy of a bedroom might sometimes ignite parents’ curiosity, while playing in the lounge often involved more intergenerational and parallel play between different devices. The significance of Minecraft was not just in the playing of the game.

Figure 26.3 Minecraft plays on digital and material forms of play – LEGO Minecraft is on the table, while Minecraft is played on the PlayStation

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Indeed, often the passion of playing Minecraft took other material and performative turns – from Minecraft LEGO and paraphernalia to Minecraft guidebooks and cosplay objects. Playing with Minecraft can take multiple material, digital and social forms. Bedrooms have a long history of being key sites in the home in which young people can express themselves. Silverstone (1994) has previously noted that teens will adorn their bedrooms with photographs of soap-opera or rock-music stars as part of identity formation. Horst (2012) notes that bedrooms are spaces where children experience a greater sense of safety, customization and control. Through the decoration and organization of bedroom spaces, children are able to express their identity. Many of our younger participants were similarly entangled in the mechanisms of identity display with artefacts from the Minecraft transmedia universe. Indeed, the game of Minecraft has also increasingly solidified as a customizable “place” in and through which children playfully test and express their identity through the decoration and adaptation of environments (both virtual and material), avatars and their own bodies through costume play (cosplay). For example, 11-year-old Clara from Adelaide boasts an elaborate array of avatar skins from Star Wars and manga ( Japanese comics) characters to a Banana “skin” she is wearing as we interview her. Discussing her extensive virtual wardrobe, Clara tells us “It’s fun. It’s like I have different clothing or costumes you can wear. I don’t really know what my favourite is, I put on different skins all the time.” Likewise Raymond, whose actual bedroom is quite minimal in terms of identity expression and customization, lovingly discussed his Minecraft creations, telling us: I made a house. It wasn’t just a house like a shelter from monsters and stuff, but like a full home. I designed the kitchen and put up paintings and made all the interiors and everything. It was a long time ago… but I remember it was really cozy and nice. I made a really nice home. In our fieldwork, there emerged something of a paradox in the prohibitions we encountered against the use of Minecraft in the bedroom – a place that, as Horst reminds, is historically a site of containment, a place where parents could keep their children protected from the outside world, but also a space where a child’s identity could be freely explored and expressed with elevated agency. While Minecraft emerged as a space where children nurtured creativity and found identity expression, parents sought a balance in educating their children about healthy screen use and digital habits while also comprehending that domestic media technologies play an increasingly important role in structuring and sustaining social, educational and professional worlds outside the home.

Conclusion This chapter has detailed Minecraft’s role within the home. As we have explored, Minecraft can provide insight into intergenerational play, contested notions of screen time and the negotiation of playful identity in the home. Although we discuss scenarios from our own fieldwork into Australian homes, such scenarios of use are likely playing out across the globe. The mundane intimacy of Minecraft in the home allows us to gain a more nuanced understanding into familial relationships – between siblings, the generations, differences in screen cultures and perceptions around screen time. The spaces in which play takes place is negotiated within family groups through discursive and sophisticated rules that emerge around games, interfaces and the spatial organization of the home environment. 398

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The space of the home is complex and contested and imbricated in technology and media practices, evidenced by the way Minecraft use within everyday settings is often deployed to reinforce specific temporal, social and spatial boundaries. Through Minecraft play, parents and their children navigate intergenerational ways of understanding media, literacy, sociality and play in the home.

References Australian Communications and Media Authority. (2010) Report: Trends in media use by children and young people: Insights from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Generation M2 2009 (USA), and results from the ACMA’s ‘Media and communications in Australian families 2007. http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_ assets/main/lib310665/trends_in_media_use_by_c hildren_and_young_people.pdf Bakardjieva, M. (2005) Internet Society, London: SAGE. Balmford, W. and Davies, H. (2019) ‘Mobile Minecraft: Negotiated Space and Perceptions of Play in Australian Families’, Mobile Media and Communication. doi: 10.1177/2050157918819614n. Baranowski, T., Abdelsamad, D., Baranowski, J., O’Connor, T., Thompson, D., Barnett, A., Cerin, E. and Chen, T.-A. (2012) ‘Impact of an Active Video Game on Healthy Children’s Physical Activity,’ Pediatrics, 129, e636–e642. doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-2050. Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. and Ward, K.J. (eds.) (2005) Domestication of Media and Technology, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Brand, J.E., Borchard, J. and Holmes, L. (2009) ‘Australia’s Computer Games Audience and Restrictive Ratings System,’ Communications & Strategies, 73 (1), 67–79. Butler, J. (1991) Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Chun, W.H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gauntlett, D. (2013) Making is Connecting. London: John Wiley & Sons. Green, L. (2010) The Internet: An Introduction to New Media. Oxford Berg. Hjorth, L. and Richardson, I. (2014) Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hjorth, L., et al. (2020) Digital Media Practices in Households. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Uni Press. Holloway, D., Green, L. and Livingstone, S. (2013) Zero to Eight. Young Children and Their Internet Use. London: LSE, EU Kids Online. Kim, K. and Kim, K. (2015) ‘Internet Game Addiction, Parental Attachment, and Parenting of Adolescents in South Korea,’ Journal of Child Adolescent Substance Abuse, 24 (6), 366–371. King, D. and Delfabbro, P. (2009) ‘The General Health Status of Heavy Video Game Players: Comparisons with Australian Normative Data,’ Journal of Cybertherapy and Rehabilitation, 2 (1), 17–27. Kwak, K.J. (2004) ‘A Review of Researches of the Impact of Computer Game and Children’s and Adolescent’s Development,’ Korean Journal of Psychology and Social Issues, 10, 147–175. Lally, E. (2002) At Home with Computers, Oxford: Berg. Lim, S.S. (2019) Transcendent Parenting, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lin, H. and Sun, C.-T. (2011) ‘A Chinese Cyber Diaspora: Contact and Identity Negotiation on Taiwanese WoW Servers,’ DiGRA Conference 2011, http://www.digra.org/digital-library/ publications/a-chinese-cyber-diaspora-contact-and-identity-negotiation-on-taiwanese-wowservers/ Ling, R. and Haddon, L. (2003) ‘Mobile Telephony, Mobility, and the Coordination of Everyday Life,’ in Katz, J.E. (ed.), Machines that Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology, New Brunswick: Transaction, 245–265. Livingstone, S. (2019) Parenting in the Digital Age, TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/sonia_ livingstone_parenting_in_the_digital_age. Luke, C. (1999) ‘What Next? Toddler Netizens, Playstation Thumb, Techno-Literacies,’ Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 1. doi: 10.2304/ciec.2000.1.1.10. Marsh, J. and Richards, C. (2013) ‘Play, media and children’s playground cultures’. In: Children, Media and Playground Cultures: Ethnographic Studies of School Playtimes, edited by Rebeka Willett, Chris Richards, Jackie Marsh, Andrew Burn and Julia Bishop, London: Palgrave, 1–20. Morley, D. (2003) ‘What’s Home Got to do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (4), 435–458. doi: 10.1177/13675494030064001.

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Larissa Hjorth et al. Oka, Y., Suzuki, S. and Inoue, Y. (2008) ‘Bedtime Activities, Sleep Environments, and Sleep/Wake Patterns of Japanese Elementary School Children,’ Behaviour. Sleep Medicine, 6, 220–233. Pinch, T. and Bijker, W.E. (1987) ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,’ in W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes and T.J. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge: MIT Press, 17–50. Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T. and Jo, T. (2015) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage. Richardson, I. and L. Hjorth (2017) Mobile media, domestic play and haptic ethnography, New Media & Society 19 (10), pp. 1653–1667. Rikkers, W., Lawrence, D., Hafekost, J. and Zubrick, S. (2016) ‘Internet Use and Electronic Gaming by Children and Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioural Problems in Australia–Results from the Second Child and Adolescent Survey of Mental Health & Wellbeing,’ BMC Public Health, 16 (1), 399. doi: 10.1186/s12889-016-3058-1. Ross, J., Miller, C. and Vamplew, P. (2013) ‘Video Games Classified M and MA15+ in Australia Compared with Their International Counterparts: Does Games Classification Protect Australian Children?’ Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, 45 (1), 37–59. Schneier, J. and Taylor, N. (2018) ‘Handcrafted Gameworlds: Space-Time Biases in Mobile Minecraft Play,’ New Media & Society, 20 (9), 3420–3436. doi: 10.1177/1461444817749517. Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life, London: Routledge. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 15–31. Song, S.J. and Og, H. (2003) ‘Computer Immersion and Children’s Psychosocial/Behavioral Characteristics,’ Korean Journal of Child Studies 24, 27–41. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Routledge.

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27 VARIETY WITHIN DOMESTICATION RESEARCH Time, perceptions and interactions Leslie Haddon Introduction One starting point for researchers interested in using the domestication framework has been to refer to the ‘classic’ text which first launched the concept and to employ some of the key elements identified in that chapter, such as appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992). Recent examples would be De Schutter, Brown and Vanden Abeele (2015) looking at how older adults experience digital games and Karlsen and Syversten (2016) examining self-help guides that aim to help people manage the role of the digital world in their lives. One first observation is that it is difficult for even one classic text to capture all the elements that were being considered by those early researchers when developing the framework. The breadth of their interests is clearer in contemporary domestication writings (Hirsch, 1992), including discussions of the methodology being used (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1991). Hence, some of the richness of the subsequent domestication literature arises from the fact that researchers have had to flesh out some of those early concepts as they attempted to apply this framework. In this process, such researchers were also developing the whole approach, drawing attention to different aspects of the social context of use that might be considered and posing further questions about what might be investigated. In this light, one can appreciate Silverstone’s later reflection on the early years of domestication research1: ‘All concepts, once having gained the light of day, take on a life of their own. Domestication is no exception’ (2006: 229). The first part of this chapter aims to outline some of the diversity within this literature even within more recent research over the last decade. It does so through looking at how a range of studies have considered three dimensions: time issues that have a bearing upon how the digital world is experienced, the perceptions of people when they are evaluating ICTs and interactions with others both within and outside the home that influence people’s digital practices. Time is considered because of the ways in which it has been further explored in research since the 1992 classic text. Perceptions and interactions were implicit in that early work but could be expanded. Of course, all three can interact, e.g. interactions with others

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-38

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can influence perceptions of ICTs, which in term have a bearing on time allocation. The second part of this chapter reflects upon some further potential case studies, think pieces, in order to elaborate the research questions one might ask about these three dimensions. The final task in this introduction it to clarify further the three dimensions being considered. Although time was highlighted in the initial description of the processes of domestication (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992), this was in the form of a broad but not so detailed guide as to what type of time questions one might ask within domestication research. In that classic work it was argued that processes of incorporation focused on temporalities and that there are examples of ICTs being used to control time (e.g. time-shifting TV programmes) and accompany existing routines (e.g. a tea break and getting up in the morning), elsewhere described as how ICTs are ‘fitted into a pattern of domestic time’ (Silverstone, 1995: 67). Meanwhile, the first article describing the methodologies being used, explained the importance of the time-diary. It enabled researchers to understand how domestic life in general is temporally organised – i.e. its time structure – and through interviews discussing those diaries, it was possible to appreciate why life is organised in this way, i.e. according to family member’s priorities, values and identities (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1991). Subsequent domestication researchers have further explored what role time may play in how we experience digital technologies. The second focus of this chapter in on people’s perceptions of different aspects of the social world and of themselves that inform their actions during the domestication processes. Such perceptions are implied in the original discussion of the moral economy, referring to family values (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley1992) and in relation to choices about the organisation of time, as outlined above. A more specific example of a perception was also provided in the first case study that demonstrated domestication analysis in action, when the parents being interviewed thought TV viewing was too passive and worried that their children would be tempted to watch more if they bought a VCR (Hirsch, 1992). Another example would be in the early days of the internet parents worry that their children would be ‘left behind’ if they did not have access to the online world (Haddon, 1999). A broad range of perceptions that might be considered within domestication analysis is outlined in the articles reviewed and think pieces explored later in this chapter. The third dimension is the various interactions between people that can be considered as a part of the domestication process. One example of this is the classic process of conversion, where the technology is used as part of self-presentation to the outside world (Silverstone, Hirsch & Morley, 1992). Another very different example from that first domestication case study was the battle between the children of the family studied as regards to who could use the computer to play games. This was to the dismay of their parents, who then chose not to repair the device when it broke down, in order to avoid such conflicts (Hirsch, 1992). Later studies have looked at the role of social networks, for example, the help of ‘warm experts’ to support internet use (Bakardjieva, 2005), or in relation to the domestication of the mobile phone (Haddon, 2003) and more recent work has discussed collective domestication (Ask & Sørensen, 2019).

Time issues in recent research One theme from the domestication literature has been the time limitations sometimes imposed upon ICT use. When, however, are they experienced as external constraints, and when do they reflect user agency, the choices of ICT users themselves? Such issues are

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illustrated in Haddon’s (2018) research on the use of smartphones by children aged 9–16 in the European Net Children Go Mobile project. In part, these children experienced imposed time constraints in the form of rules about ICT use reflecting parents’ concerns about the amount of ‘screen time’ the children experienced. Parents often felt that digital activities were taking time away either from homework, learning to be sociable, engagement in physical activities or from other more ‘worthy’ pursuits. Sometimes, the children argued against such rules, sometimes they agreed with them. But, of interest here, the same children also had their own priorities (e.g. hobbies) and they sometimes saw certain online communications as being a diversion from their interests, or as being a waste of time. This led some children to make an effort to control both the time spent on and the timing of their engagement with the online world. The issue of priorities was explored in Matassi, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein’s (2019) Argentinean study examining why WhatsApp was domesticated in different ways across the life course by ‘young adults’, ‘mid adults’ (middle-aged people) and ‘later adults’ (over 60s). Younger adults were more inclined to make time for WhatsApp messages, to try to be available all the time, because of the importance placed on socialising with peers at that stage in their life and fears of being socially excluded. For middle-aged participants, it was family- (and to an extent work-) time commitments that took priority. Hence, WhatsApp communications sometimes had to wait. For older people, there was more flexibility because many had fewer time commitments than the mid adults, but while the use for socialising was appreciated, it was not so vital as for the youngest group. This study highlights the considerations that influence time priorities, which, in turn, have a bearing upon the effort people of different age stages make to control time for digital communications. Some of the earliest domestication studies looked beyond the initial adoption of technologies to when they were sometimes re-domesticated (Lie & Sørensen, 1996). One example of a more recent study looking how technology is being reassessed is Huang and Miao’s (2020) research on young Chinese adults. This study examines use of the ‘Moments’ facility on the WeChat social networking site, partly in response to contemporary reports that some users were giving up the use of Moments, as least for a period of time. The researchers found that the chief problem was the expectation that WeChat users should be reachable at all times for work, which was creating a sense of time pressure and disrupting non-work life. In other words, patterns of usage had developed that interfered with these people’s preferred time structure. Like the European children, the Chinese participants in this study then made an effort to re-establish control over that use, including the timing of use. That meant setting new rules for themselves about the frequency and duration of checking Moments, creating new rituals like taking breaks from WeChat and establishing new temporal norms about how soon they would reply to messages (i.e. not straight away) – which included warning colleagues about this change in practice. These three examples start to illustrate a range of time-related questions that can be considered in domestication research. The European study demonstrated time constraints on ICT use, how the time spent using ICTs can reflect external pressures (here, from parents), but also one’s own decisions (in this case, of children). In keeping with those early writings trying to understand why people allocate time in certain ways, the second (Argentinian) study showed how much different age groups try to control the timing of communications depending on priorities in their time commitments. Meanwhile, the third (Chinese) case indicated how ICT usage, here communication with others, can develop in such a way that it can give rise to time problems that then have to be managed.

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Perceptions issues in recent research McDonald’s (2015) ethnography conducted in China first noted the general national discourses in that country about the internet being both addictive and bad for education and morality. It then looked at more specific representations that appeared in Chinese-language news and health portals, depicting internet cafés as places for contracting infectious diseases. In addition, a popular meme ‘Jia Junpeng your mother is calling you home for dinner’ referred to children missing (socially important) family meals because they were spending so much time in these cafés. Both the internet café representations and the meme sentiments influenced the decisions of the family he studied to adopt broadband, so that children would at least be at home when going online. One factor that can influence perceptions of ICTs is their historical legacy within a country. Leong (2020) first explained the recent history of Myanmar, where for many years the military government had strongly controlled all media, including websites. Reforms in 2011 allowed some press freedom, but also enabled the sale of smartphones that made the internet more accessible. Facebook, viewed on these, then became popular mainly as a potential source of information, rather than a medium through which to socialise. Burmese users developed a range of tactics to find and share information on Facebook such as ‘friending’ strangers in order to access the newsfeeds from their wall, using the ‘Like’ function to try to influence Facebook’s algorithms so that it shared more news, and copying and pasting news articles as posts. Changes in the technology itself can have a bearing on how it is evaluated. Sujon, Viney and Toker-Turnalar (2018) in their UK longitudinal study from 2013 to 2017 were interested in why young adults’ Facebook experience changed over that time period from one involving more compulsive checking to having a mundane relationship to the service. While there were multiple factors at work, part of this transition arose from changes in Facebook itself as more and more features were added to the platform making it much more than a medium for managing social connections. Hence, the participants referred to the changes in their overall perception of Facebook as it became the ‘Walmart of social media’ (Sujon, Viney & Toker-Turnalar, 2018: 8). Lastly, there can be conflicting perceptions that have a bearing on how ICTs are evaluated. Harvey’s (2015) US study revealed the multiple considerations at work behind parents’ decisions about how much and how to mediate their children’s use of the internet in general and of digital games in particular. These parents were often critical of the ‘demonising’ public representations and ‘discourses of fear’ (Harvey, 2015: 77), rejecting some of these claims. They nevertheless felt obliged to take some responsibility for mediation. At the same time, some parents could see that their children might be socially missing out if they could not participate in activities like game playing while their peers could. Lastly, the parents were aware that the school expected children to develop a certain degree of digital competence when at home, and that other parents were promoting such skills. This section illustrated a broad range of factors that affect understandings of the digital world and hence how people engage with ICTs. Others have discussed how public discourses themselves influence the domestication process (Hartmann, 2013; Mascheroni, 2014) and the Chinese study provided examples of both broader and more specific discourses about representations of technologies, the spaces where they could be found and their consequences. The Myanmar research indicated how historical legacies can affect decisions leading to digital platforms being used in alternative ways. The UK study reflected on how people’s evaluation and characterisation of a technology could change as its functions evolved. And the US 404

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material revealed how perceptions from different sources could be in conflict, including perceptions of what others (here, other parents) were doing and what institutions expected.

Interactions issues in recent research The ethnography of a Chinese family (McDonald, 2015) also indicated how the place of ICTs within family life can be repeatedly renegotiated over time through the interactions of its members. McDonald made the point that rather than asking how families try to fit technologies into everyday lives, here the parents were trying to use the presence of a technology to influence their child’s other behaviours. Because the parents did not want their younger son to go to the internet café, they took out a home broadband subscription. However, even then he still spent little time at family meals and watching TV with the family, instead rushing back to his room to play games online. When the parents cancelled the broadband subscription, their son went back to the internet café, so they once again reinstated the internet connection, this time trying to lay down rules whereby the son should spend more time at family meals. The twist in this particular saga was that the parents themselves eventually developed an interest in using the internet: the mother because of the particular TV programmes that could be streamed, the father because of the card game he could play online when it was often difficult to find offline playing partners. In both cases, the sons in the family would also occasionally take an interest in what their parents were doing, viewing TV with their mother or watching their father play, thus reintroducing communal family time. The actions of family members who have left home can also be influential. Harvey (2015), in her US study, gives one example of a mother who initially tried to control her younger son’s computer use by locating the family device in the living room so that she could monitor what he did and how long he spent on the device. When the son was 14, his older brother, who had left home and was working, sold his old laptop to the younger sibling. Since the latter now had his own device, he wanted to use it in his own room. Given that it was difficult to follow the previous strategy of parental mediation, the mother relented, but for a period still asked her son about his activities and experiences online, until she had feedback that convinced her that her son could be trusted. Two studies demonstrate the complexity of the influence of peers. In Cooper’s (2016) research on the US teenagers’ domestication of mobile phones, one of the norms young people discussed was whether one should respond to incoming text messages when socialising face-to-face with peers. This was an unresolved issue. One of the girls pointed out that in an all-girls group the general etiquette was that one should not, while noting that in contrast boys often felt obliged to respond. But at another point in the study, one boy received a good-night text from his girlfriend while in the company of his male friends. The boy explained to the researcher how he recognised the pressures not to respond to texts when out with his peers, but had replied anyway. This illustrated how even though he resisted this group norm, the boy still thought about it. Finally, Bertel (2018) explained the decision of a girl from his 2013 Danish study to adopt a map application on her smartphone. In the past, she had on occasion become lost when going to a meeting of friends and so had had to phone them up to ask for directions. They always helped out but also teased her about this, which made her feel awkward. When the map application became available, she could more easily find her way to the destination without seeking help. Clearly, the influence of peers may not just be through their current negotiations but reflect past interactions. 405

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This section first illustrated with the Chinese study how the actions and reactions of family members can affect choices about access to technologies. The second (US) study shows that this can include the influence of those no longer living in the family home. The third (US) study demonstrated how interactions with peers could have a bearing on decisions about how to interact with technology, while the fourth (Danish) study revealed how previous interactions with peers could also influence the assessment of a new technological feature.

Think pieces The second part of this chapter aims to expand this appreciation of time issues, perceptions and interactions by speculating about potential questions relating to three case studies. These think pieces are wearable electronic devices for measuring fitness, educational apps for very young children and new digital practices that people explored because of the coronavirus lockdown. The wearable fitness device was chosen as a discrete technology, just as televisions and stand-alone computers had been the objects of study in the earliest domestication research.2 The second case study is of educational apps on tablets, where the focus is not on technology but on functionality (like the Danish map app). While this case is based on actual research carried out by the author, framing that material in terms of time issues, perceptions and interactions is novel. The third case study emerged from personal experiences posting folk dance videos during the coronavirus lockdowns. This is an example of a new digital practice, where the technology and functionality were to some extent already familiar, but their use under particular circumstances is the innovative element. Time, perceptions and interactions are explored in different orders in the different think pieces whichever best suits the narrative.

A technology: the fitness wearable device The body of literature on self-tracking provides one wider context to understand people’s perceptions of healthiness and of the body. Historically, devices such as weight scales were sold with the message that it was important to develop more self-knowledge (Crawford, Lingel & Karppi, 2015). Then more contemporary discourses about obesity, and concern for body images, have prompted the surveillance of the body more generally, including the ‘quantified self ’ movement that involves knowing oneself through measurements (Ajana, 2018). Lastly, there are studies of how people use and evaluate fitness trackers (Depper & Howe, 2017). When researching perceptions of fitness devices, one set of questions concerns users’ broader awareness of and feelings about discourses concerning health and fitness: for example, whether they think there is a problem of an overweight population, as well their reactions to adverts for workouts and gyms. Next, there are potential questions about self-perceptions, for instance, as users reflect on their sporting activities in the past, their current body images, what they are satisfied with and what they aspire to. Other perceptions include how users evaluate the effectiveness and efficacy of such devices, perhaps reflecting reviews they have read, and their insights into how the technology is being used in practice by others. Finally, a different level of self-evaluation concerns whether different users feel that self-surveillance through having these fitness data will personally support them to achieve goals, whether they feel they are the type of people where having such feedback actually helps. 406

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As regards time questions, one starting point might be to ask about broader time use that in part reflects the importance of being active more generally: before the acquisition of the fitness device, how much time did that person spend maintaining the body, trying to stay fit? This would provide an idea about how much the use of the device is building on existing practices and how much it is being used to stimulate new practices, for example, as part of New Year’s resolution to become fitter. Given the short duration involved in checking outputs from the device, the amount of time spent using the technology may not be so interesting. But there are always questions that can be asked about how much time is initially invested in a new device when first learning how to use it, how it works and what are its functions. Sometimes, the greater investment of time may be in judging when it is useful and how often to check the device. In other words, there is the time hump, a period of effort to first get to know the device and what role it can play in daily life. This may be part of a longer trial period, the time (either planned or de facto) after which there is some reassessment of the devices’ worthwhileness, when the novelty period is over. Either its use is rejected or fades away or else the device becomes a more routine, more taken-for-granted part of everyday practices. Turning to interactions, how important are wider social circles as sources of information when a potential user is first thinking of acquiring the device? If use involves making comparisons with others, it is possible to ask about levels of involvement with different communities of users or in different communities of practice. For example, this was the approach of a study looking at a smartphone app that measured what had been achieved when riding mountain bikes (Smith & Treem, 2017). These researchers explored how engagement with that community of cyclists had a bearing on motivation and competitiveness but also on norms of practice. In the bike case, the potential community was already in place when the app posted the information online along with the data from other riders, although making comparisons with others may also be a more informal process. Related to participation in communities, there are possible questions concerning display to others, in line with the classic domestication concept of conversion. Here users of the app have a chance to demonstrate what they are doing to an audience, but it is also a way to show what type of person they are (e.g. being determined and methodical). One could also consider the specific case when the device is a gift. The wearable fitness device is the type of stand-alone item that could, for those who can afford it, be expensive enough to be given as a present, either on a Christmas wish list or, say, at a partner’s initiative. This raises further questions about the particular dynamics relating to any sense of obligation to continue using such a gift.

An app: educational apps for young children The Toddlers and Tablets project was a three-year Australian-UK study of how very young children aged 0–5 encounter touchscreen technologies (Green et al., forthcoming). Apart from interviews and focus groups with parents, pre-school staff and grandparents, the project entailed observations and videos made by the researchers and by parents of children using technologies. Sometimes this use took place with parents or siblings present, and in interviews the parents spoke about these moments. For parents of young children, one key issue is how they think children learn about the world, and here it is important to note some discourses about technology threatening creativity and children’s imagination (Edwards, 2013). Therefore, one set of questions could explore concerns about whether digital options, such as educational apps, are seen as having merit in this process or whether traditional, non-technological activities, such 407

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as playing with toys, are preferred, and what thinking lies behind those choices. A second set of perceptions to be examined is whether the parents think children learn best through experimentation 3 or whether parental intervention in the form of help or ‘scaffolding’ is preferred4 (Plowman, Stephen, & McPake, 2010). If the latter is the case, that implies more parental time should be spent helping and perhaps encouraging very young children in their engagement with the digital world. Next, there are parents’ evaluations of particular digital options, for example, whether they think some apps are better than others. Finally, there is the issue of what type of learning parents feel is taking place: is the main emphasis on skills (such as learning to count), learning about the world (such as naming animals), learning dispositions (such as patience) or learning about culture (such as the meaning of birthdays or Christmas). Such perceptions can have a bearing on how parents allocate both their own time and their children’s time in relation to ICTs. For example, some questions could more generally explore how much parents set aside time to engage with the child in a ‘sustained’ way, for example, in co-activities generally, whether digital or not. Then more specific questions could investigate how much parents were involved with child’s learning to use technologies such as educational apps, in teaching children how to use them, how to achieve goals, how to overcome problems, but also demonstrating the aims of the app, what the children are supposed to do. Then there were questions about time, perhaps better characterised as ‘being available’, as parents are involved in another activity, but may also be monitoring their children’s digital explorations, so that they can engage in short bursts to help sort out with any digital problems, for example, when summoned by the children. Finally, there are discussions of the times when, despite often feeling guilty about it, parents really want to use digital devices to ‘occupy’ the child while they deal with other demands, be they work, domestic tasks or talking to a visitor. But even young children have agency, and so to understand their time choices there are potential questions about children’s attention spans, especially at different ages, and how this might affect the time spent on different tasks. In fact, in this research a number of parents had initially been worried by the discourses about children becoming ‘addicted’ to technologies, but in practice the youngest children often only engaged in any single activity for a limited time before moving on to other things. This issue of attention span also had a bearing on how much time slightly older young children were willing to invest in trying to make something work, to sort out digital problems as opposed to reaching the point when they were frustrated and either called for assistance or gave up. Interactions with others can entail face-to-face contact with other parents when taking their children to Toddlers groups or virtual contact networks like MumsNet. This may have a bearing on parents’ ideas about how children learn, but also introduce them to recommendations about particular educational apps. Within the home, there are possible questions about interactions with siblings. For example, in this study there were examples of older siblings taking over the parental role of showing the younger child how to use the app and helping when the younger was not able to proceed. But sometimes that could involve the older sibling simply sorting out the problem without giving the younger sibling the chance to learn in this process, or else using the app for themselves, provoking conflict with the younger child. And then there is the interaction with grandparents. For example, when the child is visiting or stopping with the grandparents – which can happen on a regular basis as a form of childcare – there are questions about the evaluations and household rules of the grandparents. For instance, in this study there were examples where technology use was

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not allowed in some grandparents’ homes, as the grandparents preferred children to learn through activities such helping to cook or doing arts and crafts together. And like others outside the home, the grandparents are also interacting with the parents, conveying their suggestions and concerns about bringing up children.

A practice: posting videos project The final example is based on a personal experience. My wife and I organise Hungarian and East European folkdance performance groups. Over many years we have used ICTs related to these activities, including managing websites for our groups and making videos of new dance material and our main performances (mainly for archive purposes). In recent years I had adopted Facebook to see how other groups publicised their activities5 and I had posted some videos on YouTube with links to enhance our own dance group websites. The initial coronavirus lockdown in the UK, starting in March 2020, forced us to cancel face-to-face group dancing, although my wife and I continued to practise at home. We decided to make videos of ourselves in our ‘dance studio’ (a multipurpose room with little furniture and a wooden floor), describing and then performing different Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak dance styles. I then edited the videos, published them on YouTube, sent the link to the neighbourhood online network and emailed the link to friends, family and others. Although using videos and posting was not new per se, this whole project also involved a range of new challenges: checking other people’s choreographies on YouTube, working out how to stay sufficiently in shot within a small part of a room, managing appropriate sound levels in this enclosed environment, working out how to present on YouTube and deciding how to make the posts visible. While this is very specific example, the purpose of providing this description is broader. Imagine that the research question being posed is about how new practices using familiar ICTs arise, and more specifically how they appear in response to specific events, in this case the coronavirus lockdown, where this dance project was simply one example with which we were familiar.6 The more obvious observation to make about an event like the coronavirus pandemic is that it disrupts everyday life, including time structures. For those on furlough7 during lockdown working time was removed. For those working from home or not working, other activities were blocked or reduced. And for yet others, much more time was spent looking after children who initially could not go to school or who later went through spells of self-isolation. One of the questions often asked in domestication analysis is about how people fit new practices into their (sometimes busy) existing time commitments. In the case of the pandemic, for most people those time structures had changed. For some, this could mean more potentially free time for new activities, including new digital practices and also time to experiment, to learn how to achieve new goals. But for others one might ask if different time use such as projects with children or more use of communications platforms like Skype and Zoom to contact family and friends led to new digital practices (see Chambers in this volume). There is also the issue of being aware of other people’s new time structures. For example, when I first looked at what other people posted in general on Facebook, under normal conditions these posts might not have been viewed so much. But if other people have more free time to fill when alternative activities are reduced, then that can also contribute to the interest shown in these posts. Indeed, sometimes it helped to make them newsworthy in the media, casting light on otherwise less publicly visible small acts of technological

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creativity. In other words, an awareness of the current freer time of some potential audiences can influence the decision to try out something new. As regards perceptions, to what extent are those who develop new digital practices aware that other people were taking creative initiatives that they might not normally do in pre-pandemic times? Questions could explore whether those being studied had seen mainstream media coverage of such inventiveness, perhaps at the end of television news as human-interest stories, especially reported in otherwise bleak times. A second set of questions concerns how people arrive at an idea for a particular project. For example, if they play musical instruments or sing, could this be the basis on which to build some new digital practice? Or maybe they could foresee how a new digital activity would engage children at home or provide a new mode of communication with their own isolated parents. Part of developing a new practice also involves a self-evaluation by people of what they can achieve within their digital competence: how much they have the necessary skills, or could develop such skills, to achieve a goal. This might also involve non-digital but relevant skills. Finally, there are questions about how those developing new practices imagine the contexts in which these efforts might be appreciated, both by audiences they personally know – like friends and families – and by ones they do not. To what extent can the actions of peers provide a stimulus for new digital projects during the pandemic, apart from media coverage of such initiatives? For example, when some of the dancers I knew from other groups could no longer practise dance, they regularly posted photos and videos on Facebook of past performances as a reminder of pre-COVID achievements for themselves and for audiences like me. Then there is the role of feedback from audiences, encouragement from known and unknown others, for example, expressing appreciation of these efforts. Other types of interaction may also emerge, not necessarily pre-planned during the planning of a project. For example, the videos my wife and I produced provided an excuse to get in touch with ex-colleagues whom I only occasionally contacted and whom I could then ask about their lockdown experiences, especially in other countries. Finally, some interactions could once more entail a presentation of the self, including how ones feels about oneself, in the spirit of conversion noted earlier. Digital projects can demonstrate the value placed on being constructive, of looking for positives under adverse conditions, but equally, they can be akin to the form of voluntary labour like going shopping for others who are self-isolating, somehow making a contribution in difficult times.

Lessons from the think pieces Time In the case of the wearable fitness device, understanding how it might fit into daily life can be helped by a broader appreciation of time spent on related activities prior to acquiring the technology. And before a device’s role in life stabilises, there are potential questions about the initial process of investing time in learning not only how to use the device but to evaluate its possible role in one’s life. The case of parents of young children showed how it is possible to develop typologies of time use related to their engagement with children’s use of ICTs, and how the attention spans of younger children can have a bearing upon the time they chose to allocate to digital activities. Finally, the case of new practices focused on what can happen when there is an upheaval of existing time structures, opening the way for new practices and time for them to be appreciated. 410

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Perceptions As regards perceptions, the fitness device example indicated how researchers might consider potential users’ broader awareness of discourses (here about health and fitness) as well as narrower evaluations of whether a particular device might be effective in achieving fitness goals. It also illustrated a variety of self-perceptions that might be considered: of past and present body images, of whether the device would suit this type of user. The young children example indicated the relevance of a variety of perceptions related to learning (about the role of technology in learning, how children learn, and what they learn), as well as, once again, the effectiveness of particular apps. And the case of new digital practices showed the significance of an awareness of what other people were doing, self-evaluations (what people could actually manage to do, but also if their various skills were sufficient) as well as the contexts in which those efforts might be valued by others.

Interactions Lastly, turning to interactions, the example of wearable fitness devices showed potential questions about the role of social circles as sources of information about technologies and about the influence of participation in communities of practice. The questions about the gift status of such a device show how some objects of study provoke questions that one might not ask of others. The parents of young children example illustrated questions that can be asked about the role of social circles in influencing ideas about learning, as well as, once again, being a source of information about what counts as a good education app. It also points to questions about the positive and negative interactions between siblings within the home and interactions with extended family outside it (here grandparents). Finally, the new practices example indicated lines of enquiry about the actions of others as a stimulus to innovating, unplanned interactions arising from the practices and feedback from others.

Conclusions The three areas of time issues, perceptions and interactions were chosen as starting points for demonstrating the diversity within the domestication framework and the variety of questions that it is possible to ask. The first stage involved looking at how these dimensions had been addressed in recent domestication research. The second stage involved think pieces where it was possible to speculate about further types of questions one might ask. However, while they were useful vehicles for exploring the domestication literature in principle, others could have been chosen. For example, another ‘classic’ element from that first text on domestication, captured in the concept of objectivation, entails asking questions about the space in which ICTs are used. Indeed, domestication researchers have subsequently considered the nature of spaces outside the home, as well as the ‘spaces’ where functions are located in the navigation structure of smartphones (Huang & Miao, 2020). Another potential staring point could have been longer-term relationships with the digital world after initial acquisition and the early stages of use. This could have covered the later emergence of practices, as captured in the study of WeChat communication problems that developed over time (Huang & Miao, 2020) and other research that has looked at re-domestication. Or another dimension to demonstrate the evolution of the domestication literature could have been a focus on any changes that the introduction of ICTs had brought to daily life, including what they have enabled or where they had been empowering.8 411

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The key point of this chapter is that those interested in using the domestication framework nowadays have a huge corpus of existing studies on which to draw, which can act as a stimulus to research ideas. But there is always scope for further original exploration, further questions to pose when asking about the role of the digital in peoples’ lives.

Notes 1 For a review of research in this period, see Haddon, 2006. 2 There are also fitness apps on other devices such as smartphones. But the stand-alone devices considered here include the FitBit Classic, Jawbone’s UP, the Nike+FuelBandSE, Withing’s Pulse and Microsoft’s Band (Crawford et al., 2015). 3 In the spirit of Piaget. 4 In line with Vygotsky’s thinking. 5 We also dance in a Slovak group and this was the main way to monitor their news, but also monitor developments in another Hungarian group in London and dance groups of colleagues based in Hong Kong. 6 Here are some other examples collected while writing this chapter. A TikTok music video made and posted by staff in a care home involved clips of the residents dancing or moving to music (BBC News at 13.00 20th October 2020). On his website, someone assessed local benches, posting pictures of himself sitting on the benches and providing a score of each bench (BBC News at 13.00 23rd November 2020). Adult children of older people in a care home used a platform like Zoom to sing carols as a virtual choir while their elderly parents watched on screens in the home (BBC News at 13.00 December 23rd 2020). The ‘Self-isolation Orchestra’ performed classical music together from their own homes while its members listened via headphones and watched a conductor online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcpii1AmheM&feature=youtu.be). 7 This is a scheme where workers stayed home because they could not work while the government paid 80% of their wages. 8 As advocated by Bakardjieva, 2006.

References Ajana, B. (ed.) (2018) Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices, Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Ask, K. and Sørensen, K. (2019) ‘Domesticating technology for shared success: Collective enactments of World of Warcraft,’ Information, Communication & Society, 22 (1), 73–88. Bakardjieva, M. (2005) Internet Society. The Internet in Everyday Life, London: Sage. Bakardjieva, M. (2006) ‘Domestication running wild. From the moral economy of the household to the mores of culture,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technologies, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 62–79. Bertel, T. (2018) ‘Domesticating smartphones,’ in J. Vincent and L. Haddon (eds.), Smartphone Cultures, Abingdon: Routledge, 83–94. Cooper, C. (2016) Going Mobile: The Domestication of the Cell Phone by Teens in a Rural East Texas Town, Doctoral Thesis, University of Loughborough. Crawford, K., Lingel, J. and Karppi, T. (2015) ‘Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of selftracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18 (4–5), 479–496. Depper, A. and Howe, D. (2017) ‘Are we fit yet? English adolescent girls’ experiences of health and fitness apps,’ Health Sociology Review, 26 (1), 98–112. De Schutter, B., Brown, J. and Vanden Abeele, V. (2015) ‘The domestication of digital games in the lives of older adults,’ New Media and Society, 17 (7), 1170–1186. Edwards, S. (2013) ‘Digital play in the early years: A contextual response to the problem of integrating technologies and play-based pedagogies in the early childhood curriculum,’ European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21 (2), 199–212. Green, L., Haddon, L., Holloway, L., Livingstone, L., O’Neil, B. and Stevenson, K. (2021) Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six, London: Bloomsbury.

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Variety within domestication research Haddon, L. (1999) European Perceptions and Use of the Internet, paper given at the conference ‘Usages and Services in Telecommunications,’ Arcachon, 7–9 June. Haddon, L. (2003) ‘Domestication and mobile telephony,’ in J. Katz (ed.), Machines that Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 43–56. Haddon, L. (2006) ‘The contribution of domestication research to in-home computing and media consumption,’ The Information Society, 22, 195–203. Haddon, L. (2018) ‘Domestication and social constraints on ICT use: Children’s engagement with smartphones,’ in J. Vincent and L. Haddon (eds.), Smartphone Cultures, Abingdon: Routledge, 71–82. Hartmann, M. (2013) ‘From domestication to mediated mobilism,’ Mobile Media & Communication, 1 (1), 42–49. Harvey, A. (2015) Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context, Abingdon: Routledge. Hirsch, E. (1992) ‘The long term and the short term of domestic consumption: An ethnographic case study,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 208–226. Huang, Y. and Miao, W. (2020) ‘Re-domesticating social media when it becomes disruptive: Evidence from China’s “super app” WeChat,’ Mobile Media & Communications, 9 (2), 1–18. Karlsen, F. and Syversten, T. (2016) ‘You can’t smell roses online: Intruding media and reverse domestication,’ Nordic Review, 37, 25–39. Leong, L. (2020) ‘Domesticating algorithms: An exploratory study of Facebook users in Myanmar,’ The Information Society, 36 (2), 97–108. Lie, M. and Sørensen, K. (eds.) (1996) Making Technologies Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Mascheroni, G. (2014) ‘Parenting the mobile Internet in Italian households: Parents’ and children’s discourses,’ Journal of Children and Media, 8 (4), 440–456. Matassi, M., Boczkowski, P. and Mitchelstein, E. (2019) ‘Domesticating WhatsApp: Family, friends, work, and study in everyday communication,’ New Media & Society, 21 (10), 2183–2200. McDonald, T. (2015) ‘Affecting relations: Domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town,’ Information, Communication and Society, 18 (1), 17–31. Plowman, L., Stephen, C. and McPake, J. (2010) ‘Supporting young children’s learning with technology at home and in preschool,’ Research Papers in Education, 25 (1), 93–113. Silverstone, R. (1995) ‘Media, communication, information and the “revolution” of everyday life,’ in S. Emmott (ed.), Information Superhighways: Multimedia Users and Futures, London: Academic Press, 61–78. Silverstone, R. (2006) ‘Domesticating domestication. Reflections on the life of concept,’ in T. Berker, M. Hartmann, Y. Punie and K.J. Ward (eds.), Domestication of Media and Technologies, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 229–248. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1991) ‘Listening to a long conversation: An ethnographic approach to the study of information and communication technologies in the home,’ Cultural Studies, 5 (2), 204–227. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.), Consuming Technologies, London: Routledge, 15–31. Smith, W. and Treem, J. (2017) ‘Striving to be king of mobile mountains: Communication and organizing through digital fitness technology,’ Communication Studies, 68 (2), 135–151. Sujon, Z., Viney, L. and Toker-Turnalar, E. (2018) ‘Domesticating Facebook: The Shift from compulsive connection to personal service platform,’ Social Media+ Society, 4 (4), 1–12.

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PART VI

Homing in on domestication?

Homing in on domestication? Introduction David Waldecker

Research on the adoption and use of media technologies in the domestication tradition has highlighted how this adoption depends on dynamics and idiosyncrasies in households. Technologies have to be integrated into routines and are thereby able to disrupt them. They are also able to heighten or quell conflicts within households over the use of domestic time, space and labour. While a lot has been written about the growing importance of mobile media use, the following chapters show that these domestic dimensions of media use are still relevant about 30 years after the first studies on domestication were published. The chapters in this section shed light on details of the domestication process that have, so far, received little scrutiny. The first chapter in this section focuses on the renewed entanglement of work and leisure in the use of Zoom, one of the popular video conference software platforms. Deborah Chambers analyses how Zoom was increasingly adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this platform, which was designed to be used in work settings, became “re-socialized” as workers used the software in their free time, too, to participate in social events. Choir practice, weddings and funerals have been organized using video conferencing software. In this way, Zoom renewed and heightened the friction between the reproductive and work-related uses of the home and it also heightened gender disparities – visible in the way YouTube videos of private life interrupting expert interviews on television are commented on based on the expert’s gender. The same continuing relevance of gender for the domestication of technology is highlighted by Stephen J. Neville’s and Alex Borkowski’s contribution on YouTube unboxing videos of smart speakers by female tech influencers. Neville and Borkowski discuss how the women presenting the product and the female-sounding digital assistants are judged through misogynistic online comments. They show that the domestication of smart devices is not only influenced by online warm experts – the digital equivalent to neighbours, colleagues or friends who help household members with the setup and use of digital technology – but by patriarchal understandings of technology and women. As they detail in their contribution, hateful comments silence female online warm experts and equate them to the femalesounding intelligent personal assistants. Thus, the sexist trope of the subservient housewife is not only used by companies to make potentially surveillant technology palatable but the same ideology is also relevant in the way female warm experts are equated to “broken machinery” by online trolls. DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-40

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Justine Lloyd’s contribution equally focuses on gendered domestication but takes us back a hundred years to the early days of radio’s domestication in private homes. It examines the “intimate geographies” of 1920s radio use by reconstructing the practices of the radio enthusiast and journalist Alice R. Bourke. Bourke resisted the gendered norms of the time by not only being the radio operator of her household, but by eventually hosting ham-radio sessions on radio technique and technology. In detailing Bourke’s radio exploits, Lloyd demonstrates how radio use “shifted the relations between publicity, privacy, and intimacy in strange and surprising ways.” While Lloyd discusses a medium in its early stages and its shifting boundaries between radio receivers and ham-radio operators, Johanna L.H. Birkland reflects on the other half of human-technology interaction. In her discussion of the way domestication research treats older adults, she highlights how premature understandings of older adults’ lives and circumstances narrow chances to flesh out the complex living arrangements in this age cohort. By going beyond simple definitions based on the age of retirement, Birkland discusses generational concepts as well as the special understandings of family of LGBT older adults – as they were legally barred organizing their family life according to their sexual orientation for most of their lives. In this way, Birkland’s contribution demonstrates that every category employed in social research has to be reflected upon. Leah Jerop Komen presents another case of unexpected media use. Judging from common experience, most academics in Europe or North America spend a lot of time in front of their laptops. Komen portrays the organization of classes at universities in Kenya and explains how lecturers often rely on smartphones and social media for their teaching duties. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, smartphones have sometimes been the only way university lecturers could interact with their students. Lecturers use these devices to host live online teaching sessions, to grade papers and to see if students are logged on to the learning management system. In contrast to Kenyan academics who, at least sometimes, are in want of laptops, the disadvantaged high-school students in Jenny Kennedy’s and Indigo Holcomb-James’ study are provided with laptops through a privately funded initiative to combat the digital divide in Australia. However, they see no use in those devices beyond school-related issues. In focusing on this particular case of “moral economy” on a tight budget, Kennedy and Holcomb-James show how social inequality and digital inequality reinforce each other and how the dependence on mobile data plans structures interactions with media and others in said households. Domestication research has set out to study the seemingly mundane and everyday media practices of users in and through the interaction in households, homes and families. In contrast to sweeping statements and theories on the effects of digitalization, the contributions in this section highlight that technological change is dealt with in myriad and unfathomable ways in everyday life. In this way, these chapters complicate our picture of phenomena that are usually seen as stable factors in people’s lives and in social research. The philosopher and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer, himself a supporter of qualitative social research (Kracauer, 1952), has described the function of film and movies as “the redemption of physical reality” (Kracauer, 1965). Through empirical research, domestication studies can act as the redemption of social reality by preserving narratives, analyses and descriptions of scenes of actual media use for current research and the research to come.

References Kracauer, S. (1952) ‘The challenge of qualitative content analysis,’ Public Opinion Quarterly, 16, 631–642. Kracauer, S. (1965) Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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28 LOCKDOWN SCREEN WORLDS The domestication and re-socialisation of Zoom Deborah Chambers

Introduction When in-person meetings were curtailed by government-led lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, screen-based technologies were mobilised with remarkable speed by online households to sustain remote interpersonal communication. Video call technology is primarily designed for domestic contexts to overcome the confines of those spaces. It now forms part of an assemblage of screen-based interactive media that facilitate specific human–computer interactions: computer games, laptops, smartphones, and tablets with varied degrees of augmented and virtual reality. Focusing on the adoption of Zoom during COVID-19 lockdowns, this chapter considers the micro-dynamics of remote face-to-face interactions to examine the domestication of video call technology. It assesses how householders are primed to negotiate these ‘screen worlds’ by mediating interactive exchanges for work and socialising at a distance. To widen and attune the domestication approach, this chapter centres on three constituents that inform domestication: quantitative data to gauge wider patterns of media adoption and use; the concept of techno-social affordances; and Knorr Cetina’s concepts of scopic mediation and synthetic situations. This chapter utilises quantitative survey data, as well as referring to qualitative research, to assess wider patterns of household adoption and use of emerging screen-based interactive technologies. An affordances approach explains the technological potentials and constraints of these interactive technologies as digital tools specifically designed to sustain an emergent mode of trans-domestic communication (Chambers, 2019). The techno-social affordances and constraints that guide sensory and social cues of screen visibility, display, embodiment, immersion, and performative interaction that characterise video calling practices are pinpointed, advancing the term agency scripts. Knorr Cetina’s twin concepts of ‘scopic media’ and the ‘synthetic situation’ enhances this affordances approach by explaining how the intervention of the screen – which denotes remote phenomena as situationally present – reconstructs and transforms interactive ‘situations.’ Drawing on Goffman’s dramatology, the final section addresses contestations over domestic space to pinpoint the gendered and classed dynamics involved in the exposure of domestic backdrops during video calls. This chapter explains how, by supporting non-present face-to-face encounters,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-41

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video technology’s interactive logic and visual attributes dramatically impinge on the moral economy of the household.

Video call technology’s techno-social affordances From the early 1990s, the domestication perspective has addressed the adoption and uses of media technologies to understand how they are bestowed with meaning as part of their incorporation into people’s daily routines. The approach combats technological determinism by accenting user agency and the context of use (Haddon, 2011) within a process of domestication as an ongoing dialectic of change (Silverstone, 2006). The focus on video call technology means that certain features of this chapter pertain to the British domestication approach, concerning the incorporation of technologies into the home and their implications for the households’ moral economy. However, the emphasis on techno-social affordances relates to the Norwegian technology studies approach (Sørensen, 2006). Characterised by analyses of specific technologies in varied settings, this perspective does not regard technologies as innocent and entirely malleable since designers inscribe their visions and actions into them. Technology studies approach domestication as a space of negotiation between these inscribed visions and users’ needs and interests. This underlines the normative dimensions of technologies as evolving expectations and norms (Sørensen, 2006: 56). Today’s digitally enabled infrastructures now facilitate specific human–computer and human-to-human interactions for most symbolic activities (Krotz, 2017). Given the complexities of screen-oriented technologies such as Zoom, present-day domestication research is purposed to explain how users enfold these emergent technologies into daily life. This requires an understanding of the complex digital affordances and constraints of new technologies, from a user perspective. The concept of ‘media affordances’ is productively used in social and media studies of technology to explore the enabling features of communication technologies and how the technology and users shape one another (for example, Baym, 2010; Madianou & Miller, 2015). Hutchby (2001) argued for the adoption of affordances in communication and technology studies to redress the balance between technological determinism and the social shaping of technology approach. Although the concept of affordances aims to avert assumptions that technologies have static, inherent properties and rational uses, Hutchby focused mainly on technologies’ material constraints. Conversely, Nagy and Neff (2015: 3) warn of scholars’ tendency to overstate users’ actions within the user/technology relationship. They introduced the term ‘imagined affordances’ to stress that affordances are simultaneously ‘conceptual and imagined’ and that the material qualities of technological environments mediate affective experiences. Referring to Nagy and Neff’s contribution, Shaw (2017) explains, “Imagined affordances, and here they mean imagined by both users and designers, push back on the assumption that affordances are rational and immutable while demonstrating that at their core they are about interpretation” (2017: 596). Thus, technological affordances have potentials, capabilities and constraints inscribed in them by designers but as Shaw states, they “guide, yet still do not determine, how they are interpreted” (2017: 596). Drawing on this approach, I adopt the term techno-social affordances to highlight the complex interplay between the technological and social elements of media affordances. It denotes that technology is structurally and discursively formed and that the ‘technological’ and the ‘social’ are interdependent. But the interdependence between inscribed functions, meanings, and actions is not simply a one-way flow from design and production to adoption and use.

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It can be a two-way flow: norms of use can prompt redesigns as a contra-flow, as exemplified later. The concept of techno-social affordances indicates, then, that the ‘technological’ and the ‘social’ set limits on one another – concerning how functions are imagined, interpreted, attained, or altered. I propose that the techno-social affordances of video call technologies comprise the following three elements. First, these platforms are technologically and socially imbued with potential actions and meanings, both materially and imaginatively. Second, their affordances are polysemic: they can embody and trigger multiple meanings and actions depending on the social context of use and users’ socio-cultural norms, values, and social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Third, they comprise, and are steered by agency scripts (Chambers, 2020). The concept of ‘agency script’ explains how the functions and meanings inferred in video call technology steer or nudge householders’ screen app use. While affordances are polysemic, agency scripts attempt to anchor the user codes inscribed in the technology. That is, certain procedures are designed into and assigned to galvanise distinctive actions which are then either accessed, adapted, and implemented or resisted by users. Agency scripts carry premeditated user codes that structure and guide the audio-visual interaction on the screen. They prepare people to adopt and use the technology in particular ways. Video call technology’s agency scripts attempt to replicate and conjure the immediacy and spontaneity of in-person exchanges. Shaped by distinctive ideals and values, these scripts socially (re)construct or simulate synchronised visual and audio modes of interactions anticipated and typified in face-to-face exchanges. If video calling’s main advantage is that users can ‘see’ one another on screen when talking, then the screen’s user interface must simulate the format and logic of face-to-face communication structures. To consider the domestication of this medium, I explore the techno-social affordances involved in this simulated mode of social interactions – of observation and projection – by drawing on Knorr Cetina’s twin concepts of scopic media and the synthetic situation. Knorr Cetina (2009, 2014) builds on Goffman’s symbolic interactionist approach to consider how the staging of face-to-face interactions is mediated and transformed by the screen. Her approach provides clues about how householders domesticate this technology. Goffman (1972, 1983) viewed physical co-presence as the most basic mode of human interaction and most rudimentary social situation where participants have access to each other’s unveiled and immediate ‘senses.’ Governed by cultural rules, these co-present situations are deemed essential for conveying mutuality, affinity, and trust. With a growing number of interpersonal interactions now conducted remotely, the intervention of the screen to mediate interactions changes the ‘situations.’ For Knorr Cetina, synthetic situations occur when participants who are physically absent from one another interact with and via screen-based technologies of observation and projection. Synchronously mediated communication has overtaken the structural significance that face-to-face interactions once had. When enabled by video call technology, these screen-based interactions are performed in radically different ways from in-person face-to-face encounters. By presenting and interconnecting distant events and people, they mediate and emulate in-person, faceto-face encounters. Knorr Cetina’s ethnographic work focused on the screen worlds of international traders in the context of foreign exchange markets, long before the pandemic. This global financial context spotlights the intersecting microstructures of interpersonal coordination and the potential macro-scale of connections, spanning national boundaries. Knorr Cetina’s notion of ‘global microstructures’ mirrors the dynamics of video calling: the micro-dynamics of

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interaction can span time zones extending in scale from local, to regional to trans-national contexts. The concept of the synthetic situation offers, then, a conceptual cursor to explore how the interactive affordances and agency scripts of the video call screen are socialised and domesticated by householders.

Patterns of video call technology adoption during lockdowns To gauge how internet connected householders navigated and managed video call technology during lockdown conditions, this section draws on the findings of large-scale surveys by the Pew Research Centre (2021) in the US and Ofcom (2021a) in the UK. With differing emphases, they reveal patterns of adoption and use of media technologies. Government-led COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 severely affected paid work, education, and caregiving activities and prompted a pervasive need for informal online sociable connections (ONS, 2020). The speed of online householders’ adaptation to digital exchanges indicates that they were already equipped to face immobile conditions. The take-up of video conferencing enabled householders to navigate not only work and educational commitments but also informal socialising and caregiving across households. These patterns suggest that ‘home’ was already, in some measure, a virtual space. But, for some, access was impeded by low incomes, digital connectivity problems, and digital literacy skills according to age, income, and ethnicity (Pew Research Centre, 2021). In March 2020, 6% of the UK households had no access to the internet. Older people were less likely to have home internet access, comprising 18% of the UK population over the age of 64. Among those in low socio-economic groups, 11% had no internet access (Ofcom, 2021a). For older citizens and low-income or unemployed households deprived of digital resources and digital literacy, everyday life under lockdown conditions was rendered precarious. Together, the elderly and low-income groups comprise a class of ‘digital left-behinds’ (Ofcom, 2021a; Pew Research Centre, 2021). Moreover, survey data in the UK, the US, and Germany reveal that in March and April 2020, working women in all three countries disproportionately took on the burden of combining work online from home with primary responsibility for home schooling of children and most of the housework (Craig, 2020; Nash & Churchill, 2020). Household gender disparities led women to carry the burden of housework and childcare, thus complicating women’s digital connectivity. These patterns indicate that economic inequalities and online access problems played a significant role in digital technology engagement during the pandemic. Overall, this survey data provides an instructive backdrop regarding the trends and tendencies that guide this chapter’s theoretical enquiry into the techno-social affordances of video call technology use in online households. Video call platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Duo, Skype, and Facebook Messenger were adopted by online householders to support remote social connections in response to stay-at-home conditions. This mode of communication helped people overcome isolation and generate a sense of sociable connectivity and closeness with absent family and friends. The number of people in the UK using video call services doubled to 70% of online households in response to the pandemic (Ofcom, 2021a). Video calling was as a vital tool for supporting virtual interactions in the US, with 81% enfolding such calls into their routines to cope with stay-at-home orders. Nonetheless, the US data confirms that video calls were 20% more likely to be used among the better educated once a day or more often (Pew Research Centre, 2021).

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Zoom, which was initially designed for work purposes, rocketed to 300 million daily meeting participants worldwide in April 2020 (Mlitz, 2021). Informal use among family and friends was then added by the company as a design after-thought, when its potential to recuperate a sense of community online was recognised. However, although video calling emerged as a valuable way for people to socialise with remote family and friends, its agency scripts were initially shaped by distinctive work-related ideals and values to enable video conferencing for routine company meetings, job training sessions, addressing board members, negotiating business deals, and interviewing job candidates. These agency scripts optimise and invoke businessoriented instrumental communication rather than intrinsic interaction, as discussed below. This is exemplified by Zoom’s screen sharing, whiteboard, chat mode, annotation tools and its record function for storage and sharing and provision of meeting transcripts. With a Pro account, businesses can manage user activity by running reports to learn and review who is attending Zoom meetings and webinars, how employees use Zoom, and filing recorded chat history logs. The company also offers Zoom training and guidance on Meeting and Webinar best practices.1 These agency scripts steer and delineate business communication. As Marres (2020) states, these new computational architectures “have rendered social life reportable, interpretable, shareable and influenceable in potentially new ways” (2020: 2). A surge in the number of employees working from home during lockdown conditions in the UK (86%) led to dramatic changes in both employees’ and managers’ attitudes to working from home and flexible working (Chung et al., 2020; Forbes et al., 2020). However, managers were concerned with the mental health and well-being of employees during the lockdown, recounting that employees often struggled with childcaring issues and balancing care and work, leading to exhaustion and scheduling conflicts for calls. Many workers identified ‘Zoom fatigue’ and tech burnout as major problems. In the US, 40% reported that they felt exhausted or drained by the end of the call and three quarters of those who participated in several calls a day did so (Pew Research Centre, 2021: 33). This indicates the struggles involved in incorporating this technology into domestic routines. Despite these frictions, video conferencing was expanded to encompass remote informal socialising from home during lockdowns. This echoes patterns of IT adoption in the home uncovered by earlier domestication studies which documented householders’ struggles with telework and working from home from the 1990s onwards (Lally, 2002; Ward, 2006). Teleworkers brought home equipment such as PCs for work purposes, and then discovered their non-work applications. Once the equipment was placed in the home, teleworkers and other family members could gain familiarity with the technology by experimenting with it and developing their computer competences. However, this earlier domestication research paid more attention to the interaction between household members relating to ICTs and how people presented themselves to the outside world, as indicated by the concept of ‘conversion’ (Silverstone et al., 1992). Interestingly, video call technology’s ‘conversion’ concerns self-presentation, involving frontstage and backstage dynamics, as discussed below.

The domestication of Zoom Despite Zoom’s work-oriented agency scripts, this technology was promptly re-appropriated and re-socialised by householders during lockdowns. The take-up of Zoom for work and educational purposes, and its ease of use, lowered the stigma associated with emergent technologies. It nudged householders to develop the competences needed to navigate the technology for wider, informal socialising and creative interactions beyond work.

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Householders adapted and re-oriented Zoom’s ‘conferencing’ agency scripts for interpersonal socialising to sustain familial, friendship and community ties and provide care and emotional support to vulnerable individuals (Greenwood-Hickman et al., 2021). Given that Zoom’s initial design was schemed to meet work-related needs, this re- socialisation of ‘video conferencing’ for informal socialising and networking prompted Zoom to redesign the platform’s agency scripts. The company tagged on certain features to enhance informal use among family, friends, and communities. This retrospective design confirms the contra-flow of techno-social affordances, back from user to designer. The company’s aim has been to ensure that operating Zoom’s software would be effortless and almost intuitive, as reflected in its core mission statement: “Make video communications frictionless.”2 Zoom’s agency scripts are now assigned to fulfil two apparently contradictory roles. First, it renders professional work from home more efficient, reportable, and measurable. And second, it generates a sense of conviviality by creating the impression of shared space and shared atmosphere among family, friends, and caregivers. While householders were predisposed to extend the use of video conferencing technology for informal screen interactions, the technology was viewed as a double-edged sword.

Positive encounters with video calling technology Positive accounts of video calling by American online householders reveal that their lives were altered in valued ways by using Zoom during the pandemic for a wide range of informal activities as well as professional purposes: [I’ve been] handling … deaths of family and friends remotely, attending and sharing classical music concerts and recitals with other professionals, viewing [my] own church services and Bible classes, shopping. … Basically, [the internet has been] a lifeline. (Woman, aged 69) I … use Zoom for church youth activities. [I] use Zoom for meetings. I order groceries and takeout food online. We arranged for a ‘digital reception’ for my daughter’s wedding as well as live streaming the event. (Woman, aged 44) (Pew Research Centre, 2021: 12) This technology was used to host religious services, music practice, plays, and music gigs as well as coffee mornings, dinner parties, choirs, dance parties, happy hours, pub quizzes, virtual craft nights, cooking classes, fitness classes and workouts, virtual karaoke. In the US, a churchgoer stated: “I now attend church services online rather than in person, which I had not done before the outbreak” (Man, aged 36; Pew Research Centre, 2021: 23). Video calling also facilitated virtual festive, commemorative, or memorialising events from weddings to birthday parties and, sadly, funerals. Soon recognising that it had been domesticated to support a diverse range of activities virtually, Zoom then offered guidance on “Running Engaging Online Events.”3 Video calling has also sustained political activism from Black Lives Matter (Li, 2020) to the climate crisis. Pew data shows that one in five Americans used video calls during the 2020/2021 pandemic to connect with remote others once a day or more, while 12% did so several times a day, 12% did so once a week, 18% a few times a week, and 16% every few weeks, with 15% less often.

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We now hold bi-weekly family meetings on Zoom to make sure we are all doing okay. Before we just had individual phone calls with family members. We used Vimeo for my mother’s funeral so people could watch her funeral mass. She died of COVID-19. I used Zoom for work meetings. (Woman, aged 57) It has opened me up to using video chat to connect with physically distanced friends. I have people that I used to only see on Facebook or in person two times a year but now we do a group video chat once a month and I am closer to them than ever. (Woman, aged 39) (Pew Research Centre, 2021: 21) Qualitative research confirms that users valued the multisensory and affective mode of engagement afforded by video call apps’ scopic features. In Canada, Heshmat and Neustaedter (2021) found that video callers had a strong desire to feel as if they were in the same physical space as their remote relatives or friends. Revealing the significance of scopic media for generating a sense of atmosphere and physicality with close family and friends, these researchers found that socialising actually increased thanks to video calling, particularly with vulnerable elderly parents. With more frequent screen communication, some contacts became more intimate. This perception of a shared space and shared atmospheres was facilitated by the screen’s capacity to enable group activities such as game playing and shared meals or drinks. Likewise, qualitative research in Australia by Watson et al. (2021) found that participants devoted more time to connecting with distant family and friends during lockdown either by phone or video calls. Participants signed in to foster close ties not only with family but also with those they were concerned about during the pandemic such as relatives working abroad or in essential services. Their research revealed the value of video calling’s visual attributes when compared to other mediums. The scopic affordances of video call technology enable users to achieve a greater sense of closeness and connection. During lockdowns, video calling technology also enhanced intergenerational ties with an increase in grandchild-initiated contact with grandparents (McDarby and Carpenter, 2020). Skype, Zoom, and Facetime were regarded positively by many aged 65+ who considered these platforms to be the closest to a face-to-face communication encounter (Wilson et al., 2020). Video call technology’s capacity to enhance global microstructures is exemplified by its use by trans-national families. In fact, as Watson et al. (2021) highlight, pre-pandemic studies of digital connections between distant family and friends already confirmed the value of video calls over audio calls to generate a sense of ambient proximity with family members and conjure a sense of ‘home’ (Baldassar, 2016; Cabalquinto, 2017; Madianou, 2016; Zhao, 2019). For example, Filipino migrant workers in the West favour video calls for real-time conversations and shared family rituals such as grandparents helping with children’s homework, playing instruments, or having meals together. This interactive screen ‘presents’ participants with something that lies beyond their reach, enabling householders to engage in exchanges that can stretch across space and time zones. As Knorr Cetina states: “This ‘dissolution’ of the boundaries between the ‘far away’ and ‘near’ is a characteristic of scopic media” (2014: 44). Comprising human–machine interaction, it synthetically generates a body-to-body interaction to create a social situation. As such video call interaction generates new digitally enabled trans-domestic communication.

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Negative dimensions of video call technology’s affordances Notwithstanding its social benefits, video call technology repeatedly fell short in terms of creating the atmosphere gained when people are co-present. Video calling is navigated mainly in the domestic setting, but domestication theory informs us that its varied circumstances of use are paramount. This emergent mode of trans-domestic communication was encountered, for socialising as well as work purposes, as both a blessing and a curse. Screen time was viewed negatively by many. For example, among 68% of Americans, the online exchanges they held instead of in-person interactions, whether by phone or video call, were regarded as valuable but not be a replacement for in-person contact. An additional 15% of householders reported that these communication tools were not particularly beneficial for their interactions (Pew Research Centre, 2021). While 17% of Americans regarded digital communication to be as positive as in-person interaction, two-thirds viewed digital contact as an imperfect and partial substitute for co-present social interaction (Pew Research Centre, 2021: 23). Many felt exhausted by video calls with a quarter left feeling less close to family than before the pandemic and 38% echoed the same feelings about friends they know well. Roughly half (53%) said this about casual acquaintances. Knorr Cetina explains that scopic media are screen interfaces which create parallel realities that participants must orientate themselves towards or become fully absorbed in (Goffman, 1978; Knorr Cetina, 2009). The synthesising of face-to-face communication via a screen is a simulation that re-enacts face-to-face interaction. It therefore fundamentally alters the social and cultural context of interpersonal exchanges. Interactive screens create surrogate face-to-face interactions. While the face-to-face facility of this scopic medium predominates, to enable householders to navigate microsocial situations, the technology’s attributes are still being contested, as are its protocols of use. The social customs and processes surrounding the use of this newer medium need to be understood in relation to people’s past uses of old media such as the phone call. Comparing techno-social affordances, asynchronous channels such as text messages and emails are more discreet than synchronous communication channels such as the phone. Whether for work meetings or for socialising, Zoom calls are high commitment activities. Unlike email or social media, video calling returns us to and anchors us within a synchronous mode of interaction. But like the phone, Zoom can be used for either ‘instrumental’ or ‘intrinsic’ calls, a distinction made by Moyal (1995) in one of the few large-scale sociological studies of the landline telephone. Moyal explained that instrumental phone calls are for work, business, and seeking information while intrinsic phone calls are for personal communication with relatives, friends, volunteer work, counselling and intimate discussion and exchange. As a synthetic situation, the interactional arrangement of Zooming has preconditions. We must negotiate the video call in advance, indicating that this medium entails high commitment and careful relationship management. For formal work meetings conducted from home, the video call may be interpreted as an intrusion or interruption, or it may be viewed as temporary relief from domestic and childcare duties. It may involve informality and bonding among colleagues or render participants voiceless and disenfranchised during presentations. Conversely for informal socialising, it may signify either intimacy or convey loyalty, duty and caregiving but it is unequivocally performative and dynamic. It is imperatively reciprocal even if used for phatic communication. This scopic medium is imbued with morally charged dynamics that reveal the broader moral discourses framing screen-based encounters. Video calling requests a person’s

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immediate bodily and expressive attention. The quality of interaction becomes a moral responsibility of participants, with a normative obligation to come to the screen and log on punctually, and then to perform, as on a stage: to respond, to engage, to interact. Sharing the same screen content means that the interacting participant has a telepresence, or what Knorr Cetina calls a ‘response presence.’ We ‘watch’ each other and ourselves as a contract of the screen interaction, and we must simultaneously listen and respond. To sustain these ‘live’ trans-domestic encounters, the synchronic and scopic attributes of video call technology create interactive situations that span a continuum of intensity and immersion. The screen encounter involves close responsiveness to the person being contacted and high concentration since it also demands that the caller’s attention be reciprocated. Video calls require concentrated facial and bodily performances, and the management of backdrop displays of domestic space (returned to below). As such, video call technology demands intensified personal observation and projection and specific response systems centred on projected embodiment or re-embodiment. These new encounters infer an attentional regime and mode of digital integration that dramatically alters spatial, temporal and informational elements (Knorr Cetina, 2014). Video calling can invoke the etiquette of the telephone call but, during this relatively early phase of adoption, it exposes the socially constructed nature of the telepresence. These features not only provide important insights into the various affordances and attributes of this scopic medium for personal communication but also the intensity of the emotional effort involved, as attributes that enable yet also complicate the technology’s domestication. Older people who felt lonely during lockdowns were less inclined to engage in video calls (Wilson et al., 2020). Those who were regular users experienced digital glitches, skill deficiencies, and anxiety. Whether they suffered from social isolation or not, these antipathies towards the technology lowered older people’s uses of digital media. A study of coping strategies among older people during the pandemic found that while virtual media enabled them to stay connected to friends and family, they were regarded as less rewarding than in-person interactions (Greenwood-Hickman et al., 2021). The video call transaction may recuperate a sense of the closeness, empathy and trust that typify the basics of face -to-face communication. But being synthetically contrived, its ‘situational integrity’ is much more difficult to sustain in this mediatised setting than when interactors are co-present. The speed and reliability of the digital connection and the quality of the conversation may vacillate so that “the result is much more likely a muddle: a disorderly interactional arrangement struggling with problems of differential access, orientation and perspective, and coordination” (Knorr Cetina, 2014: 47). Early evidence suggests that women have led this domestication of video calling technology by re-socialising it for intrinsic communication with family and friends and for caregiving. The Pew Research Centre found that while men consistently engage in video conferencing, women are more likely to use this technology, and the internet, in new and diverse ways (43% vs. 36%), as do adults under the age of 50 (46%) compared with those who are 50 and older (33%) (Pew Research Centre, 2021: 20). With these new, diverse uses – weddings, funerals, church meetings, and calls with family – some adults reported that their lives moved mainly on to video platforms. As mentioned above, working women were not only steering trans-domestic communication for intrinsic purposes but also disproportionately grappling home working online with charge of home schooling of their children and the bulk of the housework.

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The backdrop dynamics of Zoom Although Zoom has been re-socialised as a social tool, it remains a work-oriented tool that changes the home’s spatial dynamics. This highlights the moral implications of projecting a domestic backdrop in video calls. Earlier research on webcams suggests that the interactive screen can become a third space in which people ‘live’ (Miller & Sinanan, 2014). The affordance of visibility to others in these synthetic situations is contingent on the screen’s ‘backdrop dynamics.’ This concerns how the undercurrents of live backdrops contribute to the meanings of the virtual encounter as part of this new screen world. It is misleading to consider online space as ‘dis-located’ or ‘disembedded’ from everyday life. The management and reordering of domestic space in Zoom exchanges impinges on the moral economy of the household, leading to contestations over shared domestic spaces. As Shortt (2021: 43) explains, “Home space rules are being rewritten, new agreements are being made, home and work boundaries are being reimagined.” Shortt refers to de Souza e Silva (2006) who explains geo-locative and mobile media as ‘hybrid spaces’ that connect and embed online communities within what were once viewed as ‘off-line’ spaces. Correspondingly, Hjorth and Richardson (2017) refer to ‘hybrid realities’ to explain how mobile gaming can generate new kinds of self-emplacement. Although the shared spaces of home are destabilised during pandemic lockdowns by home working and home schooling, the backdrop dynamics of video calling are governed by pre-existing moral values and customs. By posing challenges for new work-at-home arrangements, the video call screen’s incursion into domestic space reveals gendered and classed disparities. For a formal work-related Zoom meeting, the activity requires border control. Collective household decisions must be made about the screen-camera’s positioning to preserve a sense of uninterrupted privacy and professional orderliness. The negotiations made with other household members to avoid interruptions and ‘invasions’ by children, pets, or other adults reflect contestations over domesticity’s meanings and values. Of pertinence here, is the multiple burden placed on women during lockdowns to take responsibility for housework, childcare, maintaining social contacts, and working from home. An inspection of the home backdrops of experts exposed in video call interviews broadcast on televised news is exemplified by a Twitter account called ‘Room Rater.’ Its purpose is for “Rating bookcases, backsplashes and hostage videos since April, 2020.” Experts’ home backdrops are posted and ranked, with instant judgements made by members of the public about each one.4 Similarly, a popular pastime during the pandemic has been the perusing of public and expert figures’ homes in broadcast video call backdrops. These are uploaded on YouTube and other platforms as ‘Zoom fails.’ They expose experts’ improprieties and indiscretions caught on camera, including public figures interrupted by the casual intrusion of pets or children during formal interviews. This scrutiny of video call interruptions in experts’ broadcast interviews is conspicuously gendered (McIntyre et al., 2021). The more widely disparaged ‘pandemic videos’ tend to be of women experts interrupted by their children, suggesting that the contested nature of domestic space during the pandemic is gender oriented. When pets are caught on screen, this is regarded as amusing and exonerated. But if children are caught on screen while a woman expert is interviewed, the interruption is regarded negatively since women are expected to multitask. This reflects the ambiguities surrounding new home-working arrangements. While the message is that women should keep their children away from formalised screen spaces, in the case of men, their professional status is rendered suspect just by being in a 428

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domestic setting for work, especially if a broom, cleaning mop or child is visible in the background (McIntyre et al., 2021). Evidence of domestic labour or children in professional screen contexts remains deeply disturbing to a society that rigidly and symbolically segregates paid work from housework and caregiving. Goffman’s (1990/1959) frontstage-backstage dramatology casts light on these negative discourses, regarding domestic labour and space. For Goffman, the frontstage is where the on-view performance occurs. This is where individuals act out multiple roles that change according to the intended audience. Actors take on the behaviours, appearances, and props required to realise their expected and presented role. The backstage, where individuals are hidden from scrutiny, is where they prepare their performance and can be an authentic self without being seen or judged by others. Goffman’s study of backstage-frontstage dynamics in home spaces explains the spatial and symbolic origins of domesticity’s negative connotations. Observing hospitality in 1950s middle class homes that could not afford servants, he describes the ambiguous roles of the hostess. An unassisted hostess is expected to perform simultaneously in the front and backstage spaces of the home. She entertains guests in the social parts of the home and cooks in the backstage kitchen (Goffman 1990/1959: 110, 114). A collapse of front and backstage borders exposes the labour of the cook-hostess. LeesMaffei (2020) draws on Goffman’s observations to trace this backstage-frontstage predicament in her study of cultures of entertaining and hospitality in British and American homes from the 1920s to the present. Service hatches introduced to resolve the backstagefrontstage dilemma, became commonplace by the 1960s. Like the ‘dumb waiter’ lift in wealthy homes, service hatches connected backstage kitchens with the social parts of the home. It saved steps for the hostess and masked, from guests, evidence of labour in the kitchen. This elucidates public reactions to the collapse of this backstage/frontstage division prompted by the video screen’s presence in the home. The dilemma of exposing household labour was partially resolved by informalising domestic practices but also exacerbated by open-plan design such as the kitchen-diner, thereby complicating this division of backstage kitchens from frontstage living rooms. Echoing class judgements, evidence of domestic labour continues to be concealed to maintain the normative moral order of domestic space (Lees-Maffei, 2020). As well as impending judgements of taste about the décor of the room (Bourdieu, 1984), the video call’s two-way screen ruptures this backstage-frontstage moral order by exposing domestic labour. Just as sexism and class prejudice pervade the history of hospitality and home entertainment practices, women and men continue to be judged according to their closeness to or separateness from domestic tasks. The cleanliness, orderliness, and presentation of the home continue to be viewed as women’s responsibility. Consequently, the placement of a video screen for business purposes in an open-plan kitchen, bedsit, or child-centred home involves a careful masking of backstage dynamics: the clutter, muddle, and unpredictability of home life which can undermine the required impression of professionalism (see Woodward, 2021). When exposed on Zoom, these tasks are deemed contentious and discomforting. Accordingly, confinement to domestic space during pandemic lockdown conditions involves struggles over work–life segmentation (Bagger, 2021) to preserve the private space of home and save it from surveillance and judgement. The vilification of domesticity that fuels the public circulation of ‘Zoom fails,’ renders the video screen a hypercritical scopic agent. As such, the projection of domestic backdrops in video calls is a classed and gendered moralising discourse that characterises the home’s moral economy (see Woodward, 2021). 429

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Conclusion This chapter has drawn on three approaches to enquire how domestication theory can be attuned to the study of video call technology’s adoption and incorporation into the home setting under lockdown conditions. It has utilised quantitative data to gauge wider patterns of adoption and use; advanced the concept of techno-social affordances; and drawn on Knorr Cetina’s conceptualisation of synthetic situations. Given that video call technology’s affordances are almost singularly designed to sustain home-oriented interpersonal communication, these three approaches help to explain how this relatively new online technology is adopted and domesticated, as a highly cherished yet also fracturing mode of trans-domestic communication. First, survey data confirms the speed of video call technology’s take-up by online households during lockdown conditions. It highlights online householders’ digital connectivity problems and exposes a class of ‘digital left-behinds’ comprised mainly of the elderly, unemployed, and low-income groups. This offers vital contextual information about the patterns and conditions of media technology adoption and use during pandemic lockdowns to frame a theoretical enquiry into techno-social affordances. Against this backdrop of techno-social inequalities, patterns of video call technology use among online households reveal that its adoption promptly spread out from work-related activities to varied modes of non-work functions: from socialising and caregiving to entertainment and memorialising events. Quantitative and qualitative research confirm that these new screen worlds enabled householders to spend more time connecting with distant family and friends during lockdowns and played a major role in caregiving. They also enhanced global microstructures by supporting face-to-face communication among trans-national families. Emerging evidence also suggests that women have steered this re-socialisation of video calling technology as initiators of intrinsic screen communication. Against this background, this chapter’s focus on Zoom highlights the merits of expanding the domestication approach by advocating a stronger accent on the media affordances and constraints of this technology. Second the concept of techno-social affordances is proposed, then, to address the attributes of video call technology as a hardware/software system designed to facilitate a synchronous, interactive and scopic mode of remote face-to-face communication. The concept of techno-social affordances highlights attributes of these screen worlds. They are technologically and socially imbued with potential actions and meanings, materially and imaginatively; their affordances are polysemic in the sense that they can embody and generate multiple meanings and actions depending on social contexts of use and users’ socio-cultural norms, values and cultural skills. And finally, techno-social affordances encompass and are guided by ‘agency scripts’: premeditated user codes that structure and pilot audio-visual interactions on the screen. I explain that Zoom’s agency scripts were initially designed to optimise and invoke ­business-oriented, instrumental communication rather than the intrinsic interactions of informal socialising. This work-oriented use of Zoom predisposed and nudged householders to acquire the competences to use the technology for informal socialising and creative interactions beyond work. Zoom was appropriated, re-socialised and domesticated by householders to sustain familial, friendship, community ties and caregiving during pandemic lockdowns. In response, Zoom redesigned its agency scripts as an after-thought to extend its service to support this informal, sociable use. Involving a contra-flow of techno-social affordances, back from the domestic user to designer, this retrospective redesign confirms the interchange of affordances that fosters the domestication of video call technology. 430

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Third, drawing on Knorr Cetina’s concepts of ‘scopic media’ and the ‘synthetic situation,’ I pinpoint video call technology’s positive and negative affordances and encounters as a further element of techno-social affordances which indicates how householders domesticate this technology. Building on Goffman’s approach to the interaction order and the social situation, Knorr Cetina’s synthetic situation supports an analysis of how the interactive affordances and agency scripts of the video call screen are re-socialised by householders as a process of domestication. Goffman’s co-present face-to-face situation is perceived as a ‘naked’ and nonaugmented mode of communication that engenders trust, empathy and affinity. As a synchronised screenbased technology of observation and projection, Zoom’s meditation of face-to-face interaction emulates in-person encounters by socially (re)constructing and simulating the cues typified in co-present face-to-face exchanges. This altered face-to-face situation means that esteemed values of trust, conviviality, affinity, and reciprocity must be renegotiated. Fourth, this chapter points out that this emergent technology’s attributes are still being contested. Emphasising that its protocols of engagement are not yet determined and continue to be deliberated, this chapter chronicles householders’ positive and negative responses to the technology. I explain that as a synthetic situation, the interactional dynamics of Zooming has preconditions. Video calling may recuperate a sense of closeness but being synthetically contrived, its ‘situational integrity’ is more difficult to sustain than when participants are co-present. Inferring an intense attentional regime, Zoom’s ‘response presence’ is much more demanding than a phone call. It requires high levels of concentration by stipulating that the caller’s attention be reciprocated. This makes the synthetic situation much more tiring, challenging and less fulfilling that co-present communication. The final section draws on Goffman’s study of backstage-frontstage dynamics in home spaces to pinpoint the conflicting materialities and symbolisms entangled in video call screens’ incursions into domestic space. This two-way screen can disrupt the home’s backstage-frontstage social order by exposing the gendered labour that sustains domestic life. The agency scripts embedded in Zoom may be imbued with positive connotations by accenting its visual, temporal, sharing attributes as a social mode of connectivity. But when a video call is work-oriented, objections to signs of domestic labour outweigh these positive scripts in consigning domestic labour to a ‘backdrop.’ The collision of work and domestic agendas resulting from Zoom’s penetration of domestic space manifests the gendered and classed moral discourses that govern these new work-at-home arrangements. The framing of Zoom as a work situation is perpetually at risk of being undermined by domestic eruptions, suggesting that the domestic domain continues to be publicly fated as censured space. This predicament bears upon women who conduct professional work from home via Zoom. Video calls require a vigilant management not only of domestic backdrops but also of domestic femininity. Here, ‘feminised’ housework and ‘masculinised’ professional expertise collide. By taking responsibility for the bulk of household and caregiving chores, particularly during lockdown conditions, women quintessentially occupy and symbolise the simultaneous fusion of frontstage and backstage. Zoom becomes a hypercritical scopic agent. Working women with children are regularly marked out as inefficient multitaskers and rendered suspect as professionals and experts (see Dobusch & Kreissl, 2020; Fraser, 2016). The irony, then, is that the domestication and re-socialisation of video calling as an informal and relatively feminised mode of remote connectivity for socialising, caregiving and entertainment seems to compete with and destabilise its professional use and women’s professional status. The use of video call technology for both formal and informal purposes not only intensifies the porosity of home by undermining traditional boundaries between work and home. It also reminds us that the advancing Metaverse (Ofcom, 2021b) may be 431

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a new and exciting development, but however hybridised, augmented or merged, virtual shared space is not neutral space. Zoom’s synthetic situations unveil the tangible gendered and classed disparities that form the domestic ‘backdrop’ to virtual life.

Notes 1 “Meeting and Webinar best practices” available at: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/ articles/209743263-Meeting-and-Webinar-best-practices (accessed 26/12/2021). 2 About Zoom: https://explore.zoom.us/en/about/. 3 “Running Engaging Online Events” available at: https://explore.zoom.us/docs/doc/RunningEngaging-Online-Events.pdf (accessed 26/12/2021). 4 See Room Rater at https://twitter.com/ratemyskyperoom (accessed 03/10/2021).

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29 BROKEN DOMESTICATION The resonant politics of voice in gendered technology1 Stephen J. Neville and Alex Borkowski

In this chapter, we discuss the domestication of smart speakers and voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) to argue that the technology in question is shaped by a politics of voice that resonates in home-media environments to articulate the taming of technology and the taming of women as technology. Through a case study of unboxing videos of smart speakers on YouTube, we interpret YouTubers through the lens of the online warm expert (OWE) (Neville, 2021), a specific technology that is constructed by male audience members as a “broken machine” (Sharma, 2019, 2020) when performed by women. Moreover, from this machinic understanding of gender, a resonance is articulated between the technology of the media artefact (e.g. the voice of Alexa) and the technology of warm expertise to shape the overall domestication process in accordance with heteropatriarchal values. In particular, we mobilize a resonant politics of voice that is both metaphorical and material to discuss how the vocalic affordances of VAPAs are reinscribed onto the gendered technology of warm expertise. We develop a theoretical framework before introducing the study’s methodology, which consists of a qualitative thematic analysis of YouTube unboxing videos of smart speakers conducted by women and comments posted by their viewers. Following prior research (Neville, 2021), the study outlines the content of the videos to examine how the unboxing genre interacts with the domestication process as women content creators position themselves in a fraught context rife with sexism and misogyny. Following Silverstone and Haddon’s understanding of domestication as a continuous process whereby technologies are “socially and culturally both chewed and swallowed” (1996: 67) by their users, we suggest that audience comment sections for unboxing videos act as a site where this process is articulated. Thus, audience comments help to reveal how the domestication of feminine VAPAs proceeds in resonance with the domestication of female warm expertise. Moreover, audience engagement shows how the gendered assistance afforded by warm expert technology interacts with the vocalic affordances and feminine design of VAPAs.

Domestication and mediation Domestication refers to the sociotechnical process of introducing and integrating a new life form or object in the context of domestic life. This process is typically regarded as ongoing, DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-42

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open, and multi-staged (Lehtonen, 2003); yet significantly, domestication is also reciprocal, standing in contrast to the “adoption curve model” (Rogers, 2003). Michel Serres’ explanation of domestication is particularly informative as he uses it to describe the “reciprocal breeding of humans and animals” (2001: 105). Serres’ treatment of domestication emphasizes the underlying learning process and generative relationship inherent to sharing a roof with any nonhuman. Thus, successful domestication involves the development of a mutual knowledge base that becomes incorporated into a manner of cohabitation. For instance, a domesticated canine learns not to “mark its territory” indoors, just as the master knows when to take the animal outdoors. In the context of media and technological domestication, the figure of the “warm expert” (Bakardjieva, 2005), who serves to facilitate or expedite the necessary learning process involved in domestication, is crucial. In her study of early internet users, Bakardjieva noted the importance of warm experts to assist friends and relatives who lacked the relevant knowledge about technology in order to set up their systems and become familiarized with its protocols. For Bakardjieva, the warm expert “possesses knowledge and skills gained in the system world of technology and can operate in this world but, at the same time, is immediately accessible in the user’s lifeworld as a fellowman/woman” (2005: 99). In a previous study, Neville (2021) interpreted YouTubers and other “micro-celebrities” (Marwick, 2015) who create technology reviews, tutorials, and troubleshooting content as OWEs. Although warm experts are not co-inhabitants but are rather more akin to a household visitor, the knowledge base articulated in relation to warm expertise, especially in an online public setting, is clearly reciprocal. For instance, YouTubers routinely entreat audience members to leave comments, submit questions, and to provide feedback about their videos to help them improve their content and further assist their audience. Evidently, media developments such as influencer culture and vlogging practices can interact with processes of domestication and with the social space of home environments, calling for updated theorization. Just as with Silverstone’s (2005: 190–191) claim regarding politics and social experience, domestication cannot be thought “outside a media frame.” For the purposes of this chapter, we are inclined to avoid engaging in sustained debate regarding distinctions in terminology; however, it is necessary to briefly acknowledge the different areas of focus and overlap between theories of mediation and mediatization. In a nuanced discussion of the literature, Nick Couldry (2008) emphasizes that theories of mediatization tend to analyse a “linear media logic” (4) or “linear transformation” from pre-media to mediatized social spaces (3) to highlight common macro patterns and processes reflected in disparate social areas. This is contrasted with the perspectives of mediation theorists who focus on the heterogeneity of mediated transformations in social space through more microlevel analyses (Livingstone, 2009: 10). Further and with great influence, Silverstone (2002: 762) defines mediation as the fundamentally, albeit unevenly, dialectal process in which the media are entangled with the circulation of meaning in social life. Couldry builds on this two-way conception of mediation by arguing that Silverstone’s term “dialectic” does not adequately capture all aspects of mediation’s nonlinearity, in particular, on the discontinuous and asymmetrical dynamics of media flows. He clarifies: “By ‘media flows’, I mean flows of production, flows of circulation, flows of interpretation or reception, and flows of recirculation as interpretations flow back into production or flow outwards into general social and cultural life” (2008: 8). Although it is perhaps unproductive to draw hard distinctions between mediation and mediatization (Livingstone, 2009), the shared priority, as Sonia Livingstone argues, in building off Raymond Williams (1977), should lie in exposing how relations of power and their 436

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operation are mediated in a manner that can go unnoticed or become naturalized in society (2009: 13). For instance, we might look to representations of ideal homes in media (e.g. lifestyle media and home-makeover shows) that include demonstrations or prominent displays of pre-domesticated or emergent technology (see Kember & Zylinska, 2012: ch. 4). In many cases, such representations of domestic life are entangled with dominant technophilic interests as articulated by the staging of prescribed behaviours and relationships with technology: here, we note how media flows can obscure power relations that shape processes of domestication by (re)circulating, what can be thought of as imagined integrations, such as the assumption that humans act as the master of technology – a sociotechnical imaginary ( Jasanoff, 2015) that is increasingly suspect even in the refuge of home due to the increasing platformization of the household (Pridmore et al., 2019) and its embedded logic of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). Crucially, we commit to Livingstone’s call to action by exploring how patriarchal power relations in domestication are expressed as naturalized dynamics in the media flows articulated between OWEs and audiences on YouTube. Throughout the remainder of this chapter, we use mediation rather than mediatization, not to position ourselves on either side of the relevant debate, but as a shorthand to develop how the concept of warm expertise cannot be discussed outside of a media frame. The figure of the OWE underscores this development in a manner that is arguably redundant, since most forms of warm expertise are today articulated in relation to the internet at some point or another. Crucially, the lens of mediation helps to show how the assistance provided by the warm expert is entangled with media technologies, practices, and representations: moreover, it shows how domestication and the formation of a mutual knowledge base at home about technology are always already mediated and not only confined to the physical site of the home. Taking this one step further, the mediation of warm expertise suggests that the warm expert is itself a technology, an articulation of technē in which the collective “know how” and maker practices of OWEs is manufactured for domestication. Indeed, in a contemporary context, one is expected to learn how to cohabitate with the warm expert as technology – that is, we have domesticated the technique of learning from and with the OWE. In fact, virtually any technical query can be answered through the aid of warm expert content: for example, one can look up how to change a lightbulb, how to install a ceiling fan, how to set up a smart home product, and troubleshoot myriad problems. Although YouTube is by no means the only online space in which warm expertise is articulated (e.g. Reddit), the sheer abundance and variety of warm expert content on the platform is remarkable: additionally, the audio-visual format of YouTube videos and the popularity of the website among a diverse demographic speak to the wide accessibility of its warm experts within the lifeworld of lay users across the globe.

Gender and technology YouTube is by no means closed off from the wider politics of the internet, however we focus on this platform as a manageable case study to highlight how gender interacts with the technology of the warm expert. On YouTube, there are prominent disparities in the representation of women content creators, in general, compared with their male counterparts. Wotanis and McMillan (2014) show that women are underrepresented on the platform and receive far more negative feedback than men, as measured by audience comments that include hostile and sexist remarks. Döring and Mohseni (2019) support and expand on these findings: through a content analysis of the most popular global women YouTubers, they find that 437

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women are prone to receiving far more negative and hostile comments, especially in cases that feature open displays of sexuality, non-normative gender performances, and engagement with feminist issues. Thus, women warm experts, like other women on the platform, find themselves in a fraught context rife with sexism and misogyny whereby they must carefully position themselves to avoid the brunt of comments articulating toxic masculinity. This climate of hostility towards women on YouTube can help clarify how gender interacts with the technology of the warm expert. For Sarah Sharma (2019), those who troll women online in comment sections can be interpreted through the lens of the “social injustice warrior”: “Often misogynistic, often male, he attempts to organize the social field according to his wishes with the aid of technology.” The social injustice warrior uses several technological strategies, however, we focus particularly on the way in which he interprets women as broken machines in need of repair or replacement. This interpretation of women stems from the gendered equation of technology and patriarchy that assumes the machine world should reciprocate man’s love by “expediting his wishes and desires” and validating his power (Sharma, 2019). Thus, feminists and other nonconforming subjects are cast out in a patriarchal technological imaginary as “seemingly malfunctioning parts… [which] can be discarded and replaced” (Sharma, 2020: 173). In our case study of YouTube unboxing videos, women warm experts are interpreted as broken machines, not for communicating feminist politics per se, but simply for raising their voices in a male dominated space of tech. In other words, when women enact the technology of warm expertise, they are rejected as broken vocalic machines by the social injustice warrior – as a malfunctioning part in the domestication process. In the particular dramaturgical scenario of the YouTube unboxing video, women are denied expert status by their commenters and assigned a positionality more akin to the VAPAs they seek to discuss – that of a domestic or administrative labourer, conducting manual and menial tasks. This is understood as a perpetuation of long-standing power dynamics, not only in domestic spaces, but in the tech sector, in which highly lauded innovation thrives on the under-paid and invisible labour often undertaken by women and racialized subjects (Crawford, 2021). By rejecting this undervalued role and adopting a position of warm expertise, women are potentially interpreted as a broken technology, unfit for domestication. An awareness among women tech enthusiasts of this fraught context may help explain why authority figures in the domestication of technology are disproportionately men. This underrepresentation propagates an earlier finding: without denying the potential for women to become warm experts, Bakardjieva notes in her research, that “the gender of the Internet teacher or champion who had helped my respondents with their first steps on both the computer and the Internet was in all cases male” (2005: 102, emphasis added). The marginalization of women’s expertise on technology is a recurrent theme throughout media histories (Marvin, 1988; Spigel, 1992; Kenney, 2004; Gitelman, 2006) and is likely due to convergent misogynist logics that posit men as inherently, more in the know than women while interpreting technology itself as naturalistically male dominated (Sharma, 2020). While research has considered gender differences related to perceptions and use of communication technologies through a diffusion of innovations lens (Ilie, et al., 2005), to our knowledge, studies have not explored how “opinion leadership” (Rogers, 2003) as a variable that affects the domestication of technology – in its speed of uptake and market success – is itself impacted by gender imbalances in representation that interact with issues of patriarchal dominance in society. This gap supports the need to integrate feminist perspectives into theories of domestication. This framework, which understands domestication as layered with processes of mediation, highlights the gendered construction of the warm expert as technological, providing a 438

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unique approach to understand the broader patriarchal dimensions of domestication. Taking this one step further, the goal of our study is to explore how the domestication of smart speakers and VAPAs proceeds in resonance with the domestication of warm expertise: we focus specifically on the gendering of these technologies and the domestication process by discussing the resonance between the feminine voice of technology (e.g. Alexa) and the politics of voice articulated in relation to women warm experts. Overall, we argue that patriarchal control of domestication articulates the taming of technology as layered with the taming of women as technology. We clarify this relationship by discussing what we call a resonant politics of voice in which VAPAs are constructed according to a specific technical function of subordination and historically feminine assistance while women warm experts are concurrently rejected as broken vocalic machines.

A resonant politics of voice What we term a resonant politics of voice describes overlapping structures of gender, voice and domestic labour, of which VAPAs and warm experts are a particularly salient crystallization. In particular, we analyse a patriarchal politics of voice to discuss hegemonic perceptions of technology that resonate with and reinforce heteronormative ideologies, particularly within domestic space. Indeed, feminist scholarship has highlighted the deeply rooted lineage of policing and denigrating voices in alignment with gender. Looking to the plethora of derogatory accounts of female vocality throughout classical and modern literature, Anne Carson has posited that the ways in which the qualitative assessment of sound “whether good or bad, innovative or extraneous … is shaped by, and co-constituted with gender” (1992: 86). In a contemporary neoliberal context, even as certain permissible forms of women’s loudness and “speaking out” are lauded as indications of empowerment, patriarchal logics are still mobilized in the differentiation among consonant and dissonant femininities, with such distinctions being further intensified by race and class (Thompson, 2016; James, 2019; Kay, 2020). In the context of this study, a politics of voice demonstrably resonates between two technological elements: first, in the design of VAPA interfaces such that they are assigned feminized voices in their default settings. Indeed, the feminized personas of voice assistants are widely considered emblematic of the ways in which broader cultural affiliations between femininity and assistance, helpfulness, and subservience (Hwang et al., 2019) are “hardcoded” (West et al., 2019: 34) into consumer technologies. Scholars suggest that gendered voices are deployed as a neutralizing force predicated upon the imagined body of a white middle-class cis woman (Roberts, 2015), and rely upon the successful performance of normative gender as a means to allay the sense of uncanniness and negative associations with automata and robotic voices (Bergen, 2016; Humphry & Chesher, 2021). By appealing to stereotypes regarding traditionally gendered forms of labour – Siri is cast as a plucky personal assistant and Alexa as an unobtrusive domestic labourer or nurturing parent (Strengers & Nicholls, 2018; Schiller & McMahon, 2019) – voice assistants achieve “the perfect mimesis of the social order within the speech acts of the algorithm itself ” (Phan, 2017: 28). Further, feminine voices are deployed as a kind of auditory balm to alleviate users’ anxieties regarding the capacities for surveillance and data collection that smart speakers introduce into domestic environments. As a vocalic veil for algorithmic interventions in the daily lives of consumers, Heather Woods describes Siri and Alexa as “nimble and gracious hosts easing the transition from modern capitalist economies to the platform economies of the future” (Woods, 2018: 337). 439

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Second, we locate a politics of voice within the discourse around women as experts or authority figures more generally. We take it as a commonplace assumption that women are systematically drained of their capacity to raise their voices to stand out as leaders (Hedges, 2017): a prevalent issue supported by a plethora of professional and business oriented self-help books marketed towards women that claim to teach behaviours of authority (Henry, 2005; Humphrey, 2014; Burton, 2016; Pegues, 2020) – behaviours which include the adoption of particular modes of successful speech and vocal performance. This discourse reflects a response to the social marginalization of women in the public sphere, whose bodies, voices, and perspectives are “symbolically registered as being out of place” (Kay, 2020: 102). We add to this understanding by interpreting women warm experts as broken vocalic technology that is constructed by male users as both unsuitable stewards of the domestication process and as technologies disagreeable to the heteropatriarchal regimes of domesticity. This study discusses these two technological elements – the feminine design of VAPAs and gendered warm expertise – according to a politics of voice that resonates between them, both ideologically and materially. While we reject any linear or deterministic link between passive personas of feminized VAPAs and the policing of women’s domestic roles, we consider VAPAs as agents that both rely upon and reinscribe regressive gendered stereotypes about the feminine in domestic environments (Woods, 2018). The vocalizations of both VAPAs and warm experts are understood not simply as performances, but as performative in the sense that techno-femininities and digital domesticities are constituted, reiterated and sedimented through them. Indeed, Judy Wajcman has identified this emphasis on process, interaction and repetition as a shared principle between the domestication framework and theories of gender performance: “both technology and gender are products of a moving relational process, emerging from collective and individual acts of interpretation” (2010: 150). By exploring the resonant politics of voice articulated through a case study of smart speaker unboxing videos by women YouTubers, our study highlights problematic heteropatriarchal tendencies in domestication whereby the taming of technology becomes layered with the taming of women as technology. We discuss this layering through a framework of resonant politics whereby the vocalic affordances of VAPAs are reinscribed onto the technology of warm expertise as a way for male audience members to highlight how women are functioning as broken machines. Specifically, we address the vocalic affordances of muting and wake word functionality articulated by smart speaker and VAPA technology as attributes that are reinscribed onto women YouTubers as behaviours of “normative” and subordinate femininity, representing a foil to displays of female warm expertise.

Methodology In consideration of the particular role fulfilled by OWEs, as agents who can steer the course and tempi of domestication (Neville, 2021: 1292), the marginalization of women’s perspectives on YouTube is significant as it sidelines their influence as authority figures on new technology. Our study is designed to explore how the domestication process that unfolds around these unboxing videos reproduces patriarchal ideals of technological authority and domesticity, effectively colouring both how audience members interact with women warm experts and perceive the gendered formulation of VAPAs. Through a qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of smart speaker unboxing videos and viewer comments on YouTube, we find that the gendering of VAPAs directly impacts the relationship articulated between women YouTubers and audience members. More broadly, we aim to signal 440

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a resonant politics of voice that is articulated between the domestication of warm expertise and the domestication of VAPAs. During our initial data collection phase conducted in July 2020, we found that women were drastically underrepresented as OWEs on YouTube. While our study is not designed for generalizability, our data sample supports that unboxing videos of smart speaker technology are created predominantly by men and that content by women is less common and far less popularly consumed in terms of audience view count. In our initial sample (n = 202), merely 10.9% (22 videos) of unboxing videos featured a woman OWE. This stark imbalance is prominently reflected in audience view count: videos by men receive a collective total of 48,964,724 audience views, in contrast to videos by women receiving merely 6,558,150 views, reproducing a similar (dis)proportionate representation on the platform. This imbalance is likely attributable to YouTube’s overarching gender problems of underrepresentation and misogyny which engenders a hostile environment for potential and actual content creators; however, we contend that due to the role fulfilled by these YouTubers in unboxing videos, as OWEs, these videos illustrate a more specific problem relating to the domestication process by marginalizing women’s perspectives as everyday tech experts. Our data collection protocol began using the Netvizz YouTube Data Tools (YTDT) “video list” and “video info” modules (Rieder, 2015). Video metadata was scraped using three search terms targeting the most popular smart speaker brands and devices: “unboxing Amazon Echo”; “unboxing Google Home”; and “unboxing Apple HomePod.” With this procedure a maximum of 50 video entries are received per search query and this was repeated twice per search term – once by sorting videos based on highest view count ranking and again, based on search term relevance. Subsequently, using the YouTube video ID uniquely associated with YouTube content, data was manually examined to confirm the accuracy of the search results, to remove any duplicate entries, and to determine whether the YouTuber was female presenting or not. We then isolated a purposive sample of unboxing videos (n = 11) conducted by women in English for qualitative analysis. From this procedure and due to our inability to code non-English content, our sample only featured videos created by white or white-passing women. This was followed by a secondary data collection procedure applied to our final data sample of videos (n = 11) using the YTDT “video info and comments” module which produces a tabular file containing all retrievable audience comments and replies for a YouTube video. Following this, we selected a sample of the top 500 audience comments (i.e. most recent) for each video to follow up for qualitative analysis. In total, we coded 4,107 comments since the videos in our sample feature a wide numeric range of audience comments, some receiving thousands and others receiving fewer than 100, in some cases due to editorial monitoring by the YouTuber. A qualitative methodology was applied because we were less interested in providing generalizable results, but instead aimed to empirically justify our central argument that patriarchal control of domestication articulates the taming of technology as layered with the taming of women as technology. With a data sample now in hand, consisting of YouTube videos and audience comments directed to women warm experts, we began a coding process involving a deductive and inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) oriented around our theoretical interests concerning, what we have termed, a resonant politics of voice. As we report on our findings, we typically do not flag any typos except in cases where clarity issues are presented or to draw the reader’s attention to a point for further discussion. In general, we aim to preserve the integrity of YouTube vernacular by including the original acronyms (e.g. lol), emojis, and other forms of internet slang used by the audience commenter. 441

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The study asks: How do women position themselves as warm experts in this fraught context of YouTube? How does the domestication of feminine VAPAs proceed in resonance with the domestication of women’s warm expertise? And how does the gendered assistance afforded by warm expert technology interact with the vocalic affordances and feminine design of VAPAs?

Research findings and discussion Performing expertise Even under the seemingly narrow rubric of smart speaker unboxing videos, and within our relatively small data sample, we observed an extensive range of practices, rhetorical strategies, and aesthetics (Kim et al., 2018). For example, while some videos featured professional lighting and sophisticated editing, others deployed a shaky hand-held camera. Our sample also suggests that the contours of unboxing as a YouTube genre are quite porous, and indeed overlap in several instances with other genres and aesthetics such as haul videos and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). Further, some warm experts situate their tech unboxing videos among other themed content featured on their channels such as travel vlogging, twitch streaming, and cooking videos as part of their more expansive influencer brand, while others foreground their associations with tech blogs such as TechGadgetsCanada and CNET. To varying degrees, however, all of the videos in our sample engage with the dramaturgical conventions of an unboxing video: the warm expert directly addresses her viewers via a static camera set-up, seated at a table so that the device under discussion may be placed in clear view. The process of unboxing unfolds through the meticulous removal of packaging from a brand-new smart device, examining and describing all extraneous materials that accompany the primary technical object such as cords, instructions, and branded stickers. In framing a “journey of discovery” (Mowlabocus, 2020: 572), the warm experts narrate their initial sensory experiences of the device, commenting on its appearance, feel, and even smell, and offering up vicarious tactile pleasures for viewers (Kim, 2020; Mowlabocus, 2020; Vaudrey & Wang, 2020). In keeping with the generic conventions of unboxing, the YouTuber proceeds to talk through the set-up process which, in the case of smart speakers, is initiated vocally rather than haptically. Often, these initial reactions are followed up by OWEs with additional videos featuring the same product, offering an in-depth review once they have lived with the device for a more prolonged period of time. Indeed, several such videos – including home walkthroughs, comparisons between different product lines, and “tips and tricks” demonstration videos – appear in our data sample. Whether as an initial reaction or a more scripted review format, the videos in our sample first and foremost draw users’ attention to features of a particular smart device and demonstrate how to most beneficially interact with it, particularly via vocal cues. The OWEs recurrently ask VAPAs to provide information about the weather, retrieve miscellaneous facts, create reminders, set alarms, and play music. They also showcase the VAPAs’ integration with smartphone apps and the Internet of Things (IoT), asking the device to adjust thermostats and turn lights on and off through voice command. Comparisons between other smart speakers also feature prominently, as the OWEs advise their viewers whether Apple, Amazon, or Google’s device might be best suited to their needs based on factors such as price point, compatibility with third-party apps and Android devices, as well as audio quality. Several videos employ overlaid text and images on screen to offer detailed specifications of 442

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the technology or a look inside the device to reveal its various components. The OWEs also weigh in on complaints that surround the launch of a device, such as the widespread criticism that Apple’s HomePod leaves a damaging white ring on wooden surfaces. Such characteristics are indicative of the YouTuber’s technical knowledge and skill, and evidently serve to pass on such knowledge to viewers (Bakardjeva, 2005; Neville, 2021). Other elements of the videos, however, exceed educational aims, venturing into the sensory pleasures of unboxing described above or into gendered practices of intimacy and authenticity that pervade in influencer culture (see Tolson, 2010; Abidin, 2015; Duffy, 2016; Berryman & Kavka, 2017). One of the more striking and contradictory features we identified in several videos is the warm expert’s expression of surprise or delight when the VAPA is first activated – a comedic gasp, wide-eyed stare into the camera, or even gesturing as if they’ve been startled to the point of being knocked off their feet by the VAPA’s seeming sentience. Such gestures participate in the performance of a varied and ambivalent relationship towards expertise in unboxing videos, in which the OWE’s knowledge is counterbalanced by a kind of comedic self-deprecation. For instance, an OWE demonstrates Google Assistant’s ability to call a missing phone by staging a scenario in which she has misplaced her phone somewhere in her home, saying: “I’m very absent minded sometimes.” When Google Assistant successfully locates the device on the couch right next to where the OWE is sitting, she rolls her eyes and exclaims: “Total blonde moment!” These deliberate performances of ditsiness co-exist in these videos with earnest and informative explications of the features and set-up of smart devices. We therefore suggest that the OWEs in our study enact a hybrid form of discourse (Tolson, 2010) that combines a highly gendered mode of “ordinariness” (Duffy, 2016) with expertise. Further, this at times ambivalent approach is perhaps influenced by the warm expert’s knowing relationship to the gendered dynamics of YouTube viewership. One warm expert in our sample appears to be responding directly to denigrating commentators as she prefaces her video with a title card indicating that “all ignorant comments will be deleted.” More frequently, however, women OWEs enact a vacillating approach towards their own intelligence, perhaps anticipating that any sincere claims to expertise might be undermined by commenters. Given the crucial importance of likes and positive comments for aspiring content creators, the shift towards performing giddiness and vacuousness is perhaps indicative of a tactical reworking of the conventions of ordinariness that dominate in more feminized spheres of digital production, such as beauty and fashion (Duffy, 2016; Berryman & Kavka, 2017), in order to thrive in a tech-centric YouTube environment. With regard to the gendering of VAPA technologies, it is notable that warm experts recurrently use she/her pronouns to refer to Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Indeed, much of the OWEs engagement with and commentary upon VAPAs showcases and re-enforces the gendered stereotypes embedded in their personas. “She’s so cheerful!” one warm expert exclaims when Siri turns on some lights and says “Got it!” in response to a command. It is precisely this pleasant, perky vocal performance that feminist critiques of VAPA have identified has a kind of leveraging of conventional femininity for the augmentation of surveillance capitalism in domestic spaces (Woods, 2018), a perspective that is notably absent from OWEs’ discussions. Gender also crucially makes its way into the OWE’s assessments and critiques of the technology. In comparing how “smart” Siri is in comparison to “her” counterparts, Alexa and Google, an OWE remarks that: “I still feel like Siri has not unlocked her full potential.” Indeed, the videos in our sample are replete with misfires and mishearings. When Siri responds with confusion to a query from the warm expert, she responds by gesturing towards the camera and her imagined viewers, exclaiming: “Come on, girl! Don’t 443

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leave me hanging in front of all my friends!” The VAPA’s femininity is therefore discursively intertwined with their glitches, their lack of intelligence. OWEs therefore negotiate a difficult balance between their own femininity and expertise and the feminized “smartness,” or lack thereof, of the technology under discussion.

Marginalization of women as online warm experts This section, in part, features anticipated results based on prior discussion of the general misogyny directed towards women content creators on YouTube. However, we expand on this in two related ways. First, although research has discussed the influence of unboxing videos on purchase intent (Kim, 2020), prior studies have not examined the marginalization of women YouTubers through the warm expert lens, that is, as individuals who can influence the domestication process of media technologies. Second, this section evinces that through interacting with emergent technology in an unboxing video, women warm experts are subjected to a heteropatriarchal logic as male audience members read the affordances of media in resonance with the control they desire to have over women. In doing so, the warm expert becomes integrated into a suite of smart home media, as yet another object to support the IoT imaginary. A central characteristic of OWEs is that they are perceived as knowledgeable about emergent technology and will not merely reproduce the function of a salesperson who aims to influence consumer decisions while earning a commission or wage. However, some audience members cannot fathom why a woman should be regarded as an authority in this milieu: “Why do I want to watch a video of a girl [sic] whining about her shiny new toy 🙈.” It is noteworthy that this woman is characterized as a “girl” whose unboxing performance is perceived as whiney, in keeping with dominant disparagements and dismissals of complaint as a feminized speech genre to be tuned out (Kay, 2020). In videos presented by men, criticism of emergent technology is often perceived as an indication of an OWE’s trustworthiness, which is often discussed in comments as necessary in an impartial product review (Neville, 2021). Although many audience members indeed read these women as reliable sources to varying degrees, some audience members attack their intelligence and expertise in relation to gender: This chick is dumb I swear. Just call her noodlebrain. Why are blondes so stupid? I see a ditsy blonde selling her body more than the product! As suggested by the last example, a different line of attack is taken by men who sexualize women warm experts while simultaneously marginalizing their authority and opinions on new technology: “noone cares about the video, [audience members care] more [about] the woman.” Numerous comments liken the YouTuber to pornstars by noting a perceived likeness of appearance or sexiness: “Damn, I thought this was Alexis Texas.” Other audience members joke that the unboxing video reminded them of a pornographic scenario: “i was expecting Rico Strong to come in the room…”; “I kept waiting for the ‘plumber’ to come in and fix the sink.” Similarly, comments discredit the YouTube channel as a whole by suggesting that the videos or warm expert belong on “Brazzers,” a popular pornography company. However, the bulk of misogynistic comments in this vein is reminiscent of fraternity sexism – a juvenile and crude form of abuse – whereby boys or men tune out what is being 444

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said by the warm expert to instead view a woman’s body as a sexualized object of patriarchal fantasy: “Anyone else get a boner?”; “I just came.” More notably, some comments in this group read the shaft-like appearance of the device as a phallic object when the warm expert picks it up and handles it: “love the way you stroke that cylinder.” These comments reinforce the notion of tactical pleasure derived from the unboxing genre (Mowlabocus, 2020): however, for these male viewers, they not only vicariously take pleasure from the act of unboxing but also objectify the warm expert by sexually fetishizing her relationship to the product in their comments. Despite the predictable crassness of these comments, we draw the reader’s attention to this to segue into a broader discussion of audience members who read the technology in the hands of a woman in resonance with heteropatriarchal desire. For instance, audience members construct the VAPA as a bro or ally to assist them in their sexual advances on the warm expert: Hey google, tell this girl to take off her top. Alexa… dim lights so we can have a good time 😂. Alexa, can you make this woman magically appear in my bedroom? Alexa, vanish her dress 😎. Alexa is she wearing a thong[?] These comments certainly echo the misogyny described above, however they are notable in that they feature a VAPA’s wake word as well as the command and question-based format typical of smart speaker interaction. By situating these women as subject to the interactive affordances of smart speakers and VAPAs, these audience comments objectify the warm expert in a very literal sense: the warm expert becomes one among many objects in an IoT that can be vocally controlled within the regime of the smart home. Thus, these comments reveal how women OWEs are “repaired” or “restored” as properly functioning technologies once the affordances of control articulated by VAPAs are reinscribed onto women. In other words, and according to a misogynist logic, as warm expert technology, women are constructed as unfit for domestication until they can learn to resonate within a heteropatriarchal imaginary of the smart home.

Muting affordances of technology The undercutting of women’s authority as tech experts as a metaphorical silencing becomes, in the context of the YouTube video, a material muting, as commenters frequently allude to the fact that they enjoy watching videos by women warm experts without any sound: just cut the sound and watch… yummy!!! lol the video is a lot better in mute… hitting the mute button makes this video many times more entertaining! I watched this whole video in mute and I completely agree to whatever the hell she said, she’s right. Sure sure… wearing a low-cut top like that is to attract attention in order to get more views. Works for me, I could watch this video on mute over and over. 445

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The audibility of the warm experts’ voices is situated as an impediment to the enjoyment of the video, which, for these commenters, resides entirely in the realm of the visual. Not only does this imply that warm experts’ thoughts and expertise are of little value and unworthy of attention, but the suggestion that the videos are improved by the silencing of women’s voices further participates in the aforementioned denigration of feminized voices as unpleasant, disruptive, or meaningless (Carson, 1995; Thompson, 2016; Kay, 2020). This silencing could further be likened to the expected functionality of IoT products which are designed to passively operate in the background of everyday life and remain quiet except when spoken to: in this way, the taming of technology is layered with the heteropatriarchal taming of women as technology. Moreover, the gendered vocalic design and muting affordance of smart speakers is concurrently reinscribed onto actual women, as men in the audience express a desire for a similar form of sonic control in their interpersonal relationships: “nice vid. sometimes i wish my girlfriend had a mute button.” Thus, the muting affordance of VAPAs is strategically used by male audience members to highlight an interpretation of women as broken machines when speaking out and operating outside of a scophilic protocol. This resonant politics of voice short-circuits the assistance afforded by warm expert technology by constructing women as subservient to male domination and as a silent component in the domestication process.

Resonances between VAPAs and warm experts Within the broadly sexist rhetorical landscape of YouTube comment sections, in which women warm experts are undermined on the basis of a generalized misogyny, our analysis additionally revealed a more specific gendered conflation between the YouTuber and the persona of the VAPA. Several rhetorical tropes emerged in the comments that indicate perceived resonances between the technology and the tech expert. In keeping with the broader objectification of women on YouTube, we identified audience comments that did so specifically within the commercial ecosystem of smart devices by situating the warm expert as product for purchase: “Hey Alexa, Where has she been all my life! Alexa, can you add her to my cart? And ship her via Amazon Prime!” Comments such as “do you come with the amazon echo?” further participate in the trope outlined above that posits the warm expert as one among many products available to consumers in an IoT network. In addition, a number of comments expressed desire towards the warm expert such that she might perform the domestic and emotional support work assigned to a wife within the imaginary of a traditional middle-class family: Who cares about automation! I’d just like to come home to her after a rough day. Is she the same blonde lady who introduced many months ago ‘home automation videos’ with amazon echo?? Wow she looks stunning in brunette hair style. Still I believe I would gladly accept having a beautiful charming lady waiting for me at home instead of some new techy like robo voiced mini computer. These comments reiterate a patriarchal topology that relegates women to domestic space, narrating the presumably male breadwinner’s return from work at the end of a long day to the feminized domain of the home. They further stipulate a preference for a human woman over a VAPA device; as one commenter succinctly writes: “I’d rather have you than Alexa in my house.” This rhetoric is in keeping with the ways in which smart devices are subtly 446

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marketed to male consumers as a wife replacement, such that “it acts like, thinks of, and performs the type of tasks most stereotypically performed by a 1950s housewife” (Strengers & Nicholls, 2018: 75). What is perhaps evident in these comments that articulate a desire that the warm expert undertake the feminized labour that has been outsourced to VAPAs is a circular reinscription of gendered stereotypes: the association of domestic labour with feminine personas sedimented within smart home technologies is then reiterated and applied back to the women who share rhetorical space with them in the context of the video. These comments indicate instances in which the YouTuber’s self-positioning as a tech expert is overpowered by a heteropatriarchal resonance with the VAPA they seek to review for their viewers. The mechanics of this resonance are made most explicit in comments that allude to an imagined auditory or visual resemblance between the warm expert and VAPA: Ever since I have watched this video I picture Alexa looking like the girl in this video. Lit🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. I want my google to look an[d] sound like you!!!! 🔥 Indeed, neither Apple, nor Amazon, nor Google have provided a visual supplement to the auditory interfaces associated with smart devices in their marketing materials; the personas of VAPA are entirely constituted through voice. The fact that the default voices of VAPAs audibly allude to the body of a white cis woman might be understood as an attempt to bridge the uncanniness that might emerge as humanoid devices approach realism (Roberts, 2015) or indeed a sense of unease garnered by disembodied or technologized voices. Comments such as these perform an imaginative suturing between the visible, embodied presence of the warm expert and the disembodied VAPA in keeping with the gendered coding of the voice itself. These comments thus articulate how the domestication of feminine VAPAs advances in resonance with the domestication of women’s warm expertise. In these instances, the warm expert is situated as a kind of human surrogate who, by virtue of her feminine embodiment alone, might rectify the incompleteness of VAPA technologies. The warm expert’s presence is similarly tamed, relieved of its own brokenness, when imagined by these commenters in alignment with the servile labour typically assigned to VAPAs.

Conclusion This chapter has explored how women position themselves as warm experts in the fraught context of YouTube while emphasizing how the domestication of feminine VAPAs proceeds in resonance with the domestication of women’s warm expertise. Moreover, this chapter has discussed how the gendered assistance afforded by warm expert technology interacts with the vocalic affordances and feminine design of VAPAs. More generally, our framework is offered to help understand domestication as layered with processes of mediation: this layering, which interprets domestication as always already mediated and unfolding via digital networks beyond the physical space of the home, highlights how a resonant politics of voice can be shared between a media artefact and the technology of warm expertise. While we have focused our discussion through a critique of misogynist politics, we have yet to mobilize a feminist politics of resistance. As Ruha Benjamin (2019) writes: “remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”2 Future work might begin to imagine and develop a progressive world shaped by a politics of the broken machine, which, as of yet, remains largely unclaimed by feminists. 447

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Sharma writes that: “a feminism of the Broken Machine focuses on and uses the logic of the machines to highlight current power dynamics that are otherwise hard to pinpoint” (2020: 174). Our approach calls for others to attend to the resonances between media artefacts and the technology of warm expertise as one instance of this. Through a feminism of the broken machine we might begin to inhabit the “technologics” of power (172) articulated by warm expertise as way to critique the reigning machine logic of patriarchal domestication. Thus, we propose asking: How can the warm expert be co-opted as a broken machine that weighs in on matters of domestication? In Neville’s (2021) prior research into the domestication of privacy-invasive technology, he found that OWEs often unquestioningly accept and promote the underlying machine logic of technology: that is, in the case of smart speakers and VAPAs, warm experts typically do not meaningfully address privacy and surveillance concerns, but rather interpret these issues as inevitable consequences of the domestication process. In other words, as facilitators of domestication, warm experts often accept and promote the underlying technologic of a product as currently designed and marketed, focusing their critique on issues of functionality and practicality. Put differently, warm experts tend to ask how well a product works, helping their viewers to determine how it can work in their own lives. In contrast, warm expertise enacted through a politics of the broken machine would interrogate how technology works as part of a system of domination: again, here we refer both to sociotechnical products and to the role of the warm expert, as both technological and potential components in oppressive politics. Considering specifically the feminization of VAPAs, Sharma writes that: “Broken Machines do not see themselves extended in these new machine assistants…[and] are not so worried about the gender of assistive devices” (2020: 176). Broken warm experts likewise are not solely interested in issues of representation, such as the lack of women YouTubers: moreover, they do not strive to extend the assistance of traditional warm experts, but rather, intentionally malfunction as a domesticated technology by disrupting conventions of genre and breaking down a politics of voice that resonates within a misogynist space of technology and domesticity. One might rightfully anticipate that such performative tactics would provoke an onslaught of abusive comments, designed to wear down broken machines and scrap them for parts. Broken warm experts, however, do not intend to aid domestication as a frictionless component in the process: for Sharma, and for us, they do not strive to answer user comments, questions, or rebuttals. As a result, broken warm experts routinely block trolls, disable audience comments, and set their accounts to private as they weigh in on matters of technology, co-opting the machine logic of the warm expert to influence the domestication process in accordance with concerns of feminism, equity, and social justice. In doing so, broken machines set out to disrupt the politics of voice that resonates between gendered technologies and the processes of their domestication. More broadly, a politics of the broken machine can help to expose how the mediation of domestication can articulate taken-for-granted media flows that, in their proper functioning, often obscure relations of power and their operation. For instance, economic conflicts of interest are prevalent in influencer culture and, more specifically, in the activities of OWEs since they commonly receive monetary compensation in exchange for product endorsements and reviews. Such practices are perhaps blatantly antithetical to the value of trust articulated in relation to traditional warm experts, and indeed further research might address the relationship between online warm expertise and aspirational labour (Duffy, 2016) undertaken by digital creators. Nonetheless, within the broader mediation of domestication, such monetized dynamics and practices are increasingly naturalized, rendering them 448

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less easily problematized by audiences and users. Moreover, the mediation of domestication opens complex problems of media literacy as a seemingly simple tech unboxing video in fact involves intersecting media flows of production, circulation, interpretation, and recirculation that heterogeneously interact with domestication processes. We invite others to engage with the politics of the broken machine as a means to explore, and resist, the logics of mediation that influence the transformation of domestic life according to dominant interests and power relations.

Notes 1 The authors would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to Director Greg Elmer, Associate Director Ganaele Langlois, and the graduate students at the Infoscape Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University for helping to workshop and develop this research and writing. 2 https://twitter.com/ruha9/status/926180439827591168.

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Stephen J. Neville and Alex Borkowski James, R. (2019) The sonic episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, and biopolitics, Durham: Duke University Press. Jasanoff, S. (2015) ‘Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity,’ in Kim, S. and Jasanoff, S. (eds.), Dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1–33. Kay, J. B. (2020) Gender, media and voice: communicative injustice and public speech, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) Life after new media: mediation as a vital process, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kenney, W. H. (2004) Recorded music in American life: the phonograph and popular memory, 1890-1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kim, H. (2020) ‘Unpacking Unboxing Video-Viewing Motivations: The Uses and Gratifications Perspective and the Mediating Role of Parasocial Interaction on Purchase Intent,’ Journal of Interactive Advertising, 20 (3), 196–208. Kim, C., Self, J. A., and Bae, J. (2018) ‘Exploring the First Momentary Unboxing Experience with Aesthetic Interaction,’ The Design Journal, 21 (3), 417–38. Lehtonen, T. (2003) ‘The Domestication of New Technologies as a Set of Trials,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 3 (3), 363–85. Livingstone, S. (2009) ‘On the Mediation of Everything: ICA Presidential Address 2008,’ Journal of Communication, 59 (1), 1–18. Marvin, C. (1988) When old technologies were new: thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marwick, A. E. (2015) ‘You May Know Me from YouTube: (Micro-) Celebrity in Social Media,’ in P.D. Marshall and S. Redmond (eds.), A companion to celebrity, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 333–350. Mowlabocus, S. (2020) ‘“Let’s Get This Thing Open”: The Pleasures of Unboxing Videos,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23 (4), 564–579. Neville, S. J. (2021) ‘The Domestication of Privacy-Invasive Technology on YouTube: Unboxing the Amazon Echo with the Online Warm Expert,’ Convergence, 27 (5), 1288–1307. Pegues, D. S. (2020) Lead like a woman: gain confidence, navigate obstacles, empower others, Eugene: Harvest House Publishers. Phan, T. (2017) ‘The Materiality of the Digital and the Gendered Voice of Siri,’ Transformations, 29, 23–33. Pridmore, J., Zimmer, M., Vitak, J., Mols, A., Trottier, T., Kumar, P. and Liao, Y. (2019) ‘Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households,’ Surveillance & Society, 17 (1–2), 125–31. Rieder, B. (2015) ‘YouTube Data Tools,’ available at: https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/ youtube/ (accessed November 26, 2021). Roberts, A. (2015) ‘Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines,’ Sounding Out, available at: https:// soundstudiesblog.com/2015/03/02/echo-and-the-chorus-of-female-machines/ (accessed November 26, 2021). Rogers, E. M. (2003) Diffusion of innovations, New York: Free Press. Schiller, A. and McMahon, J. (2019) ‘Alexa, Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender, Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence,’ New Political Science, 41 (2), 173–191. Serres, M. (2001) Hominescence, Paris: Le Pommier. Sharma, S. (2019) ‘The Way of the Social Injustice Warrior,’ 100 Years of Now Journal, available at: https://journal.hkw.de/en/the-way-of-the-social-injustice-warrior/ (accessed November 26, 2021). Sharma, S. (2020) ‘A Manifesto for the Broken Machine,’ Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 35 (2), 171–179. Silverstone, R. (2002) ‘Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life,’ New Literary History, 33, 745–764. Silverstone, R. (2005) ‘The Sociology of Mediation and Communication,’ in C. Calhoun et al. (eds.), The international handbook of sociology, London: Sage, 188–207. Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life,’ in R. Mansell and R. Silverstone (eds.), Communication by design, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 44–74.

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Broken domestication Spigel, L. (1992) Make room for TV: television and the family ideal in postwar America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Strengers, Y. and Nicholls, L. (2018) ‘Aesthetic Pleasures and Gendered Tech-Work in the 21stCentury Smart Home,’ Media International Australia, 166 (1), 70–80. Thompson, M. (2016) ‘Feminised Noise and the “Dotted Line” of Sonic Experimentalism,’ Contemporary Music Review, 35 (1), 85–101. Tolson, A. (2010) ‘A New Authenticity? Communicative Practices on YouTube,’ Critical Discourse Studies, 7 (4), 277–289. Vaudrey, R. K., and Wang, J. (2020) ‘A Practice Unpacked: Unboxing as a Consumption Practice,’ 2020 Global Marketing Conference at Seoul, 331–335. Wajcman, J. (2010) ‘Feminist Theories of Technology,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (1), 143–152. West, M., Kraut, R. and Chew, H. E. (2019) ‘I’d Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills through Education,’ UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition, available at https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416 (accessed November 26, 2021). Williams, R. (1977) ‘From Reflection to Mediation,’ in R. Williams (ed.), Marxism and literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 95–100. Woods, H. S. (2018) ‘Asking More of Siri and Alexa: Feminine Persona in Service of Surveillance Capitalism,’ Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35 (4), 334–349. Wotanis, L. and McMillan, L. (2014) ‘Performing Gender on YouTube,’ Feminist Media Studies, 14 (6), 912–928. Zuboff, S. (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, New York: PublicAffairs.

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30 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? RADIO’S GENDERED DOMESTICATION Justine Lloyd

Introduction Early radio, in both its material and social forms, has been understood to have been gendered as masculine (Haring, 2003, 2008). The process of “domestication” of radio, however, was neither a linear nor uncontested process, from a gender perspective. For example, trade press such as the Harmsworth Wireless Encyclopedia contained gendered battles over early radio’s adoption that were figured as aesthetic choices. A chapter of the Encyclopedia’s December 1923 release containing entries for topics from “Booster” to “Call Signs” (the 24 volumes of the entire Encyclopedia were released fortnightly) included in its chapter on “Cabinets” designs for “A cabinet made without any attempt to conceal its purpose, while possessing the appearance of first-class furniture” (Pritchard, 1923: 33). Unlike other “cabinet-de-luxe for multi-valve sets” depicted on the same page, this cabinet daringly exposed the workings of the radio, without any doors or lids to cover up the radio when it was not in use (Figure 30.1). This now-unremarkable design reflects contemporary attitudes to media technologies, as well as wider discussions about their paradoxical material, cultural and social purposes. The desire to cover up the inner workings of radio as equipment and recast it as “furniture” speaks to the kind of challenges that media technologies would make to established divisions between public and private spheres.1 These paradoxes played out in print media at the time as a series of questions that had highly gendered implications: How was radio to be incorporated into the home and by whom? Was radio a domestic utility like electricity or heating? Or was it something more? What was its purpose for families, and women in particular? What design elements should it include and what kind of furniture should it imitate? This chapter explores accounts where women themselves answered these questions in surprising ways and thus challenged their supposedly unskilled and passive relationship to radio as a technology. This chapter thus examines how, at the outset of broadcast media’s entry into the home, these antinomies were contested and negotiated through women’s embrace of and interest in radio’s simultaneously “public” and “domestic” affordances. This chapter is organised in four sections: the first sets out the gendered background to radio as a domestic consumer item in the 1920s. The second gives a brief account of the methods I have used to develop

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Figure 30.1

Pritchard (Ed.) (1923) “Cabinets for Wireless Receiving Sets.” Harmsworth’s Wireless Encyclopedia: For amateur and experimenter – BOO to CAL, December 18: 333

an account of the role of a woman who played an important, but mostly unknown, part of radio history; US journalist, wartime secret signals operative, and amateur radio enthusiast, Alice R. Bourke. The third explains how these configurations of biography and history can be read through the concept of intimate geographies; and the final section reflects on what Alice Bourke’s encounter with radio tells us about intimate geographies that are still with us today.

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We must get a radio These tensions around gender, domestic space and media hardware are striking in an article that appeared in the very first issue of the Australian Women’s Mirror, a women’s magazine spin-off from the nationalist political and literary publication The Bulletin (its masthead read from the late 19th century “Australia for the White Man”). The Mirror was no doubt attempting to garner the advertising dollar of department stores and manufacturers of new consumer goods, such as radio and gramophones, who wanted to reach women as consumers, but it included an article written by the pseudonymous “Listening-Insect” that whimsically commented on gendered stereotypes surrounding early broadcast media. In an account of the author and his wife’s purchase of their first radio, the article explained that he had been “Standing in front of one of those radio shops which have appeared so mysteriously in every street in Sydney… reading the evening paper, waiting for Eve to complete some shopping” when he suddenly told his wife “We must get a radio”: “What on earth for?” asked Eve. I did not know. It must have been the crux of the cumulative effect of all the radio advertisements I had ever seen that had moved me. Eve scented excitement. We bought a handbook specially composed to make radio simple, and after studying it together for a while, we entered the wireless shop with the light of battle in our eyes and made known our wants to a young man with an open mouth behind the counter. (The Listening-Insect, 1924: 22) When the radio shop employee asks them both: “I suppose you’d rather have a variometer than a loose-coupler?” Eve asks, contravening gendered expectations of women’s technical knowledge of the new medium, What are filament control jacks used for and how can I hook them up in a circuit using a vario-coupler, two variometers, an audion detector and two stages of audio-frequency amplification?… And by the way… do you consider the Cockaday circuit more selective than the Flewelling; if so, why do you? (The Listening-Insect, 1924: 22) In response, the salesman confesses to the couple: “To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “I was in Smith’s lace department until a week ago,” and they leave the shop with the key to the “ether world wrapped up in brown paper under our arms.” Once home, they use their clothesline as an aerial, listening to “ecstasies of song, subtle nuances of expression and the astral ghosts of [the announcer’s] sneezes” (The Listening-Insect, 1924: 22). The couple also make use of an early evening children’s programme to act as a babysitter, with their daughter Sophie listening at 6.35pm to “good-night” stories “with the phones strapped to her head and an expression on her face like a mediating Buddha” and continuing, entranced, to listen as the announcer began a report of livestock sales. The author justified the cost of the set through these benefits to domestic life, and argued that the purchase would be affordable if the family simply bought their clothes “while the shops are in full sale.”2 This arrival of radio within the modern home, and the ripples it created in dominant formations of gender, class and nation, speak to the processes of domestication as documented by Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon (Haddon, 2007), to bring attention to the ways that individual experiences of media in domestic space intersect with broader social changes in 454

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work cultures and public life. Silverstone and Haddon’s use of the concept of domestication in their analyses of the “entry of ICTs into the home” during the 1990s helps us understand what was at stake for women in the arrival of radio in the home during the 1920s and 1930s. How radio’s placement physically and symbolically in the home was negotiated, and how women fitted media routines into the rhythms of daily life, as well as how radio was socially constructed as a feminised medium during this period can be understood through this framework of domestication. In this aspect, I build on the work of Nancy Baym (2010) to explicate media technologies arrive with pre-wired circuits of symbolic power via the advertising and culture industries in which they are embedded, but are creatively engaged with by ordinary people in their integration into everyday life. Radio’s coincidence with the maintenance and transgression of social boundaries has long been highlighted by media historians (Hayes, 2012; MacLennan, 2013; Moores, 1988; Razlogova, 2006, 2011; Scales, 2010, 2016; Smulyan, 1993; Valliant, 2013). As Kate Lacey and Catherine Fisher have each written, the promise of radio was coincidental with an opening up of the public sphere to new groups, including women, and creating a new sense of time and space for the home within broadcast networks (Fisher, 2021; Lacey, 1996: 17–55). Whether radio was seen as site for a new set of women’s agencies within modern life, or as a threat to the stability of the home depended on ideological battles over to what extent the new medium would and could either overturn or reinforce “the public-private divide in female experience” (Lacey, 1996: 38–39). As Moores has argued, a set of “wider social transformations put the mother at the centre of the privatized family” while the discourse of radio sought to “re-position… [her] at the centre of the broadcasting audience” (1988: 34). Radio became both a conservative touchstone and a sign of a radical moment in the 1920s and 1930s, as the medium was brought from the masculine-coded space of the amateur experimenter’s “radio shack” and into the nuclear family living room

Figure 30.2 Frontispiece (1925) Henley’s Workable Radio Receivers: Their Design and Construction, New York: Norman W. Henley Publishing Company

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(Haring, 2003) (Figure 30.2). From a patriarchal perspective, radio was a source of moral panic, as it had to be properly managed in the home to allow bourgeois gender roles to continue unchallenged. From a feminist perspective, radio was a power for good, as it would allow women (albeit predominantly white, middle-class women) to structure a hybrid form of public-private radio time and space around regular domestic routines as women announcers mobilised their personal connections with the audience to provide a form of “social service” and “improve the lives of listeners” (Fisher, 2021: 44). As Baym describes, media technologies transit through utopian and dystopian visions on their way to domestication, a step-change that results in “invisibility” rather than desire or fear (2010: 46). In this way, historical research and its distancing effects helps see the switching points in cultural reception of media technologies, and the way that the domestic is a key site of the shifting of media into the background architecture of our everyday lives. The remainder of this chapter provides a portrayal of an important, but largely unknown figure in early radio history in the US, news journalist and wartime radio operator, Alice Bourke. Bourke’s enthusiasm for radio emerged at the liminal stage of first encounters with such radio as a domestic medium – when the nature of radio’s connection to everyday life was still being negotiated and women were not yet clearly marked out as a definitively gendered audience (Lloyd 2019). As Bourke herself noted, during this phase radio as both a gendered technology and cultural form as most visible, and most contested. Her story reveals important insights into the domestication of media technologies through the creativity and know-how of early female users.

Not a technical article In December 1922, the US magazine Radio Broadcast published a beautifully written article by Alice Bourke entitled “O Woe! Radio.” The article was introduced by Radio Broadcast as “a cry of despair, a burst of laughter, a tragic comedy and a sly, sound estimate of human character, all rolled into one” (Bourke, 1922: 107). The magazine’s editors promised that because “‘O Woe! Radio’ presented as accurate and entertaining a picture of the effects of radio in the home as we have seen” it would find its echo in “thousands of homes”. As Bourke herself explained: … during the forenoon the radio man and his assistants came. They had a heavy forty-foot mast with them, and immediately commenced adapting the landscape scheme of the far corner of my garden to their pedal extremities and the pole. They assured me that a good antenna was of the utmost importance. (Bourke, 1922: 107) Apart from gently poking fun at the new physical infrastructure within and around the home that the introduction of radio required, Bourke’s short account of the installation of radio in her family home foreshadowed a set of complex and transformative potentials that were about to be realised within her own work and home life. The story of her career as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and army signals expert and ham radio operator, as far as it can be retold here, demonstrates how everyday knowledge of radio as a medium of communication provided women with new sets of skills that contested dominant gender and national ideologies. Media studies, and media histories in particular, have described the changes – and ossifications – of gender and genre in radio programming initiated during the 1920s, which 456

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continued into the 1950s (Badenoch, 2005: 590–591, 2007: 58; Loviglio, 2005: xv, xi; Smulyan, 1993: 300). In this process, the new medium of radio was incorporated within existing notions of the home as the domain of the patriarchal family and of gendered labour. This self-contained home was given new meaning and import through the rhetorical expansion of consumer culture within cosy, domestic terms. Yet, this kind of intimate address via radio was not the one accepted by women, including Bourke. Her work created a challenge to dominant ideas of domestic femininity as she used radio as a medium to become a producer and circulator of news and information within the public sphere: first, as a newspaper journalist innovatively using radio as an investigative tool to break and cover crime stories during the late 1920s and early 1930s, secondly as a wartime signals operative during the early 1940s, and thirdly, as a ham radio operator from her own home in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Overview of sources Alice Renneker Bourke was born in April 1891 in Wisconsin, USA, and died in Cook County, Illinois, in May 1956. Very little information exists about her journalistic career, perhaps because as a rounds reporter she was never given a byline in the newspapers she wrote for during the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from her work on the Chicago Tribune, she was also the editor of a community newspaper, the Chicago Comet, which was based in the south side of Chicago where she lived with her husband, Timothy Bourke, who she cared for when he became ill during the early 1930s. The account of her life and career given here is a very partial one, based on documentary sources such as radio trade and hobby magazines which provide some potted histories of her work as a journalist and plenty of detail on the technical set-up of her home radio studio. The limited information given about stories she worked on, and at times broke, within these mini-biographies were used to conduct keyword and date searches on newspaper databases. Through this process, I was able locate news copy that she was later revealed to have contributed to as a rounds reporter and radio expert, even though no journalist was credited at the time (see discussion of the Tribune’s coverage of the “Hunt Beer gang” and Robert Frank murder below). As with other women’s work in mass media (Moseley & Wheatley, 2008), much more detail is missing, and more work remains to be done, such as locating her war service record and examples of her fiction and journalism published nationally, as well as official documents such as payslips and contracts which would verify her work as a reporter. Bourke’s own personal archives are also absent, although traces of her enthusiasm for communicating internationally via ham radio are extant in the “transmission received” cards posted on ham radio chat sites such as those unearthed in 2011 (Tom K8CX 2011). The brief account given here is hopefully a start to uncovering the traces of the various worlds forged and inhabited by this remarkable woman.

Intimate geographies of media Bourke’s (1922) account mentioned above heralded a moment when broadcast media became part of the social architecture of the home. This historical moment, when the electronic medium of radio was enfolded into everyday time and space, tells us a great deal about contemporary mediations of everyday life, because radio broadcasts constructed both an immediacy and semblance of presence that had never before been experienced in the domestic sphere. As Mladen Dolar has argued, “radio, gramophone, tape-recorder, telephone,” as media all have in common “the acousmatic property of the voice,” whereby the human voice 457

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became detached from its visible and embodied source and thence became “universal, and hence trivial” (2006: 63). This reception of the public voice within the domestic (although I would contest Dolar’s idea that these dynamics of everyday media can ever ultimately be “trivial” or “banal”) has been associated with an “intimisation” of public address, as institutions such as national governments (Lacey, 1996; Nicholas, 1996) as well as commercial interests ( Johnson, 1983; MacLennan, 2013) and civic associations (Goodman, 2007) sought to access new audiences in novel ways. Most notably public figures such as politicians struggled to find ways to adapt to and control their message in the new medium (Loviglio, 2005). As many of these scholars have pointed out, this “intimisation” has a longer history, which is not unique to broadcast media such as radio but emerges from deeper connections between capitalism and emotions (see, for example, Illouz, 2007). Such historically grounded accounts work against the technological determinism of much media scholarship and help provide a clearer sense of the agency of individual listeners and their specific social contexts, as well as how these new formations of media and the home paralleled changes in broader economic and political structures. Following these debates, it is clear that the binary of public and private has elided the intimate. Rethinking media through this lens brings to the fore important historical contestations and negotiations – which have been ongoing well before second-wave feminist critiques (Lloyd 2013). This attention to what Ann Stoler has called, in a postcolonial analysis, “the politics of intimacy” offers “an opportunity to recognize that the distinctions between the public and the private… are the ground of contestations” over racialised structures of privilege and power (2001: 894). As Anna Parkinson has recently argued, intimate geographies are the “particular intersubjective spaces and communicative modalities through which discussion, conflict, and behavior are negotiated, and act to reproduce or, at times, to alter a society’s habitus or social norms and ways of existing in the world” (2017: 96). Historicising intimacy within media gives an account of how relations between public and private were imagined and fought over during times which have traditionally been understood as proto- or even anti-feminist. The arrival of radio in the domestic sphere in Western societies, in the period just after the First World War, had an asymmetrical impact on gender relations, as women’s very selves were being increasingly defined through the home in particular ways (Hilmes, 1999). Many non-electronic forms of media (for example, storytelling, jokes, and singing) have been intrinsic to family and domestic life, but in the early 20th century, the arrival of radio figured a new constellation of social forces in the daily lives of men and women. When radio was incorporated by its audience within the flow of domestic events, it spoke directly  – even if such radio was pre-recorded, even if many other people were listening to the same programme, and even if there was a model, “stand-in” audience for the programme in the studio – to the listener-at-home. While other non-electronic mass-reproduced media (for example, books, photography, and newspapers) had already represented places and times outside the home for centuries, radio offered a much more immediate access to these external places and times, and to the people who inhabited them. To return to Alice Bourke’s description of the arrival of a “radio-phone” as birthday gift from her husband, in telling a story of the arrival of radio in her home, she, in turn, provides an insight into a shift in the mediated geographies of the 1920s. While the radio that Bourke received as her birthday gift would later be assumed to be a “masculine” technology, her own adeptness at “switch[ing] the kazazzies around [to] produce entertainment” (108) – as she reports that one of her husband’s friends from the “Elks club” described it – signals a more open-ended construction of the medium at the time. Writing at the cusp of the 458

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transformation of electronic media into a domestic fixture, Bourke was far from a passive recipient of radio messages, and describes using her both her hands and ears to “coax” signals from the “mahogany box.” Bourke was entirely enthusiastic about the potentials of radio to overcome domestic isolation, and describes its effects on her family’s domestic routines to comic effect. She makes light of how she was assumed, like other female radio enthusiasts of the time, to have a particularly passive relationship to the medium of radio. Her 1922 account demonstrates that far from a passive consumer, she was an active agent in radio’s domestication. Radio was taken up by women such as Bourke within a concerted effort to erase firm boundaries between public and private. Indeed, Bourke used the motif of the radio’s entrance to the home to dramatise her own personal experience in ways that were surprising and challenged existing understandings of women’s capacities and potentials for self-representation. At one point in her story Bourke asks her readers not to “throw the magazine away until you get your money’s worth,” disclaiming upon her “honor that this is not a technical article.” She then proceeds to outline all the visits from neighbours that the installation provoked, with the result that by 8:30 that evening “a passerby would have thought the Bourkes were holding a mass meeting”: When my husband came home to dinner I was waiting in my pink organdie and new white pumps. With my very own hands I coaxed from the rubber-bunioned, carbolic-scented mahogany box the facts that Liberty bonds were going strong, and that it would be cooler tomorrow with variable winds. We did not Fletcherize [i.e. follow the advice of nineteenth century food writer Horace Fletcher to chew slowly and carefully] dinner that evening. We impatiently awaited the eight o’clock concert. It was not to be. The thoughtful little people who had paid [us a] noontime visit had a rather neat little broadcasting system of their own. At five minutes to eight, the Jones and Smith families presented themselves in complete editions on our front porch. It was quite a coincidence that both Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Jones had believed I might like a little fresh lettuce! Their remembrances made me very happy, but piqued my curiosity, inasmuch as we have such a large lettuce bed ourselves. Ah! How young I was then! In the early 1920s, relationships between collectively-consumed publicly-circulating information and discussions made in the middle-class privacy of the modern home were changing, as Bourke so comically describes of her new radio-inflected household’s routines. Describing pre-radio family life, she harks back to traditional gender roles during that “happy period when we had a Home, and when the only tobacco ashes I was obliged to sweep from the roof of the piano belonged to the Boss.” But in the next breath subverts these values, in a parenthetical aside: I put that last line in because he may see this article some time. Of course I am the boss, but it shows a nice disposition on my part, and incidentally it is handy in many ways to let him think he is the Great Voice around this radio-devastated remainder of What Was. (107) The domestication of radio in this period challenged existing understandings of the home as self-enclosed space, and by extension, women’s role as self-evidently situated within it. 459

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Figure 30.3

“John had bet $50 on the Michigan City fight” (1922) Radio Broadcast, 2(2) December: 109

Bourke herself was markedly enthusiastic about the new medium, humorously embracing its disruptive effects on her family’s domestic routines and the interruptions that her neighbours make on her and her husband’s time for conjugal listening. Contra the discourses that heralded a pre-given, non-technical role for women within the home’s incorporation of radio, Bourke, like many other women of the time, was actually an active agent in radio’s domestication and in the establishment of new configurations of intimate geographies. Despite Bourke being evidently highly proficient at tuning the set, she describes how one of the male neighbours continually questions her abilities: I’ve tried a million odd times to justify my manipulation of the set during atmospheric disturbances, and have spoken to him so learnedly about ‘static’ that a college professor would hang his head in shame, but does this doubting Thomas believe? His eyes say what his lips yearn to: ‘You can’t fool me. You gotta bum set, and don’t know how to work it!’ (Bourke, 1922: 109) A cartoon accompanying the text further underscored gendered assumptions of distracted female listeners (Figure 30.3). These gendered ideas of radio’s reception were being institutionalised in the 1920s, and Bourke ended the article with a sign of things to come: Do not, I pray you, labor under the delusion that only my evenings are devoted to Public Service. Far from it. In the morning, just about the time I am beginning to wonder how in the name of Heaven John can poke such big holes in his socks, the door-bell rings, and one of my fellow Household Slaves enters. The Jacksonville Bazoo has inaugurated a woman’s hour from nine to ten. Would I please etc.? I accommodate, but the ether does not. She goes home possessed of two eggs, a cup of my butter, and the belief that I wouldn’t let her hear Jacksonville because I did not want to be bothered with her. (Bourke, 1922: 109) By ending her piece with the neighbour’s announcement that the newspaper industries, here in the form of the Jacksonville Bazoo, were involving themselves in radio as a medium to reach 460

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women as consumers, Bourke foreshadowed a new stage in the construction of a gendered daytime audience. Notably, however, Bourke did not become involved in broadcasting for women sponsored by a newspaper, but would go on to have an important journalistic career within newspapers herself.

Tracing the medium Bourke appears to have been first employed as an editor on the Chicago Daily News not long after she wrote her article for Radio Broadcast (First Silver Trophy…, 1938: 182). She then worked for eight years as night-rounds police reporter on Chicago’s daily Tribune during the mid-1920s and early 1930s. According to an article published in Radio in December 1934, her career as a skilled radio operator had begun with the set she wrote about for Radio Broadcast, when away back in 1922 she had been the proud owner of a Reinartz receiver which brought in a few market reports, a little music, mostly from KDKA [a Pittsburgh-based AM station, owned by the Westinghouse brand, and later part of the NBC network], and plenty of mysterious, intriguing dots and dashes. (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 13) The dots and dashes were, of course, morse code (known in ham radio speak as “CW,” or continuous wave, for the technical innovation which allowed for the transmission of such signals before speech-based radio). Thus, the magazine reported, the “Rienartz was responsible for Mrs Bourke learning to read code, and her fanciful experiences with the old receiver were incorporated into a humorous story, ‘O Woe! Radio’, which she sold to Radio Broadcast” (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 13). Bourke ostensibly used these skills as a reporter on a crime beat for the Tribune which “covered more than a third of Chicago, including the ‘black belt’, the stamping grounds of the war-lords of Beerland, the University District, the steel mills and the finest residential section of Chicago… from placid Lake Michigan on the east, to Bloody Cicero, the Capone stronghold, which forms the western boundary of the city” and included 12 police stations (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 13). During the 1920s and 1930s women journalists such as Bourke navigated a relatively female-journalist-friendly professional environment at the Tribune. As recent scholarship by Beth Fantaskey Kaszuba (2013) has uncovered, a group of female crime reporters worked at the Tribune in the inter-war period alongside the more well-known politics and crime reporter Genevieve Forbes Herrick (Steiner & Gray, 1985). Kaszuba terms these reporters “mob sisters” for the way that they developed a specific journalistic style that eschewed sentimentality within a hardboiled style. She argues that shifting news values during the 1920s “enable[d] some women reporters to cross the line from more conventional feature writing into hard news by blurring the line between society-and-entertainment coverage and front-page reportage” (Kaszuba, 2013: 5). The very existence of a group of women crime reporters at the Tribune during the 20s certainly heralded a changing media culture. Although Bourke is not mentioned by Kaszuba (not surprising as she restricted her study to women journalists who were given bylines for their crime reporting), changing relationships between media institutions, politics, and entertainment industries allowed a new form of intimate knowledge of “underworld” figures, as well as stories of more everyday forms of violence, to circulate. Previously invisible experiences were eked out in daily publication via detailed court reporting to the extent 461

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that, as Kaszuba describes, “Chicago’s newspapers not only reported on the crime wave; they helped to brew it, through hard-fought circulation wars, especially between the Tribune and Hearst’s Examiner” (2013: 68). Moving from crime reporting to political reporting during the late 20s, Forbes Herrick’s own career demonstrated that the “mob sister” pathway was not a dead-end and could lead to even more specialised rounds of reporting for women at the paper. Even while ascribed to a political round during the late 1920s, Forbes Herrick recounted in her own columns many instances of being deliberately excluded from story opportunities by fellow male reporters (whether they were from the Tribune or from other papers was not commented on by Forbes Herrick). For instance, she was once physically led out of press briefings at the White House by an earnest fellow reporter who suggested that she focus on the President’s collie, Rob Roy, which he suggested would make “a good little feature story for you” (Herrick, 1927). Unlike Forbes Herrick, Bourke did not work in features and remained assigned to crime stories, which were perhaps less high-profile and required more on-the-spot reporting, and were not given the status of a byline.3 While Bourke’s name did not appear in any byline in the newspaper during the 1920s or 1930s, she later outlined several stories that she was involved in reporting on for the Tribune, including a “first page 8-col. Headliner” recounting the hold-up of “a Grand Trunk mail train of $133,000 at Evergreen Park” (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 12). A front-page story covering this robbery indeed appeared in the Tribune in September 1926, and although Bourke’s byline does not appear with the copy, the details match the dramatic account given by Bourke in 1934 (Hunt Beer Gang as Bandits, 1926). She was given a “bonus cheque” (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 12) for her work on the infamous Leopold-Loeb “thrill-killing,” in which two middle-class college graduates, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, murdered their neighbour and Loeb’s relative, 14-year-old schoolboy Robert Franks in May 1924 (Grossman, 2016). The Tribune ran detailed accounts of the hunt for the murderer over several weeks, and broke news of the police’s forensic investigations of clues left at the scene, all of which Bourke was likely to have contributed to without credit (Franks Case Near Solution, 1924). The considerable radio skills that Bourke brought to her work were capitalised on by the Tribune, as the late 1920s “the introduction of radio brought a great change to the police department, and police reporting”: Up to 1929, a scoop could be ‘kept on ice’ so long as the policemen and the reporter working on the case could trust each other. If ten men of an auto-theft ring were in custody, and two others were sought, the reporter could hold the story up long enough for the police to nab the missing pair, provided he knew the police would give him the story exclusively. With the coming of radio, such cooperation was at an end. Every clue was public property, and all the smart crooks had radios! In 1929, the Chicago Tribune began broadcasting police calls experimentally over its station, WGN [the radio call sign based on the paper’s slogan, “The World’s Greatest Newspaper”]: Then the Chicago public went crazy over police radio, and so did distracted policemen and police reporters! The first week of the WGN police flashes, W9DXX and a squad responded to the call: ‘Man shot in prairie,’ half a mile away from the South Chicago police station. When they arrived three minutes later, a thousand other radio listeners were on the spot, and the squad had to fight its way through. Just a false alarm! 462

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Two weeks later a man was murdered in a hotel in the Oakland district. When W9DXX arrived with the squad, it was necessary for the officers to draw their revolvers to get through the jam of 3,000 sensation seekers outside the hotel… (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934: 13) In 1930, while still working as a journalist, Bourke became known on amateur radio networks by her call-sign W9DXX, and thus described in ham radio speak as a “YL [i.e. female, from the morse-code friendly initials for ‘Young Lady’] 2-meter operator in the Illinois area” (Woodruff, 1951: 4). By 1931, she had left the Tribune and was editing the Chicago Comet. A short item in the “Chin Chin” column of the Tribune’s Women’s Section noted that the Comet was supporting the US Republican incumbent and candidate for the 1932 election with the slogan “Heave with Hoover!” (McLaughlin, 1931). Shamus O’Slattery, an author from Nile, Ohio, of widely published “pepigrams” [inspirational epigrams] and presumably an associate of the Bourkes from the Tribune, was cited as the source of this information. After she resigned from the Tribune in the early 1930s to take care of her husband, Timothy (known as Ted), during an extended illness (How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934), she became more active in ham radio (Gernsback, 1935). Together with her husband, she built a 15-room house that included “one of the most powerful amateur radio stations in the United States,” reshaping her domestic space around radio so that she could continue her hobby of “DX [distant contact] fishing” from her home (Figure 30.4) (Built by Amateur Radio Operator, 1940; How a YL Police Reporter Works, 1934). In November 1940, Ted Bourke died of pneumonia (Obituaries: Timothy Bourke, 1940). During the Second World War, Bourke trained in cryptography, becoming the only female radio operator in the US Army Reserve (Bien, 1941). In 1947, she was using her Army Reserve call sign (W9ENP) at the same time as her civilian handle to host broadcasts on VHF technical discussions every fortnight from the 36th floor of the 1920s downtown skyscraper building owned by Chicago’s

Figure 30.4 M rs Alice R. Bourke in Gernsback, H. (1935). “$5.00 for Best ‘YL’ Photos.” Short Wave Craft: 9

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Skyline Athletics Club. Radio News reported that “evidence of the interest in this program was the complete silence of the 144 mc. band during the hour-long transmission, with the exception of the participating stations” (VHF Forum, 1947). Anton Remenih, the Tribune’s postwar theatre and broadcasting critic, and himself a ham radio enthusiast (Carter, 1997: 33–34) reported in February 1951 that Bourke was one of the “Chicago area amateur radio operators… cracking Russia’s iron curtain almost every week and think nothing of it” (Remenih, 1951). Remarkable during the height of McCarthyism in the US during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bourke in her 60s was one of a group of American ham radio enthusiasts undertaking “direct communication (voice and code) between American and Red ‘hams’,” although the utopian promise of distant radio communication had dramatically changed since the end of the Second World War and the advent of Stalinism: Time was when Russian amateurs, to quote Alice Bourke (W9DXX) of Homewood, ‘were some of the nicest hams in the world to talk to.’ Not any more. Russians these days will give you a signal report and general data on equipment and that’s about it. They won’t give you the time of day anymore, much less admit that it ever snows in Moscow. Weather is military information. (Remenih, 1951) After this point, discussions of Bourke’s journalistic and ham radio activities disappear from print media. When she passed away in 1956, two brief obituaries in the Tribune mentioned only her ownership of the Comet and her private ham radio activities, and the generous bequests she made to charities, but neither discussed her work as a police reporter in the same newspaper (Obituaries: Mrs Alice R Bourke, 1956, Alice Bourke Estate Valued Above $500,000). In 1922, when Bourke wrote about the interest in the wider world that radio sparked for herself and her neighbours, her radio and print work was yet to come, her home was already implicated in the new intimate geographies of everyday life that domestic radio communication afforded.

Conclusion Bourke’s experience with radio helps us see how public-private distinctions are constantly negotiated by media users. By exploring the disjunctures that radio afforded through the lens of “intimate geographies,” I have argued that the medium, through its domestic reception, neither “publicised” private space, nor created new forms of publics, but shifted the relations between publicity, privacy, and intimacy in strange and surprising ways. The approach taken here is simultaneously sociological and historical. Unfortunately, we do not have ethnographic accounts gathered from domestic users of early radio, but have to rely on media narratives and archival material. Thus domestication is implicit in the cultural histories of technological change, but requires careful handling to both uncover it and to nuance its claims about the agency of the daily interactions that shape such technologies. These stories of “first encounters” with radio in the home, and its framing as a “benefit” to domestic life, has much to tell us about contemporary ideas of the “fit” of technologies such as smart speakers, mobile phones, tablets, and ambient media such as digital assistants within the home in networked capitalism. Seeing how uses of early media technologies played out quite differently from what was expected at

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the time helps us to be critical of these assumptions, and to reflect on what it as stake in the gendering of these technologies.

Notes 1 The ideology of separate spheres of labour, women’s work inside the home and men’s work outside, was increasingly challenged during the early 20th century with the rise of a service economy and feminist challenges to patriarchal political institutions via suffrage (Wang, 2018). 2 Despite the rise of mass production, the costs of buying a set were still prohibitive for most people, and therefore having a radio at home would have been only available to middle- or uppermiddle-class families. In the Australian case, for example, in 1924, a radio licence had to be bought for each set, so the combined cost of a low-priced basic radio receiver and its licence was around double the average weekly male wage (equivalent to $375 in 2015 adjusted for inflation, see Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics 1924): 35 shillings (equivalent to $147 in 2020) for the licence, and £6 s6 ($530 in 2020) for a “one-valve amplifier” to attach to a crystal set, boosting its reception range to around 100 km (Listening-Insect 1924). More powerful ready-made two-valve models which could pick up interstate stations began at more than double that price, and would have therefore represented an outlay of five times the average weekly wage. 3 Covering police rounds rather than court reporting was extremely dangerous in prohibition-era Chicago, a situation highlighted when Capone organisation-connected Tribune journalist Jake Lingle was shot by a fellow gang member in June 1930 (Kaszuba, 2013: 2). While Bourke did not comment on this aspect of her work later, it must have been a crucial factor in editorial practices of leaving off bylines and keeping information about sources to a minimum.

References ‘Alice Bourke Estate Valued Above $500,000’ (1956), Chicago Tribune, May 22, 62. ‘Built by Amateur Radio Operator’ (1940), Chicago Tribune, April 28, 33. ‘First Silver Trophy Goes to Alice Bourke, W9DXX, Chicago Ill. For Best Ham Station Photo of the Month’ (1938) Short Wave and Television, IX (3), July, 143, 182. ‘Franks Case Near Solution’ (1924) Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1. ‘How a YL Police Reporter Works: The Story of W9DXX–Mrs Alice R. Bourke’ (1934) Radio 16 (12), 12–13. ‘Hunt Beer Gang as Bandits’ (1926) Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1, 4. ‘Obituaries: Mrs Alice R. Bourke’ (1956) Chicago Tribune, May 4, 62. ‘Obituaries: Timothy Bourke’ (1940) Chicago Tribune, November 3, 18. ‘VHF Forum’ (1947) Radio News, 38 (4), October, 116. Badenoch, A. (2005) ‘Making Sunday What It Actually Should Be: Sunday Radio Programming and the Re-Invention of Tradition in Occupied Germany 1945–1949,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25 (4), 577–598. Badenoch, A. (2007) ‘Time Consuming: Women’s Radio and the Reconstruction of National Narratives in Western Germany 1945-1948,’ German History, 25(1), 46–71. Baym, N.K. (2010) ‘Making New Media Make Sense,’ in N.K. Baym (ed.), Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity, 22–49. Bien, A. [W8TAY] (1941) ‘YLRL, QRV!,’ QST, October, 32–37, 78. Available from https:// worldradiohistory.com/QST.htm (accessed 1 December 2019). Bourke, A.R. (1922) ‘O Woe! Radio,’ Radio Broadcast, 2 (2) December, 107–110. Carter, C.J. (1997) Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Dolar, M. (2006). A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kaszuba, B.F. (2013) “Mob Sisters”: Women Reporting on Crime in Prohibition-Era Chicago, PhD Thesis, State College: Pennsylvania State University. Fisher, C. (2021) Sound Citizens: Australian Women Broadcasters Claim Their Voice, 1923–1956, Acton: ANU Press.

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Justine Lloyd Forbes Herrick, G. (1927) ‘Informally: Feminine Fallacies in Newspaper Work,’ Chicago Tribune, July 17, 24. Gernsback, H. (1935) ‘$5.00 for Best ‘YL’ Photos,’ Short Wave Craft, May 9. Grossman, R. (2016) ‘Chicago Flashback: ‘Pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men,’. Chicago Tribune, April 3, 19. https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/ image/241710766 (accessed 1 December 2019). Goodman, D. (2007) ‘Programming in the Public Interest: America’s Town Meeting of the Air,’ in M. Hilmes (ed.), NBC: America’s Network, Berkeley: University of California Press, 44–60. Haddon, L. (2007) ‘Roger Silverstone’s Legacies: Domestication,’ New Media & Society, 9 (1), 25–32. Haring, K. (2003) ‘The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance,’ Technology and Culture, 44 (4), 734–761. Haring, K. (2008) Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press. Hayes, J. E. (2012) ‘White Noise: Performing the White, Middle-Class Family on 1930s Radio,’ Cinema Journal, 51 (3), 97–118. Hilmes, M. (1999) ‘Desired and Feared: Women’s Voices in Radio History,’ in M.B. Haralovich and L. Rabinovitz (ed.), Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, Durham: Duke University Press, 17–35. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Malden: Polity. Johnson, L. (1983) ‘The Intimate Voice of Australian Radio,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1), 43–50. Lacey, K. (1996) Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lloyd, J. (2013) ‘Domestic Destinies: Colonial Spatialities, Australian Film and Feminist Cultural Memory Work,’ Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 4 (1), 1045–1061. Lloyd, J. (2019) Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Loviglio, J. (2005) Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacLennan, A. (2013) ‘Learning to Listen: Becoming a Canadian Radio Audience in the 1930s,’ Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 20 (2), 311–326. McLaughlin, K. (1931) ‘Chin Chin,’ Chicago Tribune, March 8, Part 6, 8. Moores, S. (1988) ‘“The Box on the Dresser”: Memories of Early Radio and Everyday Life,’ Media, Culture and Society, 10 (1), 23–40. Moseley, R. and Wheatley, H. (2008) ‘Is Archiving a Feminist Issue? Historical Research and the Past, Present and Future of Television Studies,’ Cinema Journal, 47 (3), 152–158. Nicholas, S. (1996) The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parkinson, A. M. (2017) ‘A Sentimental Reeducation: Postwar West Germany’s Intimate Geographies,’ Emotion, Space and Society, 25, 95–102. Pritchard, J. L. (ed.) (1923) ‘Cabinets for Wireless Receiving Sets,’ Harmsworth’s Wireless Encyclopedia: For Amateur and Experimenter – BOO to CAL, December 18, 314–333. Razlogova, E. (2006) ‘True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting, 1935–1946,’ American Quarterly, 58 (1), 137–158. Razlogova, E. (2011) The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Remenih, A. (1951) ‘Chicago Hams Crack Russia’s Iron Curtain,’ Chicago Tribune, February 18: 274. Scales, R.P. (2010) “Subversive Sound: Transnational Radio, Arabic Recordings, and the Dangers of Listening in French Colonial Algeria, 1934–1939”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(2), 384–417. Scales, R.P. (2016) Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smulyan, S. (1993) ‘Radio Advertising to Women in Twenties America: “A Latchkey to Every Home,”’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 13 (3), 299–314. Steiner, L. and Gray, S. (1985) ‘Genevieve Forbes Herrick: A Front-Page Reporter “Pleased to Write About Women,”’ Journalism History, 12 (1), 8–16. Stoler, A.L. (2001) ‘Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response,’ Journal of American History, 88 (3), 893–897.

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31 DOMESTICATION AND OLDER ADULTS – CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF HOME AND FAMILY Johanna L.H. Birkland Introduction Societies the world over are ageing, but these trends are particularly acute in Europe, Asia, and North America (Cubit & Meyer, 2011; Eurostat, 2020; Ortman, Velkoff & Hogan, 2014; Park & Shi, 2011). As societies move processes and services to online formats, concern has developed that older adults will be excluded from society as they have historically reported lower use rates of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (Friemel, 2016; Yoon et al., 2021). Despite these trends, very few studies have explored older adult ICT use from a domestication perspective. The domestication perspective is particularly beneficial to exploring how older adults not only adopt ICTs, but how they integrate them into their lives, how they make choices in their use and non-use, develop norms and patterns of use, and develop meaning (Birkland, 2019). This chapter focuses on several important considerations when exploring older adult’s domestication of ICTs, particularly around issues of context. It is meant to help those researchers who are interested in studying older adult ICT use or encounter older adults as members in the families they study. This chapter explores how to define older adulthood, the diversity of older adult family definitions, and the many places older adults call home. These concepts are illustrated with examples provided from a case study of 17 older adults’ domestication of ICTs. While this chapter centres on data and evidence from the United States, many of the issues discussed should be considered by researchers in any cultural context.

Older adults domestication of ICTs There are two ways that older adults have been examined in prior domestication studies. One is as household participants (Quadrello et al., 2005) and the other is as a unique population of interest (De Shutter, Brown & Abeele, 2015; Haddon, 2000; Komen, 2020; Nimrod & Edan, 2021). Both are important strategies to consider for researchers. Older adults as household members will increasingly be encountered in developed countries. In some cultural contexts, multi-generational families have always been an accepted, if not preferred, familial structure in the household. However, due to economic and cultural changes, even in cultural contexts where multi-generational families were uncommon, this 468

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living arrangement has substantially increased. In the United States, 20%, or one in five people, live in intergenerational families. This is an 80% increase since 1980 (when only 12% of Americans lived in intergenerational families). This is particularly true in countries where caretaking of children and older adults is privatized, where arranging or providing such care often falls on families (Cohn & Passel, 2018). This means that researchers who intended to study domestication of ICTs in families will increasingly encounter older adults as members of the household. These types of studies can help us to understand how ICTs are domesticated in multi-generational families, and in particular, how older adult domestication is influenced by these age and generationally rich contexts. Studies that focus on older adults themselves (as opposed to as members of families) can shed light on their domestication as a population. Domestication studies focused on older adults have demonstrated that they have unique circumstances under which they are introduced to ICTs (with this introduction particularly coming from younger relatives) (De Shutter et al., 2015), develop different paths to learning about ICTs (if not in the workforce compared to working adults) (Haddon, 2000), and may be more limited in accessing ICTs due to disability (Dickinson et al., 2004) or lower income levels (Birkland, 2019). Older adults also have diverse adoption and use patterns of ICTs (Birkland, 2019; Nimrod & Edan, 2021). However, in order to understand how older adults domesticate ICTs in the home, we first must define what we mean by older adults, understand how they define their own relationships, and how they contextualize their meaning of home.

Who is an older adult? The most common definition of older adulthood is age-based and typically tied to the average age of retirement in the culture being studied. In the United States, this is age 65 (The Administration for Community Living, 2021), but other countries have diverse ages of retirement (Levine, 2020). While it is easy to use an age-based determination of a population, a researcher should consider carefully the determinants and benefits of what an age-based definition of older adulthood provides to their study. Viewing older adulthood through an age-based theoretical lens may help identify older adults who have access to certain programmes or benefits, such as state-provided healthcare insurance or a pension. This could be of importance if studying particular ICTs that relate to such programmes and benefits, or if studying how these programmes and benefits impact ICT domestication. For instance, older adults in the United States are required to register online for their Medicare benefits (a social welfare healthcare programme for older adults age 65+) (United States Social Security Administration, n.d.). An age-based lens would help researchers identify older adults who are likely to be registering for Medicare benefits online. In many other circumstances, an age-based lens is problematic in defining older adulthood. Someone who is age 64 may face many of the same challenges as someone who is 65, and yet not be included in an age-defined definition of older adulthood set at age 65 and up. Many individuals retire before they reach the traditional age of retirement, due to health or familial concerns (The Administration for Community Living, 2021). Researchers should consider if another definition other than an age-based one would be more useful. For instance, a researcher could focus on retirees, if they are interested in how technology is domesticated post-retirement or influenced by retirement-level incomes. Other populations may be of specific interest, such as how institutionalized older adults domesticate ICTs in residential care facilities. Researchers interested in how individuals use technologies in relationships could examine how grandparents use technologies in relationships with their 469

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grandchildren. These definitions rely less on age and more on the status of older adults (those in retirement or living in institutionalized care environments or those that have grandchildren). As they are not age-based, they do not unfairly exclude individuals who would not meet a set age criteria but may be retired, living in a residential community, or have grandchildren. Another solution to this challenge is to use an alternative definition of older adulthood, such as the concept of generation. Generations are cohorts of individuals who are born in a similar historical time, and therefore, go through life and historical events at approximately the same age and life stage (Colombo, 2011; Edmunds & Turner, 2002). Generations tend to be less than 20 years in time span (Carlson, 2009), such that those in older adulthood (age 65 and greater) represent two to three distinct generations. The events of a generation’s relative youth are thought to be formative in nature, and therefore these historical events help to shape generational perceptions (Edmunds & Turner, 2002). While the concept of generations as birth-cohorts that share a historical tie has existed since ancient times, much of the theory of generations was developed in the 20th century (Edmunds & Turner, 2002). While there was significant interest in how generations may form a consciousness and become defined as generations, much modern research and conceptualization (and labelling) of generations has focused on the United States. The driver for this focus is unclear; however, a number of generational researchers have focused on the impacts of the post-World War II baby boom. The increase in the birth rate during the post-war baby boom caused many social services (including education and healthcare) and social structures (from families to work) to radically transform. How this transformation happened and its impacts have been a fruitful area of research, leading to an increase in the interest of how a generation impacts society (Carlson, 2008, 2009). An outline of the generations currently representing older adults in the United States (Carlson, 2009) is listed in Table 31.1. Since generations are a cultural phenomenon, it is important to note that those generations outlined for the United States are not necessarily reflected elsewhere. While there have been proposals that the globalization of media has resulted in standard generations worldwide (Colombo, 2011), such thoughts do not reflect that generations are created by a host of historical and cultural events. Although historical events may be more likely to be broadcast via traditional or social media forms around the world, the impact of these events is felt differently. While people across the globe may be aware of an armed conflict in a region or country, this knowledge is not comparable to the impact on the people who experience the armed conflict on their own soil. In addition, while globalization of the media has shared many cultural aspects of societies (particularly Western and American ones), this exposure has not eliminated local culture, language, or customs. Therefore, while globalization has had some impacts; it has not eliminated the impact of local culture, language, or significant events: the building blocks of generational consciousness. Therefore, the generations listed prior may not make sense in many cultural contexts outside of the United States. Table 31.1 Generations in the United States Birth years

Generation name

1909–1928 1929–1946 1946–1964

WWII Generation/Great Warriors The Lucky Few Baby Boomers/Boomers

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Technology introduction is a historical event, and different generations, because they are in different life stages at introduction, have different experiences with the same technology (Birkland & Kaarst-Brown, 2010). While, in the U.S. context, even the oldest members of Gen Z (born 1998–2016) have grown up in a world of social media, Boomers (born 1946–1963) were in mid-life when social media was introduced. This means that these generations have had very different experiences, expectations, and norms in using these same types of technologies. For Gen Z’s, social media has always existed, their lives have always had a digital component, and many had a social media presence before they could even talk (through their parents). For Boomers, social media was introduced during their mid-life and not an experience of their childhood. These generations not only have different experiences with this set of technologies, but have developed different perspectives on their appropriate use and even social norms for how they will be used (Comunello et al., 2020). The theory of technological generations takes this idea of generations one step further, proposing that generations form unique mental models and social norms surrounding technology use (Larsen, 1993; Rama, De Ridder & Bouma, 2001). This theory proposes that young individuals form mental models based upon the technologies they are exposed to in their youth, which influence ICT use throughout their lifespan (Rama et al., 2001). This research suggests that individuals experience a formative period (somewhere between 18 and 30 years old) which becomes the baseline for technology exposure (Ivan, Loos & Bird, 2020). While individuals can continue to learn how to use new technologies beyond youth, the interfaces of the technologies they used when young predominate their mental models of technologies throughout their lives (Rama et al., 2001). The technologies available when people are young shape not only their mental models, but also shape society’s viewpoint of what technologies people should use and know how to use. As societies tend to view new technology as the domain of and for the young, it is the young that develop use patterns for new technologies. Hence, the technologies that are available to individuals when they are young become associated with their generation. These norms are inherited by the next generation of users that are born, while these norms also flow upwards to older generations (Larsen, 1993). This phenomenon is illustrated by terms such as “Digital Natives,” which suggests that digital technologies are meant for the young and young people are experts at using them (Helsper & Enyon, 2010). But while older generations are very capable of learning new technologies and their associated norms, they are typically considered either illegitimate or less legitimate users of these technologies by society. While young people are “digital natives,” older adults are “digital immigrants.” This view has implications for how older adults approach, learn, and navigate in a digital world. Older adults are well aware of the stereotypes they face in using ICTs: that they are considered illegitimate or less legitimate users. Stereotypes can prevent older adults from trying new ICTs due to internal thoughts (such as thinking that they are too old to learn new ICTs) but also external ones (such as being told they are too old to learn) (Birkland, 2016). Because devices are often designed for younger users, older adults may also find difficulties using ICTs due to age-related declines or disabilities (Righi, Sayago & Blat, 2017). In some cases, older adults, in an act of resistance, form their own ICT use norms, which are different than younger users. While they are aware that they are not using these ICTs in the same way as younger users, they come to view their own use as legitimate and in opposition to the commonly accepted way (Comunello et al., 2020; Fernandez-Ardevol et al., 2020). Hence, older adults can create their own cultures of use that are generationally defined, much in the same way that younger generations do. 471

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While using an age-based definition of older adulthood is problematic in many cases, there are many advantages to taking a generational or technological-generation-focused definition, particularly for domestication researchers. Since domestication researchers are interested in the process of ICT introduction, use (or rejection), display, and meaning (Silverstone  & Haddon, 1996), a generational perspective helps researchers to understand how norms and societal expectations or perceptions impact this process. Knowing that societal meanings of technologies are often closely tied to generations, taking a generational perspective can lead to a deeper exploration of meaning than an age-based one. The data discussed in this chapter came from a generationally defined sample of older adults.

Method The data explored in this chapter comes from a comparative case study analysis of 17 older adults’ ICT domestication in the North Eastern United States. Technologies explored included digital technologies (computers, smartphones, and apps/software), analogue technologies (radios, television, and landline telephone), and more traditional technologies (books, newspapers, and magazines). Selection criteria for older adults were generationally based, focusing on older adults of the Lucky Few Generation, a generation born in the United States from 1929 to mid-1946. This generation was impacted by two major historical events in the United States: the Great Depression (1929–1940) and World War II (1940–1945) (Carlson, 2008). The Lucky Few Generation is a small generation, owing to the fact that the birth rate declined during both the Great Depression and World War II. While this generation experienced poverty and rationing during this period, they were less likely to experience the negative impacts of these events than the generation before them (the World War II or Greatest Generation). Members of the Lucky Few Generation were more likely to finish their secondary school education and more likely, as adults, to serve in the military during peacetime (while benefiting from policies such as the GI Bill,1 put in place for the WWII Generation before them). Women of the Lucky Few Generation made significant strides in employment, due to the pioneer women of the generation before them who had normalized women working during war time. As the eldest women of the Lucky Few Generation came of working age, the Baby Boom that followed their generation resulted in a huge increase in the number of children that needed to be cared for and taught by nurses, childcare workers, and teachers, all traditionally female-occupied professions (Carlson, 2008). The Lucky Few Generation was a focus of the study as they are a relatively understudied generation. Participants in the study lived in the Northeast United States. The specific birth years of 1936–1946 were targeted in order to sample participants who were still working, as originally work was conceptualized to be important to understanding how older adults are introduced to ICTs. This study received Institutional Review Board approval and all names and place names are pseudonyms. Older adults were recruited using a snowball referral method (Goodman, 1961), where the researcher sought out colleagues and community members who knew people who fit the recruitment criteria. Older adults who participated were asked if they could refer other older adults who fit the study criteria. A sampling frame was used in order to select older adults based upon several factors: gender (the researcher was open to all gender representations, however, no individuals who identified as genders other than male or female volunteered for the study) and work status (working full-time, working part-time, retired, and having stayed at home/been responsible for household duties). The researcher sought to recruit at least two older adults of both 472

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genders for each work status category. While women were recruited for the study that had stayed at home/been responsible for household duties, men who reflected this work status could not be recruited. The older adults recruited for this study were termed primary participants and were interviewed three times during the study. These three semi-structured interviews ranged in length from approximately 1.5–3.5 hours per interview. These interviews included a life history (with a particular focus on the use of technologies throughout the lifespan) and a card sort of the ICTs the older adult used, abandoned, and desired to try or use in the future. During the interviews, the researcher observed the older adult using ICTs and also received a tour of how the older adult displayed their ICTs in their home, including how their location impacted use. The interviews used an interpretive interactionist methodology, a dialogue method which focuses on eliciting stories and shared meaning making (Denzin, 2001). Interviews were immediately transcribed and analysed using a variety of methods, including case analysis methods (between, within, and across) and thematic analysis (Yin, 2009). The findings discussed in this chapter largely came from a thematic analysis generated from field notes and transcripts. The vast majority of the data presented in this chapter comes from interview transcripts. When a quote is reconstructed from the researcher’s field notes and may have come from discussion following an interview or an unrecorded phone call, this reconstructed status is indicated by a bracket following the quote as follows: [from field notes]. Some quotes in this chapter have been edited for clarity and/or for confidentiality. In this case, brackets are used to indicate when the words are not originally the participant’s, but have been substituted by the researcher to conceal the participant’s identity and/or to improve readability. In addition to primary participants, secondary participants for each older adult were also recruited. These were friends, co-workers, and family members who the older adult identified as someone they used ICTs with in their relationship. These secondary participants (if possible to recruit) were interviewed once about using ICTs in their relationship with the older adult. The data discussed in this chapter, however, focuses on primary participants. The data from this study detailed above is used to illustrate several important concepts that researchers must consider when it comes to defining the family and home contexts for older adults.

Older adults and family definitions Domestication is a research area that has historically tended to explore the family context in the home (Haddon, 2007). While more recent literature has focused on the domestication of technologies outside of the home environment or in relationships other than nuclear families, family relationships and technology use in the home context have remained areas of interest for researchers. Older adults tend to have very diverse definitions of family and may have very diverse family situations. Researchers who are addressing older adults must be mindful that their participants may have different definitions of family than the researcher. Family is often defined by domestication researchers as individuals that live together in the same household. Many past domestication studies have focused on parents (Aune, 1996; Habib & Cornford, 2002), for which the definition is often quite simple: these are the individuals children live with, either full- or part-time. Sometimes, this definition has been expanded to include relatives, such as grandparents or other family members who live outside the home (such as Quadrello et al., 2005), but can be easily identified through a familial bond. 473

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The definition of family for older adults can be much more complex. Older adults, by nature of their years spent living, have developed, maintained, and extinguished many relationships over their lifetime. The “divorce wave” that Boomers (born 1946–1963) experienced, during which an unprecedented number of marriages of this generation ended in divorce, has led to a diversity of family definitions for many older adults (Riley, Kahn & Foner, 1994). Older adults may have had several romantic partners and biological, adopted, and step-children, with some older adults having former step-children whom they still consider family. Who older adults consider family members may differ from person to person: while some older adults may have maintained close ties to someone they were previously married to and now divorced from, others may have not. Some older adults have maintained close relationships with former partner’s family members, others have not. Older adults may or may not differentiate between biological, adopted, and step-children; grandchildren; or great-grandchildren in their definition of family. Margaret, one of the primary older adult participants, defined her family as including: “Well, there’s me and my partner. Then there’s my kids. And they have their spouses. And I have my grandson. My grandson is very important to me” [From field notes]. While Margaret and her partner lived together, her grandson lived in a separate household and was a teenager. Such definitions were common among participants, many of whom noted individuals they had close relationships with, but that they did not live with. Definitions of family may also include many individuals with whom the older adult has a significant relationship, but is not related by blood or marriage. In such chosen families, older adults may talk of a close friend being a “sibling” or an older friend being a “parent.” Of the 17 primary older adult’s whose data is examined in this chapter, ten of those older adults identified chosen family members to be included in the study as secondary participants. Often, the older adult identified their relationship with these individuals not as a friendship, but as a family relationship, and it was only later in the conversation that they identified that they were chosen family. For instance, Alice indicated that I should interview her sister, Julie: “You should interview my sister, Julie. Well, she’s not actually my sister. We’ve been friends for over 30 years. After that you become sisters” [From field notes]. Alice also identified a friend and former roommate as “she’s basically my second daughter.” While identifying chosen family members was more common for female participants, several male participants also identified chosen family members. In many cases, older adults contrasted their chosen relationship in terms of closeness to non-chosen family members, illustrating that their chosen family members were indeed “better” or “closer” family members than their “real” or “biological” ones. Considering such chosen, or found families, is particularly important for LGBT older adults. Many LGBT older adults have created their own familial bonds after being rejected from their family of origin. This may include chosen parents, siblings, and children. In some cases, LGBT older adults have completely severed relationships with their families of origin for decades (Compton, 2020). It is important to note that older LGBT adults were born into societies where their sexuality was considered illegal. They were denied the right to formalize their partnerships through marriage until mid-life or later, depending upon their country context. Many of these older adults, due to homophobia and discrimination, have long had chosen families as they were prohibited from having formal ones (Compton, 2020). While same-sex marriage is legal and socially accepted in 29 countries (Masci & Desilver, 2019), older same-sex couples in these countries have lived the majority of their lives in which their romantic relationships could not be formally recognized by marriage.

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In the United States, same-sex marriage only became legal at the federal level in 2015 (Masci & Desilver, 2019). This means that for a gay older adult in the United States who is 65, they have only been able to legally marry their partner for seven years of their life, but lived for 58 years in a country where such a marriage was unrecognized federally. For an older adult who is 85, they have lived 78 years in an environment where their marriage would be unrecognized. Indeed, in the first country to legalize same-sex marriage (the Netherlands) in 2001 (Masci & Desilver, 2019), a currently 65-year-old would only have been able to legally marry their partner at 44; and the 85-year-old would have been 64 before they could do so. The historical prohibition of LGBT couples from legally adopting children has also impacted older adult’s abilities to grow their legally defined families. In the United States, many states still allow adoption agencies to discriminate against would-be LGBT parents, and those states with protections have only recently enacted them (Movement Advancement Project (MAP), 2021), a change that has come too late for many older adults who wanted to be parents. While at the same time assistive reproductive technology has allowed for LGBT couples to have children over the past two decades, access to such services is not equal to that of heterosexual couples (Riley, 2019). Indeed, much like the examples for same-sex marriage, such policy changes and reproductive innovations came too late for LGBT older adults to become parents (improvements in assistive reproductive technologies came late for older adults in general; and for some heterosexual couples and single individuals, adoption has not always been an option to build a family). Indeed, for all older adults, chosen families are important. Older adults may also define that they have no family. This can particularly be true for those older adults who are childless, but can also include those with children and spouses or former spouses. Natalie had both an ex-husband and a son, neither of whom she had had contact with for over a decade. She had many cousins, but did not define them as her family, more as friends. When asked, if she had family, she repeated the phrase, “I have no family. It’s just me.” This was defined as the great loss of her life: the loss of her husband and son. Older adults may have also survived their spouses, children, and in some cases, their grandchildren. These relationships, although they involve an individual who is no longer living, can be incredibly important to the older adult. Alice had a child die as an infant and had a surviving daughter. She used technology to help her cope with her loss that had first occurred over 40 years prior, by documenting gravestones of children who died through digital photography. A current project she was working on was on creating a slideshow of her digital photography collection of images of infant graves and monuments to share at an academic conference she and her life partner attended each year. Alice spoke about how such participation in her gravestone documentation project “connected” her to her child who had died. Such technology use was echoed by Mindy Jean, who grew up listening to and then watching soap operas with her mother. While her mother had passed away years before Mindy Jean and the researcher met, for Mindy Jean watching soaps with her mother was a thread of connection that had existed throughout their lifespan: I’m a soap opera [fan], I used to watch a lot of soap operas, I used to listen to them on the radio more so than anything, and some of them got on TV. Golly, I bet I’ve been watching them at least 50 years, at least. I’ve listened to them as a teenager… When my mother was here [living with me while I was her caretaker] we watched together. I watch them now and think of her.

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When Mindy Jean watched soap operas after her mother died, she felt that this continued her relationship with her mother and brought back fond memories of their times together. Hence, technology can help older adults to maintain bonds even with family members who have passed. As the data and issues presented have illustrated, family can have many diverse definitions for older adults. For many, it is not defined by who they live with, whom they are married or related to, or, in some cases, who is even still living. This means that researchers who are interested in studying domestication of technologies among older adults in a family context have to be aware of these diverse definitions. For researchers, it is important to be aware of and sensitive to diverse definitions of family when they enter the field and allow older adults to define who they consider family. Being open to these diverse definitions will allow researchers to better understand domestication within families and relationships. Older adults, besides having a diversity of family relationships, also have a diversity of living arrangements, which means that we, as researchers, must expand our understanding of the “home.”

Older adults: diverse examples of the home Domestication researchers have often focused on how individuals use, display, and find meaning in technologies in the home context. Older adults have diverse living environments and this impacts their meanings of home. Originally, when setting out to study older adult’s domestication of ICTs, the author sought to explore older adults who were community dwelling. This was because prior studies had overwhelmingly sampled from what are often called “captive older adult populations,” in settings such as community centres, classes, or retirement/assistive living communities (Birkland & Kaarst-Brown, 2010). While such studies can be very powerful, focusing on such populations limits our understanding of older adults who are community dwelling (and may or may not attend community centres or computer classes). Such a community focus in this research meant that older adults who were living in retirement, assisted living, and nursing home communities were not included in the study, and in fact, actively excluded. The approach to this definition of home as community dwelling was challenged when Nancy, a potential study participant, contacted the researcher directly. Nancy had heard about the study from her daughter and decided she wanted to participate as she met all the criteria, minus one: she lived in a nursing home. When Nancy contacted the author, she was well aware that the study was seeking community dwelling older adults, but asked why it only considered people who lived out in the community if it sought to study home environments. What followed was a nearly 45-minute discussion on the phone in which Nancy argued for her inclusion in the study, based upon her definition that the nursing home where she lived was her home. Nancy’s argument was extremely persuasive and started the researcher thinking about the context of the home, and why it is important. Nancy thought of the nursing home as her home: it was not only where she lived, but where some of the people she cared most dearly about (her fellow residents) lived. She had embraced not only her assisted living community as her home, but saw herself as an integral member of the community, a place where she was not only cared for, but helped others: I have been involved in when some of the families are just coming in to view the place and [the staff ] will say this is Nancy and she’s been here 11 years, if you have any questions. I can spot right away when the [families] are having a problem they feel guilty 476

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about putting [their parents] here. I try to tell them, “You should feel very guilty if you don’t put them here because you cannot do for them what we can do for them here. You can’t live with them 24 hours a day, you can’t be absolutely sure that they’re taking their meds when you’re not there, and that’s all done here. So if you don’t feel that you’re doing the right thing, believe me you are. They need to be where they can be cared for properly, you cannot do it properly.” [Once people who move here are here about a month, they become integrated into the community, it takes about a month.] Where these young people [the new resident’s children] are having a hell of a time because they’re feeling so guilty about putting their parents somewhere even though they really should know they’re doing the best for them. [When we recently had a death in the family, my granddaughter called me and] the first thing she thought of was [that] I’m here all alone, and I had to reinforce it again, “how can I be all alone when there’s 130 people all around me, I am far from being alone!” Nancy describes some of the stereotypes that individuals often have about nursing homes: that they are institutions and not homes. This was a stereotype held by the author when beginning this study, but this stereotype was challenged by Nancy. Nancy became an integral part of the data collection, as it was her case that particularly illustrated some of the difficulties older adults experience with ICTs due to disability and age-related declines. Her case also illustrated some of the difficulties residents of facilities face in navigating the digital environment. For instance, her nursing home had blocked the ports for social media, which meant that residents could not use such apps on the nursing home network (Birkland, 2019). Without her argument that she should be included, these important findings would remain uncovered. Other examples of diverse home environments abound. Older adults may have living arrangements where they have significant life partners but choose to maintain separate households for a variety of reasons. Alice and Fred were romantic partners who kept separate households. Living roughly an hour apart, Fred spent the latter half of each week at Alice’s home, returning to his own house during the early part of the week, but he felt that Alice’s home was his home: Well as you probably already discerned I have a family elsewhere… but I have some responsibilities there so thus I’m between here [Alice’s home] and there… [my house]… But my home is here, with Alice…. Alice is my soulmate and this is my home. Fred’s comfort at what was technically Alice’s house helped him define her home as his: it was where he felt most comfortable. Such relationships illustrate the diversity of relationships older adults have with others and how this impacts their definitions of family and where they consider home. Another consideration of domestication researchers should be if having a permanent home is important to the research context; and to be sure to include homeless older adults. Jackie, through a series of misfortunes, found herself ineligible for Social Security (the United States government provided pensioner plan) and supported herself working part-time and odd jobs. After taking the proceeds from her deceased partner’s home sale and living a short time in an apartment, she sold her possessions, bought a truck and a pop-up travel trailer, and planned to live at campsites and on her friends’ properties throughout the year: I’m going down [South] and I’m going to live in a campground. In [the South] to be near my son and my grandchildren. In the winter of course. And then I’m going to 477

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be coming up North because I don’t like the summer heat and I can’t really be in [the South]. So I will come up North and I’ll stay with my friends. [This move was motivated by my husband’s death. Before he died] I was happy and I thought I had roots and I had and I thought well, we’ll live there throughout our retirement and stuff like that. So his death was a sudden thing. It wasn’t like he was sick or anything else. He was alive in the morning and dead at night. And that, it was such a shock. For a while I was in a fog and there were all sorts of things do… because first I had to sell all his stuff, and the house, and everything else. And then I had to sell my stuff and I didn’t know where I wanted to live, and it was awful. So now I feel good. I feel good about my near future. I feel good about going down [South]. I’m starting a new chapter of my life. Jackie was essentially homeless: she lacked a permanent home. Although she herself did not use the term homeless, she certainly met the criteria. Both the number of sheltered older adults, or those that can find temporary shelter, and those that are unsheltered are on the rise. Older adults account for nearly one in four unsheltered homeless individuals (AirgoodObrycki, 2019). These older adults may live with family or friends or in arrangements that are not formalized, or like Jackie, seek out temporary living accommodations on their own. Researchers must be aware that older adults can be sheltered or unsheltered homeless and therefore account for these various living arrangements when collecting data. It is important to realize that for older adults, their home is where they feel connected. Older adults can live in institutionalized settings, in separate homes from their family members, or be without a traditional or permanent home. As researchers, we must remain open to our participants’ definitions of home as well as their definition of family.

Conclusion There are many issues to consider when studying older adults’ domestication of ICTs. First, these include defining the population of interest, based upon the researcher’s goals. In particular, researchers should carefully consider why older adults are a population of interest, and if a residential, pension status, relational, generational, or technological generation definition of older adulthood may prove more useful. Second, as domestication researchers have often been interested in researching families’ domestication of technologies in the home, they should realize that older adults have a diversity of family and home situations. The familial definitions of older adults include non-traditional family structures, chosen families, and those who lack family. Finally, older adult home environments can take many forms and can range from community dwelling to institutional living situations. Researchers should also be aware that older adults experience sheltered and unsheltered homelessness. Most important of all, researchers should consider older adults’ own definitions of family and home paramount in their research.

Note 1 The GI Bill is a set of U.S. legislation that provides benefits for individuals who serve in the U.S. military, such as educational tuition remission and access to government-insured mortgages at reduced rates (Altschuler & Blumin, 2009). To note, the original GI Bill was created in a way that accommodated racist Jim Crow laws. This meant that access to the benefits of the GI Bill often excluded veterans of colour (for more on the GI Bill and how it excluded Black, Latinx, and American Indian veterans, please see Darity, 2020).

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32 M-LEARNING Appropriating social media for pedagogy in Kenya Leah Jerop Komen

‘Innovations pay off for teacher’ is a story of a Kenyan High school teacher, who decided to be innovative in teaching. In his words, he says, ‘I realised that the student-centred training had more potential and so I integrated it with ICT’ (Daily Nation, Monday 3, 2017). The 36-year old, Paul Thairu, a physics and maths teacher, uses his smartphone to shoot videos, take photos and uses them to make students grasp concepts. He reported that ever since he started using this innovative methodology, students had become more interested in learning and performance had been better. This is a good example of how smartphones applications can be used to promote learning. The popularity and growth of social media especially among teens and young adults have equally found increased adoption in institutions of higher learning, ushering in the potential for its use by students, who have an insatiable quest for new knowledge (Shaw, 2014). The COVID-19 pandemic engendered lockdowns and subsequent changes in teaching methodology. Kenyan university lecturers, like others, had to make abrupt changes to ensure that learning continued amidst the pandemic dictates. Although many teachers used smartphones to continue teaching, there is scant empirical documentation available. This study examined the use of social media by higher education (HE) teachers for pedagogy. Drawing from literature and interviews among select university lecturers in Kenya, the study finds WhatsApp and Facebook the most widely used social media for pedagogy and affirms that social media platforms are useful as both planning and teaching tools in institutions of higher learning.

Introduction and background Social media visibility is increasing in HE settings as instructors look to technology to mediate and enhance their instructions as well as promote active learning for students. Many scholars argue for the purposeful integration of social media as an educational tool. Empirical evidence, however, has lagged in supporting the claim (Tess, 2013). Given the prevalence of social media in general and the saturation of social networking sites (SNSs such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and WhatsApp) in particular, many HE instructors have looked to the technology to mediate and enhance their instructions as well as promote active learning for students (Anderson, 2007; Eijkman, 2008; McLoughlin & Lee, 2017; Selwyn, 2010). This has necessitated a customized use of mobile communication to suit instructional needs. In a sense, DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-45

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these users have domesticated mobile communication devices such as mobile telephony for learning. The concept of domestication emerged as an alternative to more mechanistic and rationalistic explanations of how innovations are adopted by individuals and institutions, such as the theory of diffusion of innovations, popularized by Rogers (1962). In contrast to diffusionist theories, which typically have a ‘pro-innovation bias,’ a domestication approach does not consider new artefacts or technologies as the embodiment of progress. Instead, it proposes to seriously address the question of how and to what extent such artefacts are considered fit or made fit for integration into the lives of their users. This study uses a domestication approach to understand how lecturers in Kenyan universities have used mobile telephony to enhance their teaching amidst the constraints of infrastructural requirements. Nearly all students in Kenya at the university level own mobile devices and about half of them own more than one (Klimova & Poulova, 2016), making learning via a mobile device a preferred mode of learning. This learning via a mobile device has been defined as mobile learning or simply m-learning. According to Shon (2008), mobile learning is defined as using mobile and wireless computing technologies in a way to promote learners’ mobility and nomadicity. Diez et al. (2017), however, define mobile learning as the use of mobile devices to support teaching and learning processes, echoed by Boude (2019). A critical point to note in these definitions is that m-learning should have certain affordances that should enable mobility, ubiquity, lightness, low cost, and connectivity for any m-learning to be seen as delivering (Arain et al., 2019). M-learning scholarship in HE has been approached from different trajectories: there are studies that focus on m-learning adoption (Fagan, 2019; Gómez-Ramírez et al., 2019; Hoi, 2020), those that focus on m-learning frameworks (Benali & Ally, 2020; Irugalbandara & Fernando, 2019; Jinot, 2019; Xue, 2020), and those that have emphasized user experiences (Jahnke & Liebscher, 2020; Kumar et al., 2019; Vacas et al., 2019; Vasilevski & Birt, 2020). In their systematic review of trends in mobile learning in HE, Krull and Duart (2017) found that (a) mobile learning in HE is a growing field as evidenced by the increasing variety of research topics, methods, and researchers; (b) the most common research topic continues to be about enabling m-learning applications and systems; and (c) that mobile phones continue to be the most widely used devices in mobile learning studies. This study leans towards the user experiences cluster and seeks to unravel what the faculty or HE educators see as their navigation tactics using their mobile phones and in particular social media as tools for both teaching and learning.

Domestication approach and social media via mobile telephony The concept of domestication of information and communication technologies (ICTs) was proposed and developed in the 1990s by Silverstone and Haddon and later adopted by several other researchers (Haddon, 2003). It is based on the social shaping of technology studies, showing how technological artefacts are incorporated into the everyday routines of the home. Domestication may be seen as a dynamic process, wherein individuals and groups negotiate the use of a technological device, trying to ‘fit it in’ or ‘break it into’ their own personal life structures and domestic space to best satisfy their needs and wants. Just as consumers modify the use of a device, the device, in turn, impacts and influences their daily life (EMTEL, 2004). The ‘four stages of domestication’ delineated by Silverstone and his colleagues include appropriation (possession and ownership), objectification (meaning and symbols), incorporation (everyday use), and conversion (Silverstone et al., 1992), which encompasses the activities and discourses that users develop in order to signal to others their participation in the process of consumption or usage of the artefact. This could imply exhibiting the artefact physically 482

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or symbolically, mentioning it in conversations with others, or demonstrating user skills. In the appropriation dimension, the choice of the kind of smartphone to be purchased would include implicit issues such as what is deemed appropriate for the lecturer to have, but also explicit factors such as cost, memory capacity, and other functionalities and affordances of the mobile phone. In terms of objectification (where the device is placed within the household), this aspect becomes somewhat challenged because it is no longer where it is physically placed but more of the uses and how they are rolled out. Texting, for example, requires one to position oneself in a particular posture able to type, or if one is audio recording, one may want to consider a quiet environment, free from other interferences and the like.

Case studies: application of domestication approach to mobile learning The domestication of technology is really a negotiation between users, artefacts, and social contexts (Haddon, 2003; Silverstone et al., 1992), with user needs contributing largely to the domestication process (Haddon, 2006; Lee, 2017; Komen, 2016). Applying domestication approach to smartphones requires three specifications on Silverstone et al.’s (1992) original work. First, smartphones are typically used by individuals rather than households, thus changing the unit of analysis. Second, the usage of smartphones is not limited to the physical boundaries of a household, but specifically breaks with time and space limitations. Third, the four dimensions of the domestication process from Silverstone et al. (1992) must be adapted to the specific characteristics of smartphones. The appropriation dimension implies that a person acquires a smartphone. The objectification dimension, defined as taking technologies home or into the private cultural spaces and making or not making them acceptable and familiar (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996: 64), is related to how the person uses the technology and finds out basic native functionalities. Domestication of social media for pedagogy revolves around determining technology choices for effective learning and teaching, which are appropriateness and access, ease of use and reliability to name but a few factors (Bates & Poole, 2003). Whatever the list of criteria employed, an investigation of whether the right technology has been selected is arguably a key aspect of a comprehensive evaluation of mobile learning. Mobile learning does, however, offer new solutions to traditionally problematic contexts of information delivery. Several authors emphasize the opportunities of access afforded by mobile learning that could help improve literacy and numeracy skills; encourage independent and collaborative learning experiences; identify areas where learners need assistance and support; mitigate resistance using ICTs; engage reluctant learners; enable learners to remain more focused for longer periods, and promote self-esteem and self-confidence (Attewell, 2005: 13–15). Educators will need to establish the contexts in which the use of mobile technologies is relevant. For example, significant social, economic, ethical, and educational factors will influence the effective and efficient uptake of mobile technologies. Innovative tools need to be interpreted and used according to the environment in which they will operate, with the concession that they may have a major impact on transforming current cultures and practices.

Challenges of social media use for learning Selecting the appropriate technology infrastructure requires an assessment of the appropriateness, quality, compatibility, and cost of the devices. Issues such as the management of learning through intermittent connections to institutional learning management systems (LMSs), in addition to maintaining device-independent delivery, pose significant obstacles to m-learning 483

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implementation. As with all change management projects, gaining institutional support for the m-learning approach is critical. Areas to be addressed include cost, compatibility, equity of access, security, privacy, and ethical concerns (Traxler & Bridges, 2004; Mobile Learning Group, 2004). In terms of application, issues including lack of teacher confidence, training, and technical difficulties with devices used may impact negatively on their uptake and use (Facer, Faux & McFarlane, 2005). Other critical challenges surround the use and re-use of content. Once posted by the faculty, issues of rights and privacy are a concern. These rely on compliance with disability and privacy law, intellectual property rights, copyright law, and the fair use exemption, providing practical advice for each area of consideration (Rodriqueze, 2011). For instance, once a lecturer has researched and shared the content to students, some content may not have full attributions and may not be under the rubric of creative commons, hence the danger of committing crime unintentionally by omission and commission. In the following, I present the study I conducted to gather details on such processes.

Methodology This study was a multi-step descriptive research design; first, the researcher reviewed literature around mobile phone domestication, social media appropriation for pedagogy and then conducted 25 descriptive interviews with faculty members of universities in Kenya from both private and public universities to ascertain their process of domesticating uses of mobile learning. All 25 interviews were conducted via mobile phone and audio-recorded with permission; then transcribed later and analysed thematically as per the main questions of the domestication of technology approach.

Data analysis After collecting data via recorded phone calls, the researcher transcribed each of the interviews separately and later listened to them repeatedly to ensure that everything was correctly captured. The researcher then used the transcripts to code them as per emerging themes as well as the tenets of domestication approach (such as appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion) as were experienced by the select lecturers. The verbatim texts were then presented in support of the themes that emerged and collaborated with the theoretical framework and literature.

Findings Mobile phone appropriation – possession and ownership I wanted to know what kind of smartphones the lecturers had and what their considerations were while deciding to purchase these. I have a 3G phone, can you believe that? Yeah, sometimes my own kids have asked me to upgrade and that I was embarrassing them. Well, I feel for as long as a device is serving me and meeting a need, I will not be thrown to competition spree. (Lecturer 4, public university) The quote above speaks to several issues. There is the aspect of status and expectations. Lecturer 4 felt that although she owned a 3G, it did not measure up to expectations of others 484

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of her, including her children’s. However, the utility aspect is also brought to the fore, the idea that if it serves the purpose, there is no need to be like everyone else. This may sound contradictory in that mobile phone appropriation carries with it some laden expectations; yet, a person can decide to be independent. Another lecturer from a private university had this to say: I have a 4G phone that is like a minicomputer or laptop. I perform all my duties here with ease including marking my students’ scripts. I can also watch video clips from my students from here and send responses, since I teach film, you see. I tell people, mobile phone is the next frontier in everything. (Lecturer 1, private university) This lecturer presents to us appropriation in that the lecturer first owns a better phone and second navigates and manipulates technology in both teaching and learning. He mentions receiving assignments and marking them via his smartphone. One can also perhaps argue that, because the said lecturer teaches at a private university, there might be certain expectations on the level of technology avidness by lecturers in such institutions often assumed to be ‘rich’ and perhaps well paid in Kenya. Yet, another faculty noted her frustration: I am just starting out now as an adjunct and so I have not earned enough to spare for a good smartphone. I have my 3G phone, but I must make do with it. In fact, I must connect to the mobile hotspot from my phone to a computer to be able to teach and even mark my students work. Having two mobile devices at a go is cumbersome, I should be able to get a good phone soon that will do everything a laptop or computer does. (Lecturer 8, public university) The sentiments by this lecturer speak to the complementarity of technology, not necessarily as a case of affluence, but because the two mobile technologies would together deliver a better connection, shared across devices with different weaknesses and strengths. In this case, the laptop is connected via a hotspot for internet bundles as well as connected to the mobile phone. The said lecturer upon further questioning said that he uses an old laptop, which was acquired for use, but was faulty to a large extent. Ownership then was pegged on other factors, whether the university could purchase further tools for their lecturers, and whether the faculty member could afford to buy it himself. These responses from the select faculty, from both public and private universities, indicate the need for a stronger smartphone, one that can allow for more functionalities beyond just calling and texting to one that would allow interactions and feedback exchange between teachers and learners. The type of phone a lecturer owned did not necessarily present an ideal phone, but a desire to get a better kind.

Mobile phone incorporation – everyday uses Social media is producing lazy students, observed one participant: Because of the readily available information at a click many students have been found cheating, regardless of whether they were graduate students or undergraduates. I found 485

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two cases last semester and I hyperlinked the source and shared back to the students who had cheated. This hurt a lot, because these were my bright students. (Lecturer 18, public university) This lecturer noticed with great concern how students were literally lifting online texts and submitting them for marking. She calls these ‘lazy students.’ One could provocatively also argue that such trends could go beyond being lazy to being unethical scholarship with the power to ruin not just the morals of the society but create inept citizens, unqualified and not working hard enough. This, however, is not solely attributed to the mobile technology, but treated as a case where easy detection of such malpractices as well as aiding the propagation of these are also all aided by the technology. Technology has been said to be neutral, but I propose, depending on how it is being used, technology can engender vices or values. It is more than an enabler – and ambivalently so. The interruptions while having virtual class or sharing a video is beyond count. In one group session a student by mistake shared a video of their background and it was rather intrusive even to watch. (Lecturer 7, public university, see also lecturer 11, private university). These lecturers make a case for disruptions that are not entirely caused by technology but by the user who fails to manipulate the technology to perform the intended task. Sometimes I wonder whether we are online. You see, online or even mobile learning, because the majority have smartphones, is supposed to provide room for both synchronous and asynchronous options. But because of the nature of our students, we end up meeting synchronous all the time as the time for class is usually a time off work. That flexibility is very minimal, and I have heard my colleagues from other universities say the same. (Lecturer 2, private university, see also lecturer 3 (private) and lecturer 17 (public)) The above quotes represent the everyday reality of both students and lecturers. While online or even mobile learning has provisions for both synchronous and asynchronous, it was largely synchronous because most of the students could only attend class later in the day when classes would normally have been scheduled. The joy of being online and the fact that one can access material whenever and wherever were challenged in this regard. I think the online or mobile learning has also created lazy faculty. People just post notes on the LMS and ask students to respond to a question or two on the discussion forum and yet there is limited input from the teacher on how those discussions progressed. Students have complained that all they see is YouTube links, or notes for them to interact and the teacher is absent most of the time even on virtual classes. I think this will soon have a bearing on the quality of students we shall produce. (Lecturer 5, private university) This lecturer paints a picture of not exploiting the technology well. She points to the fact that the majority of the teachers do minimal work under the mobile learning conditions and that the discussion forums that are supposed to be a learning space are poorly

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attended to. Part of this could be attributed to lecturers being thrown into a virtual space while they were used to physical spaces and each of the platforms presents different approaches. Most of the responses above were shared by others. Although the everyday uses of mobile phone continued, there was a disturbing trend of absconding of duty or learning, from both the lecturer and the learner. The affordances for online learning that include social media links were only helpful when students and teachers would engage on the platforms directly whether through LMSs, WhatsApp, Facebook, or even phone calls. Once this was neglected, the joy of engaging and co-creation of content and learning was thrown out of the window.

Mobile phone objectification – meaning and symbols You see my mobile phone is my tool of proof. Whenever a student lies to me that they logged on the learning management system (LMS), I can track that and screenshot and show the student that he or she is a blatant liar. This has deterred many and they are beginning to be ethical. (Lecturer 17, private university) The above view shows how the same communicative technology can be used as a surveillance tool, too. It is both a locative and locating device: I speak to you from my village in Chavakali. The truth is this phone is a light in many ways. In the literal sense that I can use the spotlight to light my way to attend to the pit latrine detached obviously from the main house, but I can use it to light the house when there is power outage here - and this is frequent here. (Lecturer 20, public university) Light as a concept is taken in the literal sense here, a clear indication that the device can be used for specific things that are contextual. The reality of a lavatory detached from the house renders the mobile phone a useful tool as a guide to the lavatory but literally lighting the way to and from. With my phone I can access my bank account and withdraw money via mobile money and meet the needs of my people, I can pay bills here and also leave something for my parents before I can return to the city, where I work. (Lecturer 23, private university) The quote above shows a much wider use of technology, ranging from communicating to transferring mobile money to their bank and also to the ability to share mobile money with rural folks. The above meanings and symbols given to the mobile phone by the lecturers are a clear indication that mobile phones indeed live a complex life. They cannot be understood in a linear way. The mobile phone acquires several meanings as lecturers interact with it within their contexts and within their social networks. To some it is a planning tool, it is a tool to provide evidence, it is light and a bank account. All this becomes manifest as the lecturers interact with different members of their families and society.

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Mobile phone conversion – degree of use Other than the above uses, I wanted to know how else the faculty were using their mobile phones, in particular social media functions for their academic activities. I call my students via WhatsApp, you see that group call, you can capture all of them but of course they need to join the call. I usually do this when I am caught up in traffic or wanted to let them know I shall be late, it is easier calling than texting if in traffic. (Lecturer 2, see also lecturer 23, 5 & 7, all at public universities) The above group of lecturers demonstrates processes beyond acquisition of the mobile phones and displays the extent and symbolic meanings they attribute to their devices. Many prefer calling to texting although texting would provide some documentation and later reference. This can be partly cultural. Communication is considered vital. If one can see and hear the other person, like a semi-physical meeting, is seen as a rich communication experience. Hence, many respondents prefer WhatsApp calls to other forms (such as simple texting). Every semester we start a temporary Facebook page, where we share class materials and chats. Here both the students and I can share say videos (largely YouTube or Ted talks) or audios and some e-books for enhancing our class engagements through the semester. I have found this to be nice, although sometimes we have shared material that borders on copyright issues, and I fear that might be a huge issue in the future unless something is done to curb this. (Lecturer 4, see also: lecturers 6, 9, 10, all private university and lecturers 11, 23, 24 & 25, all public universities) The prowess of sharing content via social media platforms was shared by these lecturers from both public and private universities. Here, the social media was used as a repository, planning tool and teaching aid. Through social media platforms, lecturers attest to the enriching experience as they diversify their instructions from class notes to your tube-shared targeted educative talk such as those of TedTalk. I access the LMS using my phone and communicate with my students, I encourage them through WhatsApp texts to search for information, I share some links and set reminders for tasks related to the course both on WhatsApp, Facebook or even LMS. Smartphones is the way to go. I have found social media as a useful enhancer in my course delivery and my students have let me know that much. (Lecturer 13, private university) The above quote from the lecturer presents feedback from students on how social media has moved from a space to a place, where students find gratification in their learning experiences: As for me I can upload lecture notes via Google docs and ask the students to download for their use. However, I have encountered challenges with sometimes not being able to upload files due to storage capacity limitation and sometime the screen size of my phone limits visibility and readability of certain texts. (This was a shared response by lecturer 8 (public university), lecturers 12, 15, 16 and 21 from private universities) 488

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Above quotes demonstrate the many ways that the mobile phone has been used by lecturers beyond the obvious intention of calling and texting. It has brought many other avenues and purviews such as the use of social media platforms, for example, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp, into the classroom and because of the ability for these platforms to be interactive, they are gaining acceptance across HE institutions. The social media use revolves around sharing information, recommending additional reading materials via e-books, storing lecturer notes on Google docs, or uploading of notes and downloading of videos and audios and other learning materials.

Discussions and conclusions Appropriation of social media for pedagogy is slowly gaining traction with teachers looking to technology for learning, instructions, and interactions. Mobile telephony comes in handy particularly in most developing contexts where computers are rare and expensive. Mobile learning as seen offers a new avenue for teachers to rethink their content and how to package it for their students. It can, however, also be a deterrent to creative ways of thinking and learning, especially when most of the activity revolves around downloading of other people’s work as opposed to creating own content and uploading. As shared in the findings, both teachers and students find it so easy to click a button and download content from the internet for learning and sometimes upload some course notes on the LMSs. On first sight, this looks all good. Time and space are no longer constricting, but enabling factors given that one can access material anywhere, any time. However, discovering the true nature of online learning, most students and teachers are limited on how much of the technology affordances they can use. Findings from this study concur with previous studies that in fact social media has not been fully embraced for learning and teaching, but is primarily used for networking with peers, friends, and family (Kolhar et al., 2021). It is largely viewed as an entertainment platform rather than a tool for planning and executing learning.

Trends in social media use in higher education Although earlier studies found mobile learning adoption to have taken off in HE (Fagan, 2019; Gómez-Ramírez et al., 2019; Hoi, 2020), this study found that mobile learning is still in its infancy. Many faculty members instead find the use of mobile telephony for learning a huge challenge. The mobile learning device that was widely accepted and adopted was the mobile phone. Another trend that this study found is that faculty would use their mobile phone as the main device, but complementary to their laptops or computers. This was particularly the case when the data bundles needed to be shared via a mobile hotspot. Additionally, the mobile phone size was found to be a hindrance in terms of typing and sharing and hence the need to use multiple devices to deliver a lesson. I gathered from the reading and from faculty interviewed that for each semester, they would form groups. For some, these groups were based on Facebook accounts, while for others used WhatsApp and even both. WhatsApp was chosen for ease of use such as sending alerts, that the class has begun for the synchronous classes or remind students to post their views on the discussion forums in the LMS.

Domestication of social media in HE Mobile learning and in particular the use of social media for educational purposes will largely depend on the context and the social economic realities that faculty and students 489

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grapple with on a day-to-day basis. Although this study did not particularly examine the characteristics of learners, the majority of students that the select faculty were teaching were at graduate level and were either self-employed or employed and in the middle-income bracket. Their quest for other online materials was therefore higher, considering that they use social media in their everyday lives. Findings showed that the majority of faculty chose to incorporate social media in the learning process because it gave students additional reading material and expanded their locus of understanding of concepts. To those faculty who used YouTube videos, or audio or Ted talks to complement their class notes, they recorded an improved interaction of the students on the LMS. However, as we shall see later in the Challenges section, this was not a panacea for learning. The choice of what smartphone to purchase was largely dependent on the uses the faculty was looking for. I need a ‘minicomputer’ was the language of what that smartphone was to look like, i.e., one that could perform the function of a computer, but hosted via a mobile phone. This was seen in both the appropriation and objectification of the mobile learning by the teachers.

Challenges of uptake of social media for pedagogy This study found challenges already exposed by literature to be the same. The challenge of institutional support, privacy and security of content posted, and ethical dilemmas were mentioned. As with all change management projects, gaining institutional support for the m-learning approach is critical. Furthermore, scholars find other obvious impediments to be costs, compatibility, equity of access, privacy, and security concerns (Traxler  & Bridges, 2004; Mobile Learning Group, 2004). Other challenges found in this study were the screen size of mobile phones, limiting visibility and readability of certain texts. Particularly those faculty somewhat advanced in age noted this point. Some respondents were categorical that the mobile phone or mobile learning presented unique challenges, those of data bundles or internet, power outages, and the ability to interact for long was limited as they were dependent on internet stability and ability to purchase internet bundles if they ran out. There was also the issue of not being able to upload files due to storage capacity limitation. In conclusion, mobile learning is rife and is needed to be able to navigate these uncertain times of the pandemic. However, there is a need to build infrastructures to support that learning via devices such as mobile phones that are readily available and accessible. Second, social media should now be seen beyond the entertainment angle and more as a tool that can be used to enhance teaching and learning. The domestication approach is best suited to explain the dimensions of appropriation, incorporation, objectification, and conversion in mobile learning. There is a need to research more on what mobile learning’s potential for pedagogy in the era of social media as a learning and teaching resource involves. We also need to address the challenges of content security, privacy, and copyright issues when online materials are being used.

References Abidin, N.Z. and Tho, S. (2018) ‘The development of an innovative resonance experiment using smartphones with free mobile software applications for tertiary education,’ Int. J. Educ. Dev., 14, 164–176. Anderson, P. (2007) ‘What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education,’ JISC, 1 (1), 1–64. Technology and Standards Watch, Feb, 2007. Bristol.

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M-learning Arain, A.A., Hussain, Z., Rizvi, W.H. and Saleem, M. (2019) ‘Extending UTAUT2 toward acceptance  of mobile learning in the context of higher education,’ Univers. Access Inf. Soc., 18, 659–673. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-019-00685-8. Attewell, J., (2005) From Research and Development to mobile learning: Tools for education and Training providers and their Learners. https://robertoigarza.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/artfrom-research-and-development-to-mobile-learning-attwell-2005.pdf. Attewell, J. and Savill-Smith, C. (eds.) (2003) Learning with mobile devices: Research and development. MLEARN ‘03 Book of Papers, London: Learning and Skills Development Agency. Bates, A.W and Gary Poole. (2003) Effective teaching with technology in higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Benali, M. and Ally, M. (2020) ‘Towards a Conceptual Framework Highlighting Mobile Learning Challenges,’ Int. J. Mob. Blended Learn., IGI Global, 12 (1), 51–63. Bere, A. and Rambe, P. (2019) ‘Understanding mobile learning using a social embeddedness approach: a case of instant messaging,’ Int. J. Educ. Dev. Using Inf. Commun. Technol., 15, 132–153. Bergman, S. (1994) ‘Communication technology in the household: the gendering of artefacts and practices,’ in V. Frissen (ed.) Gender, ICTs and everyday life: Mutual shaping processes, Brussels: European Commission, 135–153. Boude, O.R. (2019) ‘How teachers integrate mobile devices in the classroom,’ Espacios, 40 (29), 2. Díez, L.F., Valencia, A. and Bermúdez, J. (2017) ‘Agent-based model for the analysis of technological acceptance of mobile learning,’ IEEE Lat. Am. Trans., 15 (6), 1121–1127. https://doi.org/10.1109/ tla.2017.7932700. Eijkman, H. (2008) ‘Web 2.0 as a non-foundational network-centric learning space,’ Campus-Wide Inf. Syst., 25 (2), 93–104. Fagan, M.H. (2019) ‘Factors influencing student acceptance of mobile learning in higher education,’ Comput. Sch., 36 (2), 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2019.1603051. Faux, F., McFarlane, A, and Facer, K. (2006) Learning with handheld technologies, The Futurelab. https://telearn.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00190331. Gómez-Ramírez, I., Valencia-Arias, A. and Duque, L (2019) ‘Approach to M-learning acceptance among university students: an integrated model of TPB and TAM,’ IRRODL, 20 (3), 141–164. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i4.4061. Guy, R. (2012) ‘The use of social media for academic practice: A review of literature,’ Kentucky J. Higher Educ. Policy Practice, 1 (2), Article 7. Haddon, L. (2003) ‘Domestication of mobile telephony,’ in J. Katz (ed.) Machines that become us: The social context of personal communication, New Brunswick: Transaction, 43–56. Hoi, V.N. (2020) ‘Understanding higher education learners’ acceptance and use of mobile devices for language learning: a Rasch-based path modeling approach,’ Comput. Educ., 146, 103761. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103761. Irugalbandara, T.C. and Fernando, M.S.D. (2019) ‘Context aware adaptive mobile learning framework for bottom of pyramid people (BOP),’ Int. J. Adv. Appl. Sci., 6 (12), 27–40. https://doi. org/10.21833/ijaas.2019.12.004. Jahnke, I. and Liebscher, J. (2020) ‘Three types of integrated course designs for using mobile technologies to support creativity in higher education,’ Comput. Educ., 146, 103782. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103782. Jinot, B.L. (2019) ‘An evaluation of a key innovation: mobile learning,’ Acad. J. Interdiscip. Stud., 8 (2), 39–45. https://doi.org/10.2478/ajis-2019-0014. Klimova,B.F and Poulova,P. (2016) ‘Surveying university teaching and student’s learning styles,’ Int. J. Innov. Learn., 19 (4), 444–458. Kolhar, M., Ahmed Kazi, R.N. and Alameen, A. (2021) ‘Effect of social media use on learning, social interactions, and sleep duration among university students,’ Saudi J. Biol. Sci., 28 (4), 2216–2222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.01.010. Komen, L. (2016) ‘“Here you can use it”. Understanding mobile phone sharing and the concerns it elicits in rural Kenya,’ for (e) dialogue, 1(1), 52–65. https://doi.org/10.29311/for(e)dialogue. v1i1.532. Krull, G. and Duart, J.M. (2017) ‘Research trends in mobile learning in higher education: a systematic review of articles (2011–2015),’ Int. Rev. Res. Open Distrib. Learn., 18 (7), 1–23. Kumar, J.A., Sumi, S., Verma, A. and Verma, S. (2019) ‘Use of smartphones for academic purposes by teachers of Panjab University,’ IJRTE, 7 (6S5), 290–294.

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Leah Jerop Komen Lepp, A., Barkley, J.E. and Karpinski, A.C. (2015) ‘The relationship between cell phone use and academic performance in a sample of U.S. College Students,’ SAGE Open, 5, 1–9. https://doi. org/10.1177/2158244015573169. Ling, R. (2004) The mobile connection: The cell phone’s impact on society, Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann/ Elsevier. Ling, R. (2008) New tech, new ties, Cambridge: MIT Press. Lee, K. (2017) ‘Rethinking the accessibility of online higher education: a Historical review,’ Internet High. Educ., 33, 15–23. McLoughlin, C. and Lee, M.J.W. (2010) ‘Personalised and self-regulated learning in the web 2.0 era: international exemplars of innovative pedagogy using social software,’ Austral. J. Educ. Technol., 26 (1), 28–43. Mobile Learning Group. (2004) Mobile learning: Challenges and opportunities for learners, teachers and institutions. Retrieved https://www.academia.edu/1204432/Mobile_learning_in_review_ Opportunities_and_challenges_for_learners_teachers_and_institutions Mohammadi, M., Sarvestani, M.S. and Nouroozi, S. (2020) ‘Mobile phone use in education and learning by faculty members of technical-engineering groups: Concurrent mixed methods design,’ Front. Educ., 5, 16. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00016. Rodriguez, J. (2011) ‘Social media use in higher education: key areas to consider for educators,’ J. Online Learn. Teach., 7 (4), 539–550. Rogers, E.M. (1962) Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press. Shon, J. G. (2008) M-Learning Trends in Korea. Presentation at the ISO/IEC JTEC1/SC36 Open Forum, Seoul, Korea, March 2008. Selwyn, N. (2010) ‘Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology,’ Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26 (1), 65–73. Shaw, R. D. (2014) ‘How Critical Is Critical Thinking?,’ Music. Educ. J., 101(2), 65–70. https://doi. org/10.1177/0027432114544376 Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) ‘Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life’, in R. Silverstone and R. Mansell (eds.) Communication by design. The politics of information and communication technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 44–74. Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) ‘Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,’ in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds.) Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces, London: Routledge, 15–32. Tess, P.A. (2013) ‘The role of social media in higher education classes (real and virtual) – A literature review,’ Computers in Human Behavior, 29 (5), A60–A68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.12.032. Traxler, J. and Bridges, N. (2004) Mobile learning - the ethical and legal challenges. Proceedings of MLEARN 2004, Bracciano, June. UNESCO (2013) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Report. Institute for Lifelong Learning. Vacas, A.A., Niño, J.I. and Álvarez, S. (2019) ‘Use of a mobile app to improve the quality of university teaching: a neuromarketing study,’ Prism Soc., 27, 65–85. Vasilevski, N., Birt, J. (2020) ‘Analysing construction student experiences of mobile mixed reality enhanced learning in virtual and augmented reality environments,’ Res. Learn. Technol., 28, 2329. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2329. Xue, S.J. (2020) ‘A conceptual model for integrating affordances of mobile technologies into taskbased language teaching,’ Interact. Learn Environ. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2019.1711132.

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33 DIGITAL INCLUSION AND DOMESTICATION Jenny Kennedy and Indigo Holcombe-James

Introduction This chapter considers how the domestication framework can be applied in research on digital inclusion to aid our understanding of how social inequalities are experienced within the contextual and relational structures of households and beyond. It draws from empirical material on the lived experiences of digital exclusion in low-income households in Australia to emphasise how practices that take place within the home impact digital inclusion. Using examples drawn from an ethnographic study of low-income households, this chapter argues that domestication theory offers a means to understand how contextual factors impact the ways in which people engage with digital practices of inclusion. For example: how parental technology practices impact adolescent digital inclusion; or how choices between expenditure on home versus mobile internet access impact data usage and consumption. These influences have often been overlooked in digital inclusion research. Although digital inclusion research demonstrates that low-income households are particularly likely to experience digital disadvantage, much research in this area is conducted at the individual level. That is, individuals are surveyed, or interviewed, or observed to generate understanding about the influence of affordability on those individual’s experience of digital inclusion. However, as Helsper (2017) argues, this individualised focus disregards the influence that the fluid social contexts in which these individuals exist may or may not have on their digital inclusion. Even research that investigates everyday and domestic uses of digital technologies tends not to theorise “how individuals influence each other, or how others, who are not part of the household unit, influence individuals within the household” (Helsper, 2017: 224). We draw on empirical data to illustrate how the contextual determinants of digital inclusion and exclusion impact each phase of the domestication process in low-income households in our study.

What is digital inclusion? Digital inclusion research is concerned with the uneven distribution of digital access, skills, uses, and benefits. Early research approached digital inclusion as a binary consideration. This approach is best typified by the metaphor of the “digital divide” (NTIA, 1995): one is either online or offline, connected or disconnected. However, as research has increasingly shown, DOI: 10.4324/9781003265931-46

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it is not enough to simply have the connection or the device. To experience digital inclusion, you also need to be able to use the connection or device. Accordingly, a subsequent body of research identified what is sometimes described as a “second-level” digital divide (van Dijk, 2006; van Dijk & Hacker, 2003) and that refers to the differences in digital skills or literacies that meaningful digital participation requires (Hargittai, 2002; Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019; van Deursen & van Dijk, 2014). In turn, the financial outlay required to gain access to digital connections and devices, and to develop the skills required to use them, has also been identified (Breunig & McCarthy, 2018; Bureau of Communications and Arts Research, 2017; Ogle, 2017; Ogle & Musolino, 2016; Thomas et al., 2018, 2020; Wise, 2013). As digital technologies have become increasingly embedded within contemporary life, a third digital divide – the differences in the benefits accrued from accessing and using digital connections and devices – has been highlighted (van Deursen & Helsper, 2015). Digital inclusion research borrows from and builds on this existing research to argue that each of these components of access, skills, and resourcing is critical and is required to be in place simultaneously. Adequate access (e.g., material access to a national broadband network) is inadequate for digital inclusion if it is not also accompanied by the skills and financial resourcing necessary to enable meaningful and beneficial participation. Digital exclusion was once described as being on the wrong side of the digital divide. Today, digital exclusion is understood through more nuanced terms. Digital inclusion is not simply achieved and digital exclusion thus overcomes. Digital inclusion may be experienced today and made difficult tomorrow. Your WiFi, for instance, might be playing up and your access becomes problematic, your data consumption might have increased to such a degree that it is no longer affordable to maintain, or your work demands that you acquire and learn to use a digital device to which you have difficulty adapting. What is of primary interest here, then, is digital inequality (Helsper, 2021). Critically, digital inequality falls along existing socio-economic lines of distinction. You are most likely to experience digital inclusion if you are comparatively privileged: those who experience the greatest levels of digital inclusion are typically the wealthy, the educated, and the urban- or city-dwelling. Those experiencing digital exclusion, in turn, are likely to be facing intersecting factors of inequality. They may live in rural or remote areas, belong to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, identify as Indigenous, single-parents, living with or caring for someone with a disability. In this chapter, we are particularly concerned with the digital exclusion experienced by those in low-income households.

How is digital inclusion “approached”? As digital inclusion has become increasingly necessary for social, cultural, and economic participation, so too has digital inclusion become a policy concern. In line with this, quantitative methods of measuring digital inequality such as indices at a population level (e.g., the Australian Digital Inclusion Index and the Lloyds Bank Index) have proliferated. These methods, however, typically approach digital inclusion as an individualised concern (Helsper, 2017). Indices such as the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al., 2021) rely on survey data collected from individuals. At the same time, a swathe of qualitative literature engaging with digital inclusion concerns at a finer grain – such as within communities, or specific population cohorts – has been developed. Yet, even research that investigates everyday and domestic uses of digital technologies tends not to theorise “how individuals influence each other, or how others, who are not part of the household unit, influence individuals within the household” (Helsper, 2017: 224). 494

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More useful, we suggest, are those studies that consider the dynamic interplay between individuals and the contextual structures in which they take part. Burrell (2018), for instance, uses materiality to think through the relational dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion. And Park (2017) draws on Bourdieu to deploy the conceptual framework of digital capital and enable analysis of the economic, cultural, and social capitals that digital inclusion requires. Approaches such as these are useful for digital inclusion research because they broaden our focus beyond the individual and shift our attention away from lack, and towards the nuanced relations of material and social influences. In this chapter, we show how domestication theory offers a similar utility to digital inclusion research and practice.

What study are we drawing from here? In this chapter, we draw from a study of low-income households that each received an inclusion kit consisting of a laptop, a 4G router, and SIM card. The SIM provided unlimited internet access for two years. These kits were distributed under the Connected Students programme and run by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider. Telstra builds and operates networks and markets voice, mobile, internet access, pay television, and other products and services. The aim of the Connected Students programme was to address the impact of affordability barriers on digital disadvantage. The programme began in April 2020 and concluded in October 2022. The kits were distributed to households of senior students at Greater Shepparton High School in Victoria, Australia. Shepparton is a regional city with a population of around 30,000. A similar number of people live in the surrounding area. The Shepparton area has low long-term employment rates compared to state or national averages. More than a quarter of the population receive government support (Moran & Mallman, 2015: 69). This backdrop of economic disadvantage was one of the reasons this location was chosen for the rollout of the programme. Households were recruited to the Connected Students programme through the local high school. Participating households were also invited to take part in the research evaluation of the programme which involved surveys and interviews. Each of these households self-identified as low-income and had at least one child between the ages of 15–18. While the internet connection was provided to the whole house, the laptop was given to the child. We met with the recipient child and a caregiver in each participating household to interview them at least once over the duration of the programme. Often, other family members participated in the interviews too. In some cases, these interviews took place by video call (with this due largely to ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions), and others were conducted face-to-face. To date, we have conducted a total of 57 interviews across 35 households. We interviewed participants on their experience of digital exclusion. We asked participants to describe: the devices in their home and how they are used; the routines and dynamics of their household; the costs associated with connectivity and how they navigated these; the barriers they experienced accessing connectivity; how they worked around these barriers; the impact barriers had on their lived experience; and the impact of the Connected Students kit for them and their household. We later coded the interview transcripts according to these themes. Quotes from these transcripts are cited pseudonymously in the sections below. When we attended households in person we also conducted technology tours. This involved moving through the house, noting digital devices around the home, their location, uses, users and non-users, and how they were acquired (e.g., purchased outright; payment plans; donated by friend or family member) to document how and where technology is 495

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located and used in everyday life, in the home environment, and the interactions home occupants typically have with these technologies (Kennedy et al., 2020; Nansen et al., 2015). Participants take the lead in the technology tours, not the researchers. The technology tour is effective in mapping socio-technical and economic dynamics of households’ digital participation and is consistent with the ethnographic methods used by Silverstone, Hirsh, and Morley (1991) in their approach to the study of information and communication technologies in the home. The methods described were chosen for their usefulness for unpacking the structural aspects of digital inclusion in participating households. In addition, we also sought to understand the relational impacts of the Connected Students kit, operating with the understanding that provision of a laptop to one child within a family would likely have indirect consequences for others in the household. In the next section, we use the domestication framework to identify how these relational dynamics played out and describe what taking a domestication approach can tell us about digital inclusion more broadly.

What does the domestication framework offer digital inclusion studies? In this section, we consider how each of the phases of domestication, including the preceding imagining phase, can help explain the relational dynamics of digital inclusion with households. As Silverstone, Hirsch, and Morley (1992: 16) tell us, once a technology or a device is domesticated, it is “redefined in different terms, in accordance with the household’s own values and interests.” In outlining how these phases present in the research data, we are particularly interested in what using a domestication framework tells us about how, and in what ways, digital exclusion intersects with a “household’s own values and interests” (ibid.).

Imagining Each of the students in the Connected Students programme households was without their own laptop at the time the programme began. When we came to interview them, it was striking how many of these teenagers had casual jobs, earning money on weekends and evenings. The influence of this income on the household as a whole varied: while some students’ earnings were directed towards living costs, others were free to spend their income as they pleased. In most instances, however, those students that were earning paid for their own mobile phone connections, and occasionally paid for additional streaming services shared with family members. A significant number of these working teenagers were putting earnings into savings and spoke proudly of the amount they had saved. Yet, only a couple planned to use these savings to purchase a laptop. Instead, almost all were saving for their own car. A smaller cohort told of saving for the anticipated expenses of attending university in the coming years, and the need to move away from home. Wilma lives with her parents and two siblings. She told us she had purchased a laptop a few months before the Connected Students programme began, “I purchased one around Christmastime because I figured, yeah, last year, I can take it onto university. I think it’s a good move I got one.” She was one of the few participants in the study who showed desire to continue to higher education. We asked other participants if they had considered purchasing their own laptops, but received negative answers in almost every instance. When asked why, answers were often vague. We pondered this in our debriefs and fieldnotes after each interview. Was it the cost? Or did participants not see the benefit or purpose of a laptop for their own, varied situations? Sometimes during our interviews, participants would describe having purchased a 496

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new mobile phone or a smart watch, or would show us a new gaming console during the technology tour. Participants – both children and parents – were clearly willing to expend significant amounts of money for some digital devices but not others. And they were willing to make use of “buy-now, pay later” credit schemes to purchase these devices when they did not have readily available funds, but not to access these schemes for laptops. Approaching these experiences through the domestication framework suggests that participants did not move to acquire a laptop because they could not imagine a use for it that would prompt them to go through the next stage of domestication: the acquisition process. The benefits of such a device appeared to be too distant to their daily life and practices for them to imagine. In particular, participants indicated that they did not see a use for a laptop beyond schooling. Given that the students participating in the Connected Students programme were in their senior years of schooling, investing in such a device was seen as being “too late” to be justified. Only a couple of participants attached meaning to such devices from contexts that extended beyond high school education. However, it is important to note that these participants’ association of value remained tied to educational purposes. These participants told us how useful the Connected Students laptop would be when they went on to tertiary education. The remaining cohort were largely excited to leave school and planned to transition into full-time employment within their local area. This might explain why, for many of the teenagers we interviewed, a car was considered a more immediate tool of independence than a laptop.

Appropriation Within the Connected Students households, both imaginings and relational dynamics were apparent in the ways that technologies were appropriated. This was especially noticeable in the dynamic between parents and teenagers, and the way the parent’s value system and digital abilities impacted and influenced how and if others in the household acquired devices. To continue with the laptop example described above, parents, who themselves did not use a laptop, struggled to imagine a use for a laptop beyond schooling and did not indicate in interviews that they had encouraged their teenager to spend money on one, whether their own or that of the household. It is worth noting that few of the participating parents within the cohort were employed in desk or office-based roles, with this illustrating the ways in which existing daily practices (or the lack of such existing daily practices) inform the ways in which devices are appropriated or acquired. Acquisition of personal devices such as mobile phones was typically initiated by the teenager, although in a few households, mobile phones were acquired for younger siblings for keeping in touch with their parents when travelling to and from school. Only teenagers with casual jobs, who were earning their own money, were able to make decisions about what phone to purchase and what type of data plan to use. For those teenagers within the cohort who were not employed, their parents made choices about what model mobile phone and which data plan would be provided on the basis of the household budget. In an effort to reduce these costs, parents often spoke about how they had bundled multiple data plans within the household. The relationship between acquisition and financial expenditures was strongly identified across the participating households. In most households, and for almost all technology decisions within the household, the person managing payments was also the person making financial decisions. However, in households with two parents within our study, the parent earning the greatest share of the household’s income was not necessarily managing the household finances, nor making the decisions that impacted the digital participation 497

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practices of the household – whether to have home internet, how much data, what devices to acquire, streaming services to subscribe to, etc. This is striking when compared to domestication- oriented household studies of affluent families, which show that the person making many of the technology acquisition decisions in heteronormative households is frequently both the primary income-provider and a man (Kennedy et al., 2020). In such households, technology acquisition is described as a hobby, entertainment, and a leisure pursuit. Conversations in these households about acquisition decisions tend not to interact with conversations about utilitarian household budgets. For the low-income households in our study, however, it was mostly women who managed the household budgets, the payment of bills, and the decisions on “extras.” They typically described a careful and tight budgeting process, where funds allocated for one purpose could be impacted by another, more immediate, cost. You think ‘Oh my god, you know, why is this so expensive?’ But it’s just a necessity these days, isn’t it? You have to have it. Well it’s just something that I do. The kids have to have it for school, so obviously you pay your rent and your heat, but internet access is factored in in those living expenses. (Gina, a parent of two teenagers, living on a disability support pension and carer payments) Sometimes I might have some other bills, so I might divert paying the phone bill to pay other bills and then sometimes it causes some trouble. … It’s not really trouble; it’s just like [the telco] say that the bill’s due and I’m like ‘Oh shit. I’ll have to’ – and then I’ll call them up to make a payment arrangement. Generally, it’s paid within a couple of weeks after that. (Karina, parent to four children and working full-time) We were data rationing, trying to keep an eye on how close you were because, of course, you’d go over that smidge and there’s another $10 down. It could be the day before your data renews, and it’s like, damn. ( Julia, parent, working full-time)

Objectification Where objectification – the physical integration of devices into the home and into daily routines – often indicates something of the values and interests of those in the household, in the context of digital inclusion, it also reveals something about the levels of digital inclusion held within and experienced by the home. We visited many households that described how their previous WiFi modem or the Connected Students modem did not reach certain areas of their homes or produced a very weak signal. Single-parent Richard told us: Although our house is not very big, it gets to the start of the hallway and then bingo, it drops out. My bedroom is the closest to where it is, and it drops out, let alone get to the girls’ room. In these houses, the modems were often located at either one end, or in the very centre, of brick houses. Despite the WiFi signal produced not being strong enough to penetrate the infrastructure of the house to where the devices were being used, participants in these 498

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households resisted moving their modems. Instead, members of these households “put up” with insufficient or inadequate household connectivity, resorting to moving to locations within the house where the signal was stronger, forgoing quieter workspaces, or using the data provided through their mobile phones (whether pre- or post-paid). Other households within our study reported that they had maintained their previous connection and placed the Connected Students modem at another point in the house to increase coverage. When considered in light of the low incomes of these households, these practices are particularly concerning. Despite the affordability impacts of such practices, these households resisted re-negotiating the objectification of these devices, neither taking full advantage of the free connectivity facilitated through the Connected Students programme, nor reducing expenditures by selecting “better value” plans at the household level. While costs of WiFi amplifier devices may ultimately be prohibitive for low-income households with coverage issues, those we asked did not know such devices existed and had not considered their value. Certainly, the cost of a WiFi amplifier would have been cheaper than maintaining two connections (albeit one connection was free for the duration of the study). Digital literacy is an important component of digital inclusion and an important component of the objectification process. The digital literacy required to understand and troubleshoot such connectivity concerns, however, is not usually considered in digital inclusion literature. Such research tends to consider questions of access (e.g., do you have it?), use (e.g., how do you use it?), or benefit (e.g., what do you get out of it?). We rarely ask questions like “how do you set your WiFi network up?”, “how do you figure out why your connection dropped out?”, or “what do you do if the signal does not reach all areas of the house that you need it to?” Taking a domestication approach, in contrast, reveals that negotiating these considerations forms a critical component of digital inclusion. Without the abilities required to successfully objectify the device and its affordances, digital inclusion of the household remains unobtainable.

Incorporation The social and economic contexts of households profoundly influence the ways in which digital devices are incorporated (or not). Some households described actions or practices aimed towards reducing the integration of devices into household rhythms and routines. One mum, on a limited broadband plan, told us how she would unplug and take the modem out of the house with her, placing it in her handbag, when she left to do household errands such as grocery shopping so that her teenage children would not use up the data allowance playing online video games while unsupervised. It got to the point where I would take [the modem] whenever I went into town because… we’d get home and all the data would be used. So I would take it with me and I would take the handpiece of the phone with me. What else did I - the TV remote, everything would go in my handbag when I went into town on a weekend so there was something usable when I got home. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, but that’s what we did. [Karla, living with her husband, adult son and three teenagers] Another parent told us how they turned the modem off at 9 pm each evening to prevent their school-aged children staying up late streaming TV. These were complicated decisions to make with impacts for all residents in the home. In one household, a grown child in their late 20s was also living in the family home and experienced the same data curfew. 499

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Conversion The most significant dynamic influencing domestication of devices within the participating households was the digital inclusion of the parent. Parents’ economic circumstances were obvious factors, but their literacy (e.g., their digital abilities) also played a significant part in understanding the significance of devices and influenced their willingness to facilitate their incorporation into household dynamics. The laptops distributed in the Connected Students kits were always intended to support schoolwork, but the timing of the project, which coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, seemed to intensify this educational association. While students in participating households were restricted to online learning for a period of time, many also restricted their use of the laptop during this period for schoolwork only. They gave a variety of reasons for doing so (e.g., the portability and instantaneity of access of phones were preferable for social media use). Particularly notable were participant descriptions of their device as being associated with school work. To avoid this association, they chose to stream TV (whether Netflix, Stan, or otherwise) on their small mobile phone screen rather than watch TV on their “school” laptop. When the screen was closed on the laptop, they were done with school for the day. When they eventually returned to school in-person, this association remained for some months after.

The social contexts of digital inclusion By tracing the experiences of participating households and their engagements with the stages of the domestication process, this chapter provides evidence of the utility of this approach for gaining greater insight into the dynamic material and relational enablers and inhibitors of digital inclusion. Attention to the connection between material consumption capacities of households and digital inclusion echoes sentiments of early domestication research. “We wanted,” Silverstone et al. stated, “to understand how, and how significantly, a family’s material position determined its opportunities for consumption” (1991: 206). Like other early domestication studies of computer adoption showed (Haddon, 1992; Lally, 2002; Murdock, Hartmann & Gray, 1992; Wheelock, 1992), affordability plays a significant role in the adoption of devices. In taking a domestication approach to this data, we highlight how approaches to digital inclusion that privilege the individual may neglect critical influences that enter into and intervene with the individual’s experience beyond affordability. Calderón Gómez in his study of digital capital of youths in Madrid shows that shared social practices “overturns the idea that digital domestication is an individualized practice (Lupač, 2018)— most human activities are social after all” (2021: 2547). Critically, taking a domestication approach to understanding the dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion enables awareness of the influence not only of other household residents, but of the household itself. For those participants who struggled to progress through the phases of domesticating their digital devices, their struggles were not only tied to the varied levels of digital ability that they and others in their household held, but also the material dimensions of the household. The thick brick walls and physical layout of the house had a direct influence on the connectivity – and thus the basis of digital inclusion – that residents of these households were able to take advantage of. Taking a domestication approach to this data also reveals the ways in which devices in these digitally excluded households were often not domesticated. Households in which

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connectivity was uneven or unavailable, or in which household residents lacked digital abilities, were often at the mercy of the digital devices, rather than the other way around. In these households, domestication is perhaps a more circular process prone to stagnation than it is in others that are able to move through each stage more smoothly. In one household, there was a top-range sound bar visible under the smart TV in their lounge room. It had been there for some time, evidenced by the layer of dust over it. The participants were dismissive of the device, saying that it was less than a year old, but that it did not work. We asked how long it had been broken and were told it was not broken. We intuited that they had purchased the desired device, but had failed at some stage of the set-up process, leaving them in a state of inertia with the device. They had been unsuccessful so far in setting it up, but had also abandoned returning the device to the store for a refund. There was a sense of discomfort, or shame, about the circumstances. They said that they “should” be able to set it up. Participants were often negative about their digital abilities, dismissing what they were able to do in order to emphasise their lack of confidence in doing other things. Being unable to “tame” a new device was particularly shame-inducing for this family. What this shows is how meaning is attached to devices both outside and inside the home regardless of whether the domestication process is successful. Studies of low-income households also reveal how the domestication process is not linear. Powell et al. (2010) describe how low-income Americans participate in cycles of adoption, where a broadband connection is adopted for a period of time, disconnected or cancelled for financial reasons, then re-adopted when financial difficulties ease. This practice was identified in the Connected Students participants also. Households described temporary disruptions to their home internet access for weeks at a time because a bill could not be immediately paid, as well as longer disruptions of some months because of changes to income, such as a parent reducing their working hours to care for a family member or the ebb of seasonal work. Previous studies have referred to this process as “unadoption” (Whitacre & Rhinesmith, 2016) or the “fragile equilibrium of home broadband adoption” (Dailey et al., 2010: 3). Even though households in our study prioritised internet connection over other household expenses (also echoing earlier studies of low-income households, see Rhinesmith et al., 2019), disruptions were unavoidable.

Conclusion Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that digital inclusion and exclusion are likewise determined by social and economic factors, the dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion and their influence on the incorporation of digital devices played out in a variety of ways in the households that we worked with. While absolute digital exclusion would limit the domestication process entirely, dynamics of digital inclusion and exclusion are increasingly more nuanced. As noted above, digital inclusion research and initiatives tell us that it is not enough to simply have access, this access must be affordable, and the individual must have the time, opportunity, and wherewithal to gain the skills required to make use and draw benefit from these devices and skills. Through working with low-income households participating in the Connected Students programme – households that existing research tells us are especially likely to experience digital exclusion – we show how low-income households take part in the domestication process, and reveal the ways in which digital exclusion both disrupts and distorts this process. Specifically, we show how the social context of the whole household impacts digital inclusion for individuals living there.

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Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. A/B toaster 216, 218 Abendzeitung 74, 75 active non-participation 274–275 actor network theory (ANT) 221, 348 air-quality birdcage 214, 215 Alaimo, C. 271 algorithmic friendship 142 Althusser, L. 240 Åm, H. 187 Andersen, T.F. 11 ANT see actor network theory (ANT) anxiety 2, 3, 11, 92, 95, 97, 98, 427 Appadurai, A. 81 appropriation 1, 4, 17, 30, 42–43, 45, 56, 84, 158, 158, 212, 289, 348, 349, 497–498; cultural 153; internet-connected computers 58–60; media technology 96, 124, 180, 271, 287; mobile phone 484–485; public 185; reverse 367–368; simple cash-purchase nexus 113–114 Archambault, Soleil 116 Arnold, M. 299 Ask, K. 194, 299, 310, 377, 379 Aune, M. 349 Australian Digital Inclusion Index 494 autocatalytic cycle 230n6 Bakardjieva, M. 11, 56, 59, 251–252, 292, 390, 436 Ball, D.W. 354 Barthes, R. 204 Bauman, Z. 96 Bausinger, H. 74 Baym, N. 455

Beavis, C. 387 Beck, U. 96 Beddington, E. 71, 72 Benjamin, R. 447 Berker, T. 10, 88, 288 Bertel, T. 405 Biden, J. 145 Big Other 258–262 Bijker, W.E. 183–185 Birkland, J.L.H. 418 Blank, G. 300 Bloch, M. 20 Blomberg, J. 34, 37 Blommaert, J. 143 Blumer, H. 350 Boczkowski, P.J. 403 Bøhling, F. 315, 316 Bolter, J. D. 44 Bonsiepe, G. 204 Borkowski, A. 417 Boude, O.R. 482 Bourdieu, P. 20, 253, 350 Bourke, A.R. 418, 453, 456–461, 463 Boyd, D. 137 Branscomb, L.M. 184 Brause, S. R. 300 broken domestication 435–449 Brown, J. 401 Brown, R. 315 Browning, C.S. 5 Brunotti, I. 142 Brunty, J. 137 Bryne, E. 141 Butler, J. 387

505

Index Caesar, J. 148–149 Carey, J. 236 Carman Neustaedter, C. 425 Carneiro da Cunha, M. 19–20 Carrier, J. 158 Carson, A. 439 Carter, S. 348 Casemajor, N. 274 Chan, D. 390 Chen, V.H.-H. 118 Chib, A. 118 Chun, W.H.K. 387 Clark, L.S. 396 clubbing practice 313–314 Cockburn, C. 80 Coleman, G. 138 contexts 56, 58, 66, 154, 200, 243, 382; contentcontext conundrum 331–344; cultural 11, 17, 25, 46, 107, 117, 138, 140, 141, 153, 396, 468–470; digital media 57; domestic 10, 57, 91; domestication 329–330; economic 11, 241, 499; policy 66; social 17, 25, 57, 119, 483, 499–501 Cooper, C. 405 Costa, E. 140 Couldry, N. 269, 275, 436 counter-domestication 251–252 Courtois, C. 139 COVID-19 press media 96–98 creolisation 152 Cuban Internet 251, 296–297, 300, 302–305, 307–310 cultural diversity 153 cultural melange 152 d’Andrea, L. 184, 185 Dahlberg, A. 9 Dalsgaard, S. 17 data 56–58, 96–98, 133, 155, 169, 180, 238, 252, 259–261, 266–268, 335–339, 439–442, 493–500; analysis 484; bundles 489, 490; colonialism 235, 271; disempowerment  268–271; domestication 214–216, 215–218; entangled infrastructures 271–272; infrastructural inversion 272–274; multilevel public value approach 275–276; survey 422, 430 data colonialism 235 data domestication: A/B toaster 216, 218; airquality birdcage 214, 215; correlation display 216, 217; motivation scale 216, 218; noiselevel leash 214, 216; service printer 216, 217; water-quality aquarium 214, 215 devices context 199–201, 200, 201 David, M. 357 De Schutter, B. 401 De Waal, M. 266

Descola, P. 19 design 31, 33, 34, 71, 83, 193–194, 380, 420, 424; domestication 179–181; fiction 214–216, 215–218; research 237–238, 301–302; VAPAs 435, 439, 440, 442, 447 Deursen, A. van 292 Dewey, J. 222 Dezuanni, M. 387, 388 digital detox camp 330, 361: analysis 364–367; appropriation 362; camp event 367; conversion 362, 363; disconnection practices and discourses 361; incorporation 362; methods and material 363–364; objectification 362; reverse appropriation 367–368; reverse conversion 370; reverse domestication 363; reverse incorporation 368–369; reverse objectification 369; situational domestication 362 digital divide 493–494 digital ethnography 138 digital game-based learning (DGBL) 380 digital games: domestication dimensions 382–383; heterogeneity 376–378; learning to play 380–382; mainstream 374–375; negative stereotypes 375–376; online community 379; PEGA ratings 378; STS model 374 digital inclusion: appropriation 497–498; Australian Digital Inclusion Index 494; Connected Students programme 495; conversion 500; digital divide 493–494; domestication theory 493; imagining 496–497; incorporation 499; objectification 498–499; social contexts 500–501 digital labour 133 digital platforms 266–268, 266–276, 271–272 digital tools 61 Dijck, J. van 64, 266, 269, 276, 292 dis-domestication 45, 252, 280, 290–291, 293, 393 disempowerment 268–271 disruption/change 307–309 Dolar, M. 457 domestic mobilization 48 domestication 1, 2, 4, 5, 70–85, 75, 105, 179–181, 489; broken 435–449; contextualising 329–330; (counter-)domesticating media and technologies 251–252; COVID-19 press media 96–98; Cuban Internet 296–310; data 214–216; digital games 374–383; digital inclusion 493–501; discomforts and continuity 94–96; domesticators 253–264; FoMO 91–94; “home-based” domestication 117; homing 417–418; ICT 331–344; indications 98–99; infrastructural inversion 266–276; lockdown screen worlds 419–432; mobile communication, women 109–119, 123–134; mobile learning 483; ‘moral’ economy

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Index 106–107; mutual 235–247; ‘natural’ 107–108; networked domestication 300–301, 309–310; non-domestication 285–286; nuanced 137– 149; older adults 468–478; personhood 15–25; phones and drugs 313–325; practice-based theories 219–230; private mobilization 88–91, 88, 90; re-domestication 42–53; reflexive domestication 98–99; research 55–66, 401–412; (re-)thinking 9–13; reverse 361–371; radio’s gendered 452–465; roofless media 282–285, 290–291; savage medium 291–293; situational 347–357; social media via mobile telephony 482–483; smartphones 152–159; vs. taming 290; technoscience 182–194; theory 162–172, 386; user-led infrastructuring 29–39; wild technologies 286–289 domestication origins 298–299 domesticators 19, 31, 252, 253–264 Döring, N. 437–438 double articulation 105, 108, 165, 167, 198, 237, 239, 242, 245, 255, 256, 267, 298, 331–333 Douglas, M. 78, 258 dual broadcasting system, re-domestication 50–52 Duart, J.M. 482 Dumont, L. 16 Dye, M. 296–298, 301, 303 economic constraints 303 educational apps 407–409 Eileen, A. 390–391 Einthoven, W. 224 Ekdale, B. 141, 144 El Paquete Semanal (EPS) 297–298, 305–306 Eliot, G. 18 Ellis, J. 50, 51 Ellison, N.B. 137 empowerment 82, 87, 194, 396, 439 ethnocentrism 164–166 ethnographic methodology 168–171 failed domestication 286 familism 164 Fassin, D. 106 fear of missing out (FoMO) 91–94 Feenberg, A. 83, 254–255, 289 Fernández, R. 298 Fernandez-Ardevol, M. 107–108 Fibæk Bertel, T. 44 fitness wearable device 406–407 Fitzgerald, J.I. 316 Forbes Herrick, G. 462 forms of domestication: counter-domestication 252, 266–276; dis-domestication 45, 252, 280, 290–291, 293, 393; non-domestication 188, 285–286, 290; re-domestication 11–12,

42–53, 290–291, 300, 363, 411; reverse domestication 1, 330, 361–371 Fortunati, L. 114 Foucault, M. 244 Garfinkel, H. 351 Gauntlett, D. 71 Gell, A. 20 Giddens, A. 2–3, 96, 222, 236, 268, 350 Gieser, T. 20–21 Gillespie, T. 236 Goffman, E. 350, 351, 421, 429, 431 Goggin, G. 389 Goulding, C. 315 Grasseni, C. 20–21 Gray, A. 72, 76, 108 Green, J. 389 Gregg, M. 315 Grošelj, D. 44 Grusin, R. 44 Gullestad, M. 31 Gupta, N. 349, 353, 354 Habermas, J. 31, 347 Haddon, L. 42–44, 55, 88, 112, 300, 309, 351, 389, 454–455 Hage, G. 20 Hahn, H.P. 107 Hall, S. 89, 90, 95 Hampton, K.N. 349, 353, 354 Hansen, S. 90 Hartmann, M. 13, 71–74, 75, 76–85, 88, 212, 251, 252, 256, 309, 349 Harvey, A. 404, 405 Heidegger, M. 222 Heidenreich, S. 186, 187, 188, 193 Helenek, K. 137 Helles, R. 266 Helle-Valle, J. 107, 166 Helmond, A. 270, 271 Helsper, E. 493 Henriksen, I.M. 356 Heshmat, Y. 425 Hirsch, E. 10–11, 36, 43, 83, 349 Hjorth, L. 299, 428 Holcomb-James, I. 418 Holdsworth, A. 77, 79 homelessness industry 293n5 Horst, H. 15, 398 Horton, D. 256 household 10–12, 17–18, 25, 31, 35–38, 43–52, 57–60, 71–74, 200–211, 258–260, 362, 495–501; domestic 330, 348, 423; ethnocentrism 164–166; moral economy 87–99, 88, 106–108, 335, 420, 428; online 430; third articulation 255–256; video conferencing 422 Huang, Y. 45, 290, 300, 403

507

Index Hubak, M. 190 Hugh-Jones, S. 19 Huizinga, J. 377 Humphrey, C. 26n3 Hutchby, I. 420 hybridisation 152 Hynes, D. 23 Igwebuike, E. 156 immobile mobile phone: LTCs 61–62; policy context 61; policy implications 63 information and communication technology (ICT) 15, 389 infrastructural inversion 29–30, 272–274 infrastructure 10; computer-based technologies 139; counter-domestication 266–276; smartphones 318; user-led 29–39 infrastructuring: characteristics 33–34; devicecentred aspects 35; inversion 35; master narratives 34; reach and scope 37; standards 36–37; transparency 37–38 Ingold, T. 20–21 Instant Messaging (IM) 44 intelligent transport systems 189 interactions issues, domestication 405–406, 411 Internet, domestic communication cultures 46–48 Internet-connected computers: appropriation 59–60; policy context 58–59; policy implications 60 Jackson, M. 21 Jensen, K.B. 266 Johnson, B. 79 Johnson, C. 71, 76, 79 Juma, E. 145 Kalahari 107, 163–165, 172 Kallinikos, J. 271 Kallio, K. P. 377 Karasti, H. 34, 37 Karl, I. 200 Karlsen, F. 401 Kaszuba, B.F. 461–462 Keilbach, J. 32 Keja, R. 156–157 Kenaw, S. 156 Kennedy, J. 418 Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) 138, 147 Kim, K. 395 Kirmaye, L.J. 140 Klimek, A. 186, 188, 193 Klocke, V. 76–77, 180, 282–284 Knodel, K. 156–157 Knorr Cetina, K. 419, 421, 425, 426, 430, 431 Komen, L.J. 418 Kopytoff, I. 223

Kozinets, R.V. 141 Kracauer, S. 418 Krull, G. 482 Laing, R.D. 84 Lally, E. 18, 389 Lamarre, T. 388 Larkin, B. 34, 85 Laurier, E. 353 Lave, J. 21 Lazaridis, M. 127–128 learning management systems (LMSs) 483 Lees-Maffei, G. 429 Leong, L. 247, 251, 297, 299, 404 Lie, M. 31, 299 Lievrouw, L.A. 275–276 Lim, S.S. 107–108, 396 Ling, R. 44, 107 Lipset, D. 23–25 Liste, L. 309–310 Livingstone, S. 255, 256, 275–276, 390, 395, 396–397, 401 Lloyd, J. 418 Lodziak, C. 73–74 Löfgren, O. 223 Lowis, D. 282 Lull, J. 73, 89, 90 Madsen, O.J. 361 Martìnez, C. 12, 63, 306, 308, 362 Marx, K. 10 Mascheroni, G. 44 mass self-communication 266 Matassi, M. 403 material articulations 198–199 Mauss, M. 16, 26n4 McDonald, T. 22–23, 404 McGonigal, J. 376 McKay, D. 17 McLuhan, M. 87, 94, 95, 236 Mead, M. 91 media diary 337–338, 341 media-centric tendency 163 media-centrism 167–168 media technologies, living spaces 208–211, 209–212 mediatization process 4 Mejias, U. A. 269, 275 Miao, W. 45, 290, 300, 403 micro-infrastructures 37 Miller, D. 15, 83, 200 Minecraft play 386–387; domestic media 388–390; ethnographies 387–388; intergenerational and sibling play 392–395, 393–394; screen time 395–398, 397; touchscreen interface 390–392 Mitchelstein, E. 403

508

Index m-learning: data analysis 484; domestication approach 483; mobile phone appropriation 484–485; mobile phone conversion 488–489; mobile phone incorporation 485–487; mobile phone objectification 487; multistep descriptive research design 484; proinnovation bias 482; social media 483–484, 489–490; social media via mobile telephony 482–483; social media visibility 481 mobile communication, Asia: benefits 130–132; digital services 124; education 125–126; environmentalism 126–127; fitness 127; religious worship 126; smartphone users 124, 125; social interaction 125; super apps 123, 127–130; technology domestication theory 124 mobile communication, by women: appropriation 112–114; commercial and the private domains 109–110; conversion 117–118; ICTs 110–111; imagination phase 111–112; incorporation 115–117; objectification 114–115 mobile phone appropriation 484–485 mobile phone conversion 488–489 mobile phone incorporation 485–487 mobile phone objectification 487 mobile privatization 88, 96 Moe, H. 361 Mohseni, M. R. 437–438 Møller, K. 251, 314 Moores, S. 56 moral economy 87–99, 88, 106–108, 335, 420, 428 Morley, D. 9, 11, 13, 70–74, 77–82, 84–85, 43, 55, 70, 85, 88, 140, 163, 168, 197, 198, 299, 349 Moyal, A. 426 multi-level public value approach 275–276 Murik social life 23–25 mutual domestication: algorithmic platforms 235; conversion 236, 243–244; dialectics of 236–237; integration 236, 240–242; Netflix 238–239; personalisation 236, 239–240; research design 237–238; resistance 236, 244–246; rituals 242–243 Nagy, P. 420 Nancy, J.-L. 274 nano-stations 305–306 Neff, G. 420 Negroponte, N. 261 Neville, S. J. 53n1, 417, 436, 448 Newzoo 124 Nicenboim, I. 180 Nieborg, D.B. 270, 271, 276 Niemand, S. 49 non-domestication 188, 285–286, 290 non-media-centric approach 3, 13

nostrification 152 Novena Prayer Group 143–144 nuanced domestication: communal ethos 140–144; contextual cultures and practices 137; digital ethnography 138; situated cultural affordances 138–140; web-based technologies 137–138; whimsical interactive culture 144–149 O’Grady, A. 320 O’Mara, J. 387 Obama, B. 145 Ogone, J. O. 107 Ohashi, K. 129 Oldenburg, R. 347 older adult’s domestication: digital natives 471; and family 473–476; generations, United States 470, 470; home environments 476–478; ICTs 468–469; Lucky Few Generation 472–473; retirement-level incomes 469; selection criteria 472; social services 470 Olsson, T. 12, 362 Omanga, D. 142 ontological security 2–5, 13, 73, 97, 251, 268–270, 285, 350 Pantzar, M. 180, 181, 223 partying with phones 317–319 Peil, C. 11, 12, 46 perceptions issues, domestication 404–405, 411 personhood: conceptualization 16–17; cultural value 15; domestication theory 17–18; family relations 22–23; ICT 15; moral persons and relations 23–25; relation with things 20–22 Phahlamohlaka, J. 141 Pierson, J. 35 Pink, S. 77, 140, 391 Plantin, J.-C. 273 Poell, T. 266, 276 policy 12–13, 184; data 269; domestication 55–66; government 142; RRI 188 political conditions 302–303 Polson, E. 303 practice-based theories 219–220; actor network theory 221; circulatory conception 221–222; cultural turn 220; mobile and mundane heart rate monitoring 224–228, 225; reproduction circuits 222–224; skeleton model 221 practices 12, 37, 44, 46, 89, 219–229, 230n3, 235; conversion 243, 244; cultural transformation 158; digital 409, 410, 411, 493; domestic 13, 22, 35, 429; ICT 334, 340, 343; innovation 183; media 50, 52, 58, 70–71, 79, 140, 162, 163, 168, 169, 274; policies 62, 63; reverse domestication 361–371; social 11, 33, 140, 180; user instructions and regulations 190–193

509

Index private mobilization 88–91, 90, 96 programmed sociality 142 projector network 207 proxemie space 204–206 Pujol, E. E. P. 298 Quandt, T. 159 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 16 radio’s gendered domestication 453; Frontispiece 455, 455; media geographies 457–461, 460; public and domestic affordances 452; Radio Broadcast 456–457, 461; radio shack 455–456; social changes 454–455; sources 457; Tribune 461–464, 463 Radway, J. 256 Ramstead, M.J.D. 140 Reckwitz, A. 221 re-domestication 11–12, 42–53, 290–291 reflexive modernity theory 94 Remenih, A. 464 Rennie, E. 309 (re-)thinking domestication 9–13 reverse domestication 1, 330, 361–371, 363; reverse appropriation 367–368; reverse conversion 370; reverse incorporation 368–369; reverse objectification 369 Richardson, H.J. 391 Richardson, I. 428 Roberts, J.A. 357 Robins, K. 78 Rodenbaugh, R. 128 Rogers, E. M. 482 Romanelli, E. 223 Röser, J. 11, 12, 46, 49 Ruhleder, K. 33–34, 36, 37, 272–273 Ryghaug, M. 189–190, 193 Sandvoss, Cornell 71 Schneier, J. 391 Schütz, A. 350 science and technology studies (STS) 30–31 scrollback technique 238 Serres, M. 436 service printer, data domestication 216, 217 Shankar, A. 315 Shannon, C.E. 256 Sharma, S. 438 Shaw, R. D. 420 Shon, J. G. 482 Shortt, H. 428 Shove, E. 221–223 Sianipar, B. 128 Siles, I. 180 Silverstone, R. 9, 10, 25, 36, 43, 55, 57, 83, 84, 87, 88, 110, 111, 115, 117, 157, 164, 235–237,

243, 244, 246, 253–255, 256, 262, 268, 289, 293, 313, 317, 324, 332, 348, 349, 389, 393, 398, 436, 454–455, 483 Singh, R. 273 situated cultural affordances 140, 149 situated objectivity 227 situational domestication 362; ANTs 348; café society 347–348, 350–351; café worker species 352, 352–354; cognitive dimension 349; collective domestication 357; empirical base 351–352; mobile socialities 349; practical dimension 349; social café visitors and smartphones 355, 355–356; social café visitor smartphone 356–357; symbolic dimension 349 situational integrity 427 Skjølsvold, T.M. 183, 187–189, 193 Slater, D. 171–172 Slettemeås, D. 166 smartphones 89, 107, 123, 132–134, 173n4, 192–193, 207, 282–285, 324, 332–336, 347–352, 352, 418; in Asia 124–127, 125; dance clubs 314–316; domestication of 152–159, 317–318; loss 285–286; mobile learning 483; moral economies 322–323; objectification 61–63; regulation 319–322; social café visitors 355–357, 355; social media 368–369 SNET 298, 306–307, 307 social construction of technology (SCOT) 87 social contacts 303–305 Social Habana 296 social media 11, 15, 17, 62, 88, 324, 470, 471; communal context 107; FoMO 91–94, 97; M-learning 481–490; nuanced domestication 137–149; selection process 241; smartphones 368, 418; social interaction 125; toxicity 95; WeChat Moments 129–131 social practices 11, 33, 140, 180 socialisation see technoscience societal ambivalences, smartphone 156–157 socio-cultural ecology 141 socio-technical networks 30, 32 Solbu, G. 188 Sørensen, K. H. 30, 31, 33, 37, 45, 56, 88, 179, 181, 188, 194, 291, 299, 310, 309–310, 349, 357, 363, 377, 378 Souza e Silva, A. de 428 Spigel, L. 82 Star, S.L. 33–34, 36, 37, 272–273 Stauff, M. 32 Stewart, J. 56 Storm-Mathisen, A. 107 Strathern, M. 16–17 Strauss, A. 350 StreetNet (SNET) 298 Sujon, Z. 404

510

Index surveillance capitalism 258, 259 Sutcliffe, T.E. 35–36 Syversten, T. 95, 401 Szabla, M. 143 Taiwo, R. 156 taming technologies: dis-domestication 290–291; do(mestication), roofless media 282–285; homeless-/rooflessness 280–281; MoWo project 281–282; non-domestication, rooflessness 285–286; savage medium 291–293; wild technologies 286–290 Taylor, A.-C. 19 Taylor, N. 391 technology domestication theory 331–333 technoscience: liminal spaces 182–184; newspaper articles 187–188; policymakers 184; public participation 188–190; science communication 186–187; socialisation sites 185–186; user instructions and regulations 190–193 tech-obsessed home culture 364 television 201–204, 206–208 third articulation 255–258 Thomas, J. 309 Thompson, E.P. 106 Thompson, J. 257 Thon, J.-N. 377 Throndsen, W. 189 time issues, domestication 402–403, 410 Toker-Turnalar, E. 404 trans-domestic communication 419 transformative program 56 Tribiani, J. 197 Trondheim model 348, 350 Tully, M. 141, 144 Turkle, S. 95, 97, 351 Turow, J. 259 Tushman, M.L. 223 Twinomurinzi, H. 141 Underleir 361–368, 371 users 11, 30, 32, 34–39, 95–97, 123–124, 128–130, 132–134, 137–142, 145–149, 216, 252, 261–263, 302, 482; interview and focus

group 336; mobile communication 115–117; mobile devices 347; mutual domestication 180–181, 235–247; smartphone 125, 193–194; social interaction 125 Vanden Abeele, V. 401 Veblen, T. 117 Veissiere, S.P.L. 140 videos posting project 409–410 Viney, L. 404 Vistisen, Peter 11 Vitos, B. 315, 316 voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) 435, 439–447 Von Pape, T. 159 Wajcman, J. 440 Wang, Y. 329 Warnke, M. 197, 205 water-quality aquarium, data domestication 214, 215 Watson, A. 425 Weaver, W. 256 Wenger, E. 21 Wi-Fi parks 297, 305 Wilhite, H.L. 35 Wilk, R.R. 35 Wilken, R. 309 Williams, D. 379 Williams, R. 51, 96, 257, 268, 389, 398, 436 Wittgenstein, L. 222 Wohl, R. 256 Woods, H. S. 439 Yee, N. 377 Zebracki, M. 315, 316 Zekić, A. 301 Ziewitz, M. 273 Zoom, lockdown screen worlds: backdrop dynamics of 428–429; domestication 423–425; negative dimensions 426–427; techno-social affordances and constraints 419; video call technology 420–423 Zuboff, S. 258–259, 263, 269, 292

511