3

Domestication: the enactment

of technology^
Knut H. S0rensen

D oing technology or not

The modem human lives with technology. Everyday life is a continuous
engagement with artefacts: physically, mentally, emotionally and mo
rally. At least in the relatively wealthy OECD countries, this situation has
become trivial. We expect to live with technologies as matters of fact; we
seldom question their place in modem society. And if we do, it is because
we expect improvements and new technological options. Thus, we do not
just take for granted the experience of having modern technology
continuously at our fingertips. We have also come to presume that there
will be a continuous supply of new artefacts and systems, and that new
versions of the established ones will be offered to us.
Of course, there are controversial technologies. Some are the object
of long-standing heated controversies, like nuclear power. Others are
questioned occasionally, like television and the car. In fact, there are a
number of such technologies that seem to invite moral exchanges about
their use. How many hours should children be allowed to watch
television, if at all? Should you not use public transport rather than your
car to get to work? Under what circumstances should mobile phones be
turned off? These debates are important reminders that even if
technology's place in modem life is a matter of fact, its use and meaning
are not. The practice of technology in everyday life is far more complex
and ambiguous.
In this chapter, I inquire into the complexities of human perfor
mance or enactment of technologies, related to what is commonly seen
as ownership and use. These activities may be conceptualized as the
domestication of technology, and this chapter attempts to elaborate this
concept and suggest some of its benefits. The argument begins with the
assumption that people construct their own technological practices, but
in interaction with other people's practices. To start with, the focus is on
the way individuals and groups of individuals create assemblages or
networks of artefacts, meaning and action in their everyday life.
However, most technologies involve the construction of social institu
tions of infrastructure and regulation as well as collective repertoires and

repositories of action and meaning. Thus, we need to approach the

analysis of 'doing of technology' as a multi-sited, multi-actor process.
The aim of this chapter is to show how the domestication perspective
may be helpful in this respect.
This way of framing the issue may be seen to circumvent the set of
problems often presented by invoking concepts such as autonomous
technology or technological imperative (Winner 1977). They refer to a
long-standing anxiety of modem society that technology is out of control,
that machines are taking command. Much of the literature that has
pursued this perspective seems to take the idea of 'out-of-control' too
literally and assumes the technological imperative to be too effective. Most
inventions never see the light of day. Most innovations never become
household goods. These simple facts should caution against simplistic
beliefs that technologies have to be used once they have been conceived.
Nevertheless, the issue of technology as an imposed force on
everyday life should not be dismissed too quickly. Even if the idea of a
technological imperative is misleading, there may be strong social
influences that push us to use certain technologies. This is evident from
efforts to analyse what may be conceptualized as non-use of technologies
(Wyatt 2003; Sorensen 1994). Clearly, the phenomenon of non-use is a
strong indication that people frequently have a choice with regard to
what technologies they appropriate, but this choice may not always be
exercised at will. In fact, non-use may take a lot of effort as the use of
many technologies may be conceived as part of 'normal' behaviour. Of
course, non-use may be interpreted as a result of technophobia. Some
argue that this is a widespread phenomenon that affects between a
quarter and one third of the population worldwide (see Brosnan 1998).
However, Wyatt (2003) argues that non-use is a strategic decision, made
because the technology does not appear particularly beneficial or
interesting, or because of active resistance. Thus, we have to be aware
that ownership or use of a particular technology or a set of technologies
may be enforced as well as resisted. To study the enactment of
technology, we have to use an approach that is sensitive to the fact
that this doing is influenced by choice as well as discipline, by
enthusiasm as well as resistance. What should such an approach look
like? To clarify the advantages of the domestication approach, it is useful
to look into some precedent efforts.

Reductionist approaches
In general, technology has been and still is a marginal issue in the social
sciences. This is reflected in the striking absence of technology and

technological development as topics in standard textbooks. Most social

theorists circumvent technology in the same way as nature, climate and
physical landscape, probably because this allows them to analyse society
as a purely social phenomenon, undisturbed by any considerations
related to the material dimensions of human existence. Moreover, the
exceptional efforts to analyse how technology interacted with humans
were based on varieties of technological determinism or at least
technological reductionism. Technology was understood as an autono
mous force that had well-defined impacts on people and society, and
social change could be explained in terms of technological progress
(MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). To understand the challenges at hand,
let us briefly consider two of these efforts: the early sociology of
technology and industrial sociology.
The first explicit attempt to develop a sociology of technology came
from American sociologist William F. Ogburn and his collaborators.
They made thorough, empirical efforts of analysing and assessing
technology and technological development (Gilfillan 1970; Allen et ah
1957; see also Westrum 1991). While Ogburn's prediction that a personal
aeroplane would replace the car with hindsight appears ridiculous, this is
not a sufficient reason to neglect the approach. His sociology of
technology consisted of two parts: the first was his theory of inventions;
the second was concerned with social effects.
Ogburn's first part - the theory of inventions - was integrated into a
larger theory of social evolution. This theory was based on four key
concepts: inventions, cultural accumulation, diffusion of inventions, and
adaption of one part of the culture to another. The rate of inventions,
according to Ogburn, grew exponentially with cultural accumulation,
implying an acceleration of human progress (Ogburn 1964 [1950], pp.
17-32). The second part of Ogburn's sociology of technology was
concerned with social effects. Similar to multivariate statistical analysis,
social effects of technology were to be identified through an analysis of
variations: 'Since cause and effect are always variables, then, an effect
cannot be explained by something that has not varied' (Ogburn 1957, p.
13). The crucial point was the perception of technology as a more or less
continuously changing feature of modern society because of the
exponential growth of inventions. This was contrasted to humans who
were perceived as constants: 'We say that the automobile creates motels,
though actually it is the human beings who do the creating, because the
variable is the automobile and not the human beings' (ibid., p. 15).
Consequently, we may describe this methodological approach as technovariate. The concept emphasizes the fact that the main characteristic of
the methodology is to compare social systems or social events through
their classification, based on the stages in the development of a given

technology. To Ogburn, technology was the only independent variable

in his analysis of social change.
Nevertheless, the effects of technology are perceived as products of
human action and not as a necessary outcome of new technology:
By granting that we may choose to use a radio receiving set in
several different ways, if enough people use a radio to listen to
music, then it may be said that a radio has a social effect upon
our musical enjoyment. If enough choose to listen to reports of
the news, then broadcasting has a social effect upon our civic
education.
(Ogburn 1957, p. 18)
In most of the work of the Ogburn group, social effects were deducted
from technology in a rather sweeping manner. Put a little crudely, what
they did was to make an inventory of new phenomena that could be
linked to a specific technology in a given period (like radio, television,
the automobile and so on). Linking meant observing that the technology
played a role in the phenomenon, like increased physical mobility or
different strategies of keeping informed about what happened in society.
Since they, as I noted above, tended to perceive technology as the main
source of social change, such new phenomena were attributed to
technology.
To the very limited extent that standard sociology touches upon
issues of technology and technological change, a similar analytical move
may be found in the analysis of technology as an external force of
variation. Take for instance Talcott Parsons's grandiose contribution to
social theory, The Social System (1951). While most of his efforts are
concerned with social reproduction, his analysis of social change brings
him to science and technology as the main force of social transforma
tions: 'Obviously, one fundamental feature of the institutionalisation of
science and its application is the introduction of a continual stream of
change into the social system' (Parsons 1951, p. 505). Parsons was more
abstract in his analysis of technological change, but no less impressed by
the scope of impacts than the Ogburn group.
Industrial sociology came to develop quite a different approach to
the analysis of how technology could impact human action. Here, one
was interested in the interaction of humans and machines related to
processes of mechanization and automation. A machine may be seen as
an arrangement that requires certain tasks to be performed. In this way,
it may be argued to produce instrumental constraints, for example, along
the following four dimensions (Kern and Schumann 1970; see also Bright
1958):

the technical content of the task or its instrumental structure,

the temporal structure of the task,
the spatial structure of the task,
the technical consequences of not executing the task or the
technical sanctions.

This allows for a much more detailed analysis of the interaction of

humans and machines than Ogburn's techno-variate method, with
greater emphasis on characteristics of the machinery under scrutiny.
From this perspective, 'effects' are observed in terms of division of
labour, skills, bodily and mental strain, and possibilities of social
community. However, the analysis presupposes that technology has
definite instrumental constraints, unmediated by human interpretation.
While industrial sociology can serve as a reminder of the need to analyse
the interaction of humans and technology in detail, its methods failed,
particularly through its inability to account for diverse socio-economic
outcomes of identical technologies.
The intention of these two approaches, the sociology of technology of
the Ogburn group on the one hand and industrial sociology on the other,
was to provide empirical insights into the role of technology in society
and at work, respectively. Both approaches emphasize the need for
detailed analyses and the importance of studying technology in a concrete
way, which is important to a domestication perspective. They had
outlined an important challenge, even if the problems inherent in their
reductionist strategies of inquiry pointed to the need to find other ways to
conceptualize the interaction of technology, culture and human action.

Consum ing technologies - or dom esticating them ?

In the early 1990s, a small group related to the newly established 'Centre
for technology and society' in Trondheim, Norway initiated a few
projects to explore aspects of technology and everyday life.2 We knew we
had to search for non-determinist and non-reductionist approaches - but
where? Our research interest was embedded in a long-standing, local
interest to study technology from the perspective of users or workers and
the call from economic historians like Nathan Rosenberg (1982) to get
inside the black box of technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1987) also
provided an important stimulus to investigate 'the consumption
junction' in relation to the development of technology.
Eventually, we came to engage particularly with two sources of
inspiration. One was actor-network theory (ANT) and the effort to
develop a semiotic approach to the study of technology (Akrich 1992;

Latour 1988, 1992). From this endeavour came above all some new
concepts that helped the analysis of technological artefacts as embodi
ments of designers' ideas about the ways users were supposed to apply
their designs. Design was seen to 'define actors with specific tastes,
competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices and the rest',
based on the assumption 'that morality, technology, science, and
economy will evolve in particular ways'. Designers inscribe their visions
of the world in the technical content of the new object (Akrich 1992, p.
208). This inscription Akrich calls a script Thus, like a film script,
technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors
and the space in which they are supposed to act' (ibid.). These ideas also
resonated well with designer guru Donald A. Norman's suggestion that
artefacts could be considered as affordances related to human action, a
mixture of suggestions and facilitations with regard to how designs
should or should not be used (Norman 1988; see also Pfaffenberger 1992).
Another important idea in ANT was that the script could be
contested by users, who consciously would try to override inscriptions.
Latour (1992) suggested that the actual use of an artefact could be
understood as a dynamic conflict between designers' programmes of
action, inscribed in artefacts, and users' anti-programmes that countered
or circumvented these inscriptions. The outcome could not be predicted;
it had to be observed through empirical investigations.
The second source of inspiration came from media studies and the
proposal to study information and communication technologies (ICTs) in
everyday life through concepts like the moral economy of the household
and domestication (Silverstone et al. 1992, 1989). Silverstone and his
colleagues thereby presented a suggestive and very promising theoretical
scheme to study the use of technology, proposing to do this by analysing
four dimensions or stages in a household's dynamic uptake of a
, technology: (1) appropriation, (2) objectification, (3) incorporation, and
(4) conversion. This scheme integrated action and meaning. Silverstone et
al.s main focus was on the household, where the concept of the moral
economy was invoked to emphasize that the economic circulation of ICT
commodities was paralleled by a transactional system of meaning:
To understand the household as a moral economy, therefore, is
to understand the household as part of a transactional system,
dynamically involved in the public world of the production and
exchange of commodities and meanings ... At stake is the
capacity of the household or the family to create and sustain its
autonomy and identity (and for individual members of the
family to do the same) as an economic, social, and cultural unit.
(Silverstone et al. 1992, p. 19)

This concept of domestication was attractive in two main regards.

First, it presupposed that users played an active and decisive role in the
construction of patterns of use and meanings in relation to technologies.
Second, it suggested that a main emphasis should be put on the
production of meaning and identity from artefacts. This meant a
fundamental break with technological determinism, as well as a move
away from a long-term tendency to interpret technologies in mainly
instrumental terms, as purposive tools.
The growing scholarly interest to study ICTs provided a common
ground of investigation for media studies and technology studies.3 Still,
these two fields of inquiry do have their different analytical focusing
devices and research questions. Thus, arguably, there is a media studies
version of domestication as well as one emerging from technology
studies. These two versions are in my opinion compatible, but there are
important dissimilarities due to the fact that the two versions have been
employed for different purposes. Thus, to some extent, the resulting
conceptual and theoretical work has pursued different problems and
made use of different intellectual resources. I will try to clarify some such
issues by looking into some characteristics of the technology studies
version.

A technology studies approach to domestication

The technology studies approach to domestication developed from an
emphasis on the analysis of specific artefacts, initially primarily the
analysis of the computer and related commodities (Aune 1992, 1996;
Berg 1996; Hapnes 1996). In addition, there was an expressed concern to
study domestication as a negotiated space of designers' views and users'
needs and interests. Thus, in this version, domestication was less about
household consumption and more related to the construction of a wider
everyday life (Sorensen et a l 2000; Lie and Sorensen 1996). As a starting
point, domestication was used as a metaphor for the transformation of
an object from something unknown, something 'wild' and unstable, to
become known, more stable, 'tamed' (Lie and Sorensen 1996; see also
Silverstone et ah 1989, pp. 24-5). This kind of analysis is not just
concerned with the enactment of technology: in the domestication
process people and their socio-technical relations may change as well.
Domestication therefore has wider implications than a socialization of
technology: it is a co-production of the social and the technical.
Hence, the domestication concept could be seen to have a wider
potential than its apparent situatedness within the moral economy of
the household. First, from a technology studies point of view,

domestication invites a focus on three main, generic sets of features

(S0 rensen et a l 2000):
The construction of a set of practices related to an artefact. This
could mean routines in using the artefact, but also the establish
ment and development of institutions to support and regulate
this use.
The construction of meaning of the artefact, including the role
the artefact eventually could play in relation to the production of
identities of the actors involved.
Cognitive processes related to learning of practice as well as
meaning.
Pursuing the generic potential, domestication becomes a multi-sited
process that transcends the household space, and in which the sites
interact. 0stby (1995), for example, shows how the historical integration
of the car in Norway may be understood as a process in which the set-up
of national institutions and collective discourses are involved together
with the production of individual practices. Similarly, Brosveet and
S0rensen (2000) suggest how the uptake of multimedia technologies and
the way these technologies are made available - for example, for
households - involve the extensive production of a wide variety of
institutions and standards at a national level. Spilker (1998), Levold
(2001) and Lagesen (2005) have taken the perspective into yet another
direction. Here, the domestication concept is employed to analyse master
students, computer scientists and computer science students, respec
tively. The aim is to sensitize readers to the ambivalent and ambiguous
acts of development and positioning that take place when the students
and the computer scientists become or evolve as professionals.
Such observations may be taken further by drawing on ANT as a
theoretical resource. First, the 'taming of an artefact may be understood
as a process where a script or a programme is translated or re-scripted
through the way users read, interpret and act. Second, domestication
may be seen as the process through which an artefact becomes associated
with practices, meanings, people and other artefacts in the construction
of intersecting large and small networks (S0 rensen 1994). Only rarely do
we domesticate things in isolation.
Using a slightly different vocabulary, the domestication of artefacts
may be understood as the complex movement of objects into and within
existing socio-technical arrangements. In contrast to the standard
assumptions of diffusion theory (Rogers 1995), such objects are not
immutable; they are - at least in principle - mutable and may change
through their movement. De Laet and Mol (2000) describe this

phenomenon as the fluidity of technology. Their example, a kind of

water pump, may be particularly open to reconfiguration, due to the lack
of sharp and solid boundaries, the potential for collective and shifting
'authorship' with regard to the technology, and the absence of precise
criteria for what may be considered successful functioning. However,
following Law's (2004) suggestions, we should not just be aware that
objects may be mutable; they may even be elusive and/or multi-vocal.
This is not so much a quality of the object as a situational issue related to
the kind of network within which the object moves or becomes
stabilized.
On the other hand, the domestication perspective may add concrete
sensibilities to the rather abstract ANT vocabulary. First, it represents a
reminder of the temporal aspect of change processes which may be
understood as social learning, the important observation that the use of
technologies might be transformed over time and that the trajectory of
these modifications is important (Sorensen 1996). Domestication may
end in the sense that the artefact is forgotten or thrown out, but the
process is irreversible in the sense that its traces cannot be completely
removed. Second, the domestication perspective adds subjectivity to
ANT through its focus on practice, meaning and learning. Domestication
implies not only the movement of objects in a network, but also a series
of joint enactments between human and non-human elements of the
network and in the intersections of network.
Andrew Feenberg (1999) has criticized the use of the domestic
metaphor in the domestication perspective: The metaphor connotes the
narrow confines of the home however it is reformulated, and thus
privileges adaptation and habituation in a way that short circuits the
appeal to agency' (Feenberg 1999, p. 108). Given the emphasis on social
inequalities, like gender or social class, in many domestication studies
(see Haddon 2004; Lie and Sorensen 1996), this critique seems
misplaced. Social conflict, discipline and power are inherent in most
domestic practices, within households, organizations or nations.
Arguably, agency starts out from the familiar, even if the aim is to
transcend well-known territories. When domestication of artefacts may
appear to involve adaptation and habituation, it is through hindsight the knowledge of what actually happens.
To clarify this point, it is important to investigate domestication
processes that extend in time and space. In the following sections, I
discuss two examples of such domestication processes, which are
presented by drawing on some of the technology studies vocabulary
introduced above. The first is a brief outline of the Norwegian
appropriation of the car, to demonstrate the multi-sitedness, multivocality and emergent character of a long-term enactment of technol

ogy. The second is a study of gender and mobile telephony that looks
into the tension between diversity and standardization of use. Both
examples are also intended to highlight an additional aspect of
domestication, namely the co-production of norms and enactment of
technologies.

The successful construction of the Norwegian car

There are a few attempts to manufacture cars in Norway. They have all
failed, including the latest effort, the electrical car Think. Still, from a
domestication point of view, the headline The Norwegian car makes
sense. It is an allegory that suggests a specificity of cars in Norway that
distinguishes them from Swedish or German ones, even when the cars
technologically speaking are identical (Sorensen 1991).
To make the argument and to indicate the fruitfulness of studying
domestication at a national level, I begin by considering the early
historical process through which cars became introduced and embedded
in Norwegian society. In the first stage, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, the car in the role of a 'rail-free vehicle was a
contested object. Many municipalities met the car with strong regula
tions; some even prohibited driving. The car was seen as a scary enemy of
the perceived natural order, where transport was conducted by foot,
horses, or - at best - railways. In addition, cars were believed to have a
destructive impact on roads (0stby 1995, pp. 90f.). On the other hand,
other actors invoked the car to signify progress. A main supporter, Hans
Hagerup Krag, general manager of the Norwegian Highway Directorate
from 1874 to 1903, suggested - as early as 1899 - an increase in public
grants to improve roads to prepare for the use of cars: p]t would be of
great harm, if the nation - due to a lack of resources to improve roads still for some time should have to do without the great advantages of
such means of communication' (Skougaard 1914, p. LI). Two years later,
Krag drove a car through the Norwegian mountains from Otta to
Andalsnes, a strenuous journey, to make his contemporaries aware of the
car and its - in his opinion - great possibilities. Krag also sent his
subordinates to other countries to study highways but also cars and
driving (Kristiansen 1975).
There are probably many similarities between the Norwegian
domestication of the car and what happened in other countries with
respect to the building of infrastructure and the regulation of car
ownership, driving, and the construction of roads. However, Per 0stby
(1995) identifies important specific qualities of these processes in
Norway. He shows how Norwegian efforts were shaped by the lack of a

national car industry, a long-standing concern for the balance of trade

with other countries, and high costs of road building in a mountainous
and sparsely populated country. This resulted in high duties and strict
import controls. Between 1934 and 1962, people needed permission
from a public authority to buy a car.
After 1945, new institutions were designed to provide input to the
political planning and regulation of cars, traffic and roads. Many
engineers were trained in highway planning and management in the
USA. They returned to fill posts in public management, in education,
and in a new national research institute for transport economics that was
established in 1958. These institutions and the highway engineers came
to manage national level domestication of the car in Norway, in the
absence of a powerful car industry. In particular, city and highway
planning shaped the use of cars, while extensive car ownership and
driving was a basic premise for the planning. It is not possible to
understand the domestication of the car on the national arena or by
individuals without analysing the interaction between car traffic and the
construction of roads and highways. The practice of driving has been
and still is scripted by engineers and politicians, even if the various
scripts have been consistently resisted (0stby 1995; S0rensen and
Sorgaard 1994). What we see is really a complex interaction between a
wide variety of objects, resulting in a strong and powerful but also fluid
and malleable network, due to conflicting efforts of domestication.
The Norwegian car was initially a luxury, mainly for the few and
wealthy, but gradually it came to be the most important means of
transport and thus of great economic significance. Culturally, the
continuing increase in car ownership meant that it became a household
good which, during the 1960s and 1970s, came to be more or less taken
for granted. Still, the meaning of the car never stabilized entirely. While
some controversies were closed - like the issue of luxury versus utility
and triviality - new ones emerged. Thus, the domestication of the car in
Norway has taken place in a continuous engagement with moral aspects
of ownership and driving. Inspired by literary theorist and philosopher
of language, Mikhail Bakhtin, and his ideas about polyphony (Bakhtin
1986; see also Bell and Gardiner 1998; Lagesen 2005), we could say there
exists an abundance of contradictory authoritative voices and expecta
tions regarding car ownership and use which Norwegians are in dialogue
and negotiation with. Examples include utterances such as:
'Cars are an unnecessary luxury'
'Cars are needed to provide important social activities, like
transport of goods and people, and to perform services, like
doctoring'

Cars are an economic problem'

'Cars are needed to support economic growth and development'
'Cars are dangerous'
'Cars are a part of a modern welfare society and a sign of progress'
'Cars need to be taxed severely to pay for costs of infrastructure
and accidents'
'Cars are a threat to the environment'
'To drive a car is a human right'
'You should rather use public transport' (see Aune 1998; 0stby
1995; S0rensen and S0rgaard 1994).
Clearly, this allows Norwegians to find arguments that support both use
and non-use of cars. A wide diversity of ways to domesticate or not
emerges. However, it would be misleading to see this as an exercise of
free choice. Only a small minority of Norwegians do not have access to a
car, and most people in this category are either young or old. In the
infrastructure offered to Norwegians with regard to where they live,
where they work, and where they find shopping and service institutions,
car ownership has been inscribed as a clear expectation. In particular,
when people have children, argues Aune (1998), this represents a
practical demand to acquire a car, because it is commonly perceived that
children need to be driven to kindergarten, sport events and social
activities. This makes car ownership a social standard, a normal way of
life.
But car driving in Norway is a matter of concern. It is recognized as a
normal thing to do, but also as something that one should do less of. In
this respect, domestication of the car involves the management of moral
ambivalence and ambiguity. As a society, Norway has domesticated the
car to the extent that car ownership has become normal. Strong
disciplining mechanisms set standards for ownership as well as driving,
such as traffic rules, police surveillance, road bumps ('sleeping police
men'), mandatory technical controls and parking rules. While car
practices remain diverse, subject to individuals' needs, values and
creativity, the car has become what we could call a quasi-stable object.
It is stabilized in a complex and extensive network, but it also remains
mutable. In a deep sense, to drive a car is a messy business (Law 2004).

M obile phone m orality 4

The mobile phone offers an interesting opportunity to analyse
domestication processes since this artefact has very rapidly become a
widely used communication device, which involves considerable

cultural changes. In particular, I want to look into the construction of

technology-related norms that may shape meaning as well as use of the
artefact.
On one level, Norway's domestication of the mobile looks very
much like a 'critical mass' story, given the very rapid growth of
ownership of mobile phones and the dramatic increase in traffic. In
2003, 86 per cent of Norwegians between 9 and 79 years of age owned a
mobile phone.5 The people interviewed in our study acquired their first
mobile at different times and for different reasons. Most of the early
users got their mobiles through work.
I got my first mobile in 1995. I needed it at work, and my
employer paid for it. At that time, I drove my car every day from
Sandefjord to Oslo. Then I could do a lot of work in the car.
There were a great number of people I needed to call, and I could
spend the time doing this while I was in the car anyway.
(Anders, 42)
The late users got their mobile one to three years before the
interview took place. Several had resisted the mobile, and some had even
decided that they never wanted a mobile. Resistance was primarily
explained in two ways. The first claim was that they really did not need
one. The other claim was that they did not want to be accessible at all
times.
I resist it. I feel that I want to protect myself and not be so
accessible. This is something I believe is related to my situation
at work; all the time somebody wants something from me. Also,
socially and family-wise I am at a stage where everyone sells and
buys homes in need of refurbishing and wants some assistance.
(Reidun, 50)
Nevertheless, some of the resistant users had become quite active. To be
a latecomer does not mean that one has to remain moderate or cautious;
it only implies that domestication may be a drawn-out process. Reidun
told us that she felt her attitude towards her mobile was changing, but
only very slowly.
A striking finding in our research was a gendered pattern of
acquisition of the mobile phone. While the male informants either got
the mobile through their employer or bought one themselves, all the
women received their first mobile as a present. It was given to them by
their husbands, boyfriends, sisters, brothers, fathers or other family
members. Often, they got a used mobile, available because the giver had

acquired a new one. Arguably, we observe a phenomenon that may be

called a 'wife mobile' similar to the 'wife car7.
There is a communication logic, which fuels the motive to give away
mobiles. To those who own one, their experience suggests that it is very
practical - at least for them - that people they relate to also have access
to a mobile. As a communication device, mobile phones seem to carry
the seed of their own diffusion - an object-generating object. As an
increasing part of the population owns one, access becomes increasingly
tempting, even a pressing concern. Reidun told that she felt pressured.
She vividly claimed that she did not want a mobile, but her children and
her parents had 'forced' her to have one, so they could reach her when
she spent time alone at their cabin in the mountains. Domestication
may thus be disciplined in a quite upfront manner.
The conjecture that there is considerable variation between our
informants in terms of their domestication was definitely confirmed.
Some of them spend a lot of time, energy and money on communication
through their mobiles. They tend to leave their mobiles on at all times,
and they send a lot of messages. Some of them also talk to people a lot
through their mobiles, but that tends to be related to work. In a typical
manner, Anne (26) admits that:
I have made myself a bit dependent, really. You get accustomed
to be accessible when you want to. Sometimes, it is very
convenient to be accessible. You decide yourself. You can ignore
people; you can turn it off or choose not to respond ... I mainly
use the mobile to send messages. Usually about nothing, such
small everyday life things. In a way, this is a toy that you buy for
yourself. I really don't phone very much.
Anniken (43) got her first mobile through her employer to make her
more accessible. Presently, she is a housewife and she mainly refers to
her social life and her interest in chatting, when she explains why she
needs a mobile: 'Everyone else had one. I missed out on so much when I
didn't have a mobile. There were a lot of at-the-moment appointments.
Then it was impossible to get hold of me. I had a telephone at home, but
it wasn't used in that way.'
The other informants display a pattern where the rationale behind
the use of the mobile resembles the one we observe among the heavy
users. After a while, they become much more eager users than they had
planned to be. This was particularly true for some of the initially
resistant. Suddenly they found themselves bringing the mobile with
them wherever they went. Another change was that they now rarely
turned off the mobile. Instead, they applied the silent mode. Their

reason for leaving the phone on even at times when they are unable to or
do not want to answer it, is to remain in control: to see who has called
and when a message has come in.
The urge to have the phone turned on seems to be due to a feeling of
belonging or being part of a group. When they received a text message,
they knew someone was thinking of them. To some degree, there was
also the fear of being left out. Many of the informants had noticed that
there had been a change in the way people made plans. While in the
past, they used to make plans in advance, some of the planning was now
left to the last minute.
The mobile was also deemed important in love affairs. Marit (30) told
us how essential it had been in her last relationship. Within the first
couple of weeks, she sent 258 messages to him, and he answered all of
them. As the love affair cooled off, messages became increasingly rare.
Anniken told a similar story, but on a more positive note. She and her
present partner had exchanged 600 messages the first two days after they
had met. She had written them all down on paper, which she kept like a
treasure. Every now and then she would read them to be reminded of
their first days of getting to know each other.
It was common to talk about 'mobile common sense' or 'proper
behaviour'. Here, we observe the emergence of a morality as a part of the
domestication of the mobile. The main concern expressed by the
informants is to avoid disturbing other people. The most active users say
moral sense is about not having telephone conversations at weddings,
funerals or very nice restaurants. To some degree, they concur that
talking on the phone when you are with just one other person should be
avoided. However, conversing on the phone during public transport, in
cafes and other places where talking is permitted, they find OK. The
more moderate users said they would try to keep their voices down and
keep the conversation short if other people were around. As a rule they
thought people should avoid talking on the phone in public places when
other people were close by.
Many informants also said they should be better at turning off the
mobile or even leaving the mobile at home. However, all of them acted
in the opposite way. They left the mobile at home or turned it off more
and more rarely. In a way, one could perhaps say that they became
habituated to having the mobile in an 'accessible mode'. For example,
they would say that other people were so used to being able to reach
them at all times that they got worried if they did not answer. Also, they
admitted to feeling restless when they did not know if someone had sent
them a message or tried to call them.
That people talk at length about moral aspects of mobile telephony
offers no evidence for a well-defined morality related to mobiles. On the

contrary, suggested moral rules vary a lot and many admit to breaking
the rules they themselves suggest. Clearly, the situation regarding norms
for the domestication of mobiles is more ambiguous than in the case of
the car. However, many people feel that technologies like mobile phones
should somehow be regulated in a normative way because their use raises
important moral issues about appropriate behaviour. These concerns are
shared by men and women, and there was no clear-cut distinction
between the moral narratives offered by men and women informants in
the study.
The domestication of the mobile phone is a moral undertaking in a
double sense. We have observed that moral concerns are invoked in the
account of the domestication process, but also that the construction of
such norms is done as a collective aspect of the domestication. People
discover a need for norms and struggle to negotiate what they should be
(see also Ling and Yttri 2002). In this way, they retain agency, while the
mobile phone remains fluid. The construction of norms is of course an
effort to achieve stabilization, but it is not effective in this case.
However, the most striking aspect of the domestication of mobiles is
the emergence of a more intensive communication practice. Ling and
Yttri (2002) propose that mobile phones facilitate 'hyper-coordination'
in terms of the instrumental possibility of exchanging information about
time and space coordinates. Both men and women use the mobile phone
to exchange information and emotional messages, to allow for tighter
socio-spatial navigation. However, in most cases, coordination is not
that hyper. It is just improved, compared to previous communication
technologies. What is new is the emerging feeling that one should be
accessible everywhere and at all times. This moral norm seems to
strongly influence the domestication of the mobile to achieve accessi
bility, but as our study shows, the space for diversity remains
considerable.

Representing complexity
The idea that technology has social impacts is widespread. In popular
accounts, the car reshaped modern society in a fundamental way and the
mobile phone is causing deep changes in late modern living. The
techno-variate method of Ogburn and collaborators probably resonates
much better with popular thinking about technology than domestica
tion does. The suggestion of industrial sociology that machines direct
human action seems close to everyday experience. Is there any reader
who has not at least once cursed her car or his computer for its
spitefulness and uncomfortable interventions?

The challenge of thinking in terms of 'impacts' is at its most evident

when new technologies are about to be introduced. If we look at the
arguments provided for heavy investments in broadband technology or
so-called 3G mobile telephony, they are surprisingly slim. They focus on
speed and capacity, as if these features had an immediate social meaning.
It is assumed that increased speed and capacity will be translated into
something useful, but it is unclear what that utility will be. Broadband
and 3G clearly need to be domesticated; it is only after an eventual
domestication that 'impacts' may be identified. Impact is hindsight,
something we may believe in after the underlying performances have
been rendered invisible or uninteresting.
This argument is no denial that technologies are forceful ingredients of
modern society; the argument only protests that the forcefulness should be
taken to be inherent in technology itself. Actor-network theory has argued
that this force emerges from the way technology and culture become
enmeshed through delegation and re-delegation of action between human
and non-human actants (Latour 1988, 1992). We experience the force of
technology through learning and discipline made invisible.
Thus, the main advantage of the domestication perspective is that it
is a conceptual device that sensitizes the analyst to the complexity of
integrating artefacts into dynamic socio-technical settings, like the
household, the workplace, or society. It is a reminder to be concerned
with the practical, symbolic and cognitive aspects of the work needed to
do this integration, at multiple sites. The brief efforts to analyse the
domestication of cars and mobile phones was meant to demonstrate this
point and to show the great number of diverse efforts needed to achieve
a productive integration.
In particular, I have emphasized the morality of domestication to
show the importance of considering the normative aspects of technolo
gies. On the one hand, domestication is disciplined through expectations
and norms. A person may feel that she has to bring a car or a mobile
phone into her life, even if she does not want to. On the other hand, over
time, a collective domestication produces new norms and expectations
that influence the way the artefact is used, the meaning it signifies, and
the possibilities of learning new ways of doing and thinking about it. In
this respect, technologies are deeply moral enterprises.
This observation is related to, but also distinctly different from, the
perspective of a moral economy. As developed by E. P. Thompson (1971),
the concept of a moral economy is meant to emphasize the importance
of non-economic features to explain action and agency. Thompson was
concerned with social norms and obligations as given, as preconditions
of proper behaviour. The domestication argument, as presented here, is
that norms may be understood as contested, fluid, emergent properties

of developing technologies. At some point, norms may influence

domestication, but the moral aspects of technologies seem to remain
dynamic. Maybe this is typical of norms in late modern societies, which
suggests that the concept of a moral economy is too strict and stable in a
fluid modernity (Bauman 2000).
This does not mean that technologies should be seen as innocent
and completely malleable. Rather, the domestication argument is that
technologies should be seen as under-determined and not undeter
mined. Designers inscribe visions and actions into artefacts, and they are
probably successful in shaping users' actions quite often. However, this
may only be clarified through empirical analysis of actual use, which is
the heart of the matter for domestication approaches. The moralities
elicited by a given artefact should be observed in the same vein, as
cultural resources of the enactment of technology.

Notes
1. The work reported here has been supported by the EMTEL network
project as well as by the Research Council of Norway. I thank
Margrethe Aune, Maren Hartmann, Vivian A. Lagesen, Hendrik
Spilker and Per 0stby for useful comments to a previous version.
2. The group included Hakon With Andersen, Margrethe Aune, AnneJorunn Berg, Tove Hapnes, Marit Hubak, Gunnar Lamvik, Per 0stby,
Jon Sorgaard and myself.
3. This has been fruitfully explored in the EMTEL I and II network
projects, from which this paper draws inspiration.
4. This section draws on Nordli and S0 rensen (2004), a study based on
interviews with 21 Norwegian men and women in two age groups,
between 25 and 45, and between 50 and 60 years of age. The
informants include both early and late adopters. They have been
classified as belonging to one of four categories according to use:
Pioneer users (first name begins with a P), advanced users (first name
begins with an A), moderate users (first name begins with an M), and
resistant users (first name begins with an R).
5. http://www.ssb.no/aarbok/tab/t-070230-271.html

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Domestication running wild.

From the moral economy of
the household to the mores
of a culture
Maria Bakardjieva

A slice of life in my virtual household 1

'You are the greatest, Peter! No one can be like you, but I will do my best.'
Hearing these words coming out of the mouth of my youngest son and
addressed to his brother certainly warms my heart and almost draws
tears into my eyes. The reaction on the part of the older brother is no less
emotional. He smiles and stretches out his arms in an impulse to hug the
little boy, but alas, his attempt is doomed. The two brothers are looking
at each other via a webcam and are talking over the audio function that
we only recently managed to get to work. Following the conversation,
the younger one sets out to understand how he can draw cartoon-like
pictures in the field of the textual chat just like his older brother had
done.
As this episode unfolds, I know for sure that we have domesticated
the computer, the ADSL connection to the internet, the webcam and the
numerous pieces of software involved in the process. By drawing on
these 'virtual7 technologies our scattered family manages to retain a
sense of closeness and realness of its bond. We make an incredibly
complex technical system, created by an anonymous army of designers,
engineers and others, to serve the simultaneously trivial and essential
intimate purposes of our reunion. (In fact, I call the exchange between
my boys trivial only to demonstrate analytical detachment. As a mother,
I would fight anyone who dares to characterize it that way.) I know that
it may be the case that the sense of closeness given to us by the technical
system is false. I agree that it would have been much better if Peter could
grab his little brother in his arms for real, but the distance between us is
an element of the actual situation in which we have half-willingly
chosen to put ourselves, pursuing projects of work and study in a mobile
and global public world. The technical system has offered us the best
possible place to be and act together under these circumstances. It has

become a part of our material geographic home by way of the laptop

placed on the kitchen table, the tangled cables running along the floor
and the connectivity bills that will arrive at the end of the month. And it
creates a virtual home for us to inhabit together when our crazy
schedules and conflicting time zones permit. We can remain in what
Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann 1973) has called 'attainable reach' to each
other as 'fellowmen' and women sharing overlapping segments of each
other's existence. This allows us to create a shared lifeworld, even if only
for a limited duration and with curtailed sensual engagement.
The short episode described above and the technological activities
and relations that constituted it did not occur spontaneously or
unexpectedly. When I was packing for my visit to a foreign university,
I purchased a webcam and put it in my suitcase. When my son was
preparing to go to university in another city, we gave him a laptop and a
new mobile phone. The moral economy of our family unit was issuing
an imperative for us to try to overcome, as far as possible, the distance
that was about to stretch between us. And the technical devices
applicable toward this goal were growing in relevance and significance
to the point where we picked them from the shelf of the computer store
and put them alongside our most intimate belongings. Once taken out
and installed in our new locations, these devices constantly reminded us
of the project they were supposed to furnish and thus turned into tokens
of our family bond. But how exactly was the connection between the
sleek silver webcam and the heart-warming exchange between two
brothers supposed to obtain? We had to work hard (some of us harder
than others) before we could figure out how to make the programs run,
how to position the camera and manipulate the multiple windows, how
to indicate our status of availability or absence. This was actually the easy
part. Much more difficult to settle on were the rules of mutual
engagement, respect for privacy, tolerance for slow typing, rhythm of
turn-taking as well as the coordination between the interactions on the
screen and those behind it. Then, really, what do you do, when your
mother, your friend and your grandfather are simultaneously calling for
your attention from different windows and different points on the
globe? These latter questions remain largely unresolved to this day and
the fate of the webcam, even of the very idea of online gatherings and
chats, hinges upon finding workable answers to them. You do not want
your, friend peeping in and engaging you in a frivolous conversation
while you are frantically typing your way toward a deadline, as much as
you do not want your son to shoo you away every time you catch him
online and decide to ask if he has eaten his vegetables.
The concept of domestication, as I encountered it in the early 1990s
(see Silverstone et a l 1992), has been the swing of the theoretical wand

that established the significance of feelings, puzzles, decisions and

actions like those recounted above to the dynamic of a technological
society. The idea of domestic users having a say, albeit through their
mostly silent choices and circumscribed activities, in the shaping of the
emergent 'information society7 was inspiring to me. The stream of
literature discussing the impacts of that society and its dominant
technologies on individuals and households was so abundant at the time
that a glimpse of faith in the mindful, knowledgeable agent represented
a welcome change. I had personal reasons to want to believe in the
existence of such an agent, of course. Along with millions of fellow East
Europeans, I was coming out of the collapse of an authoritarian
communist state hopeful that the dictate of a system, be it political or
technological, over individuals was not an inevitable state of affairs.
Moreover, I had the inside knowledge of someone who had inhabited an
authoritarian society and realized that the power of a system could never
be so comprehensive as to permeate all aspects of life, to smash all
resistance and to cancel all expressions of alternative human creativity.
For my own emotional and biographical reasons, I wanted to search for
the 'power of the powerless7 that Havel (Havel and Keane 1985) had
brought to light, if not necessarily to triumph. I was aware of the role of
the home as a place of resistance, as a crucible of an alternative
rationality7 which generated and enacted value systems and projects
different from those organizing the public world. I knew intuitively that
what we did with objects and ideas in the home mattered with respect to
our public affairs. The concept of domestication elevated that intuition
to the status of a theoretical tenet.
Seen among a larger family of ideas regarding the relationship
between technology and society, the concept of domestication repre
sents a vital extension of social constructivism into the field of
technology use. When Pinch and Bijker (1987), along with their
colleagues, historians and sociologists, laid out the principles of the
SCOT approach and other related perspectives, they were focusing their
attention mainly on the practices of those professional groups out of
whose efforts new technical artefacts emerge. 'Following the actors7was
their leading motto and they lived up to it honourably. But the historical
cast of actors they were portraying did not include users in any central
roles. Users were confined to the background, to the crowd or choir that
would appropriately rejoice at the birth of new inventions.2 Users7trials
and tribulations, their monologues and dialogues as they struggled to
make sense of newly emergent technical devices were missing from these
accounts.
The concept of domestication was among the first to direct the
analytical lens to the dispersed and often dissonant micro-developments

occurring behind the stage. More than simply pointing that way, it also
offered an elaborate map for the explorer to follow as he or she enters the
field of domestic life with technologies. Although I, along with others,
would later want to revise the original scheme, the subdivision of the
process of domestication into appropriation, objectification, incorpora
tion and conversion was really helpful in structuring one's questions and
observation plans. The inscription of technical artefacts into domestic
values, space and time is indeed definitive to how these artefacts would
be perceived and employed in daily practice. Placing, I discovered in the
course of my own studies, is equivalent to appraising, and timing to
taming. People choose locations for their artefacts strategically depend
ing on the extent to which they would like to encourage or discourage
their use by certain inhabitants of the household and/or for certain
purposes. They work out elaborate schedules for access and rules of
engagement. After a researcher has come across a sufficient number of
examples of these embedding decisions, rules and timetables, or in a
more technical lingo, use protocols, it becomes hard to see them as
something separate from the technical device itself, from its own
buttons, voltage, frequencies, and so on. Domestication, thus, produces
an additional set of parameters that literally blends with the technical
device and determines its nature, purpose and functionality. With this
view of technology in mind, users are indisputably actors in the
technological world.

Dom esticating the internet, unleashing

domestication
Another propitious discovery I made in the early 1990s was that of the
internet. Heralded as a new communication miracle, the internet at that
time was still the domain of engineers, programmers and geeks. Those of
us who were not trained in the concepts of computer networking had to
go through a hard labour of domestication before we could call the
medium our own. It was clear to me from the vantage point my two
discoveries gave me that the transformation of the internet into a mass
medium beginning in the mid-1990s called for domestication-oriented
research. What the medium would become, I believed, would be decided
in the unglamorous shuffling around the connected computer at home
as much as in the pains of the ingenious brains populating the research
and development departments of the burgeoning internet industry.3
So, I set out to unveil some of the activities surrounding the internet
at home and, following the original domestication appeal, to show how
appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion occurred in

the context of the moral economies of households coming in touch with

a new communication technology.
Sure enough, the processes stirred by the arrival of the connected
computer into households proved to be exciting. But observing them
stirred a no less exciting commotion in the neat domestication model I
was trying to work with. First of all, no stable moral order (moral
economy) could be found reigning in the households that opened up for
me to investigate. In fact, most of them seemed to be in a constant
struggle to manage change that propped up from all kinds of corners: my
protagonists or their children being diagnosed with disabilities, spouses
leaving, jobs being lost or found, careers turning around or ending, or
countries of residence being left or embraced. Household values and
ways of life had to be reinvented and renegotiated almost on a daily basis
and that was exactly where the new medium was best fitting in. It was
proving to be an excellent change-management tool as well as an
initiator of change itself. Notably, my respondents and their families
were more interested in employing the medium in order to propel
themselves into new realms of activity, knowledge and values than to
preserve a static order of habits, identities and relationships.
Second, and most confusingly, the boundaries between the world
beyond the doorstep and the 'private7 life of the household were
ceaselessly cracking and shifting. People were bringing in work from
their offices and schools, friends and relatives were coming and staying,
giving remote input and advice, demanding time and attention. The
physical household was in actuality only a node in a much larger
network of significant others, which, to a large extent, determined the
nature and rhythms of its preoccupations (for similar observations see
Haddon, Chapter 6). Objects such as computers and modems were
flowing across the public-private divide and along the interpersonal
networks reaching far beyond the doorstep so that it was difficult to say
exactly which object belonged to the particular household.
In terms of ideas, too, the conversations between household
members were often overpowered and sometimes almost drowned by
voices and discourses coming from outside. In many cases the voices of
friends and relatives would be as loud and clear as those of television
anchors and other public authorities. A significant degree of ventrilocution would occur between these two types of voices. For example, the
technically knowledgeable grown-up son would speak in the voice of the
IBM ad, or the ad for that matter would assume the intonation of the
miserable child whose father had not yet woken up to the necessity of an
internet connection for doing homework. Thus the conversations within
the household were fraught with references to discourses unfolding in
public and semi-public spaces. All in all, after the active presence of

intermediate groups and personalities straddling the postulated pro

vinces of public and private life was given due notice and consideration,
the definition of the individual household as a self-regulating moral
economy became less convincing and the dichotomy between public
and private life significantly blurred.
Third, and importantly to me with a view to my desire to grasp the
nature of user agency, it was hard to think about the activities, in which
my respondents were drawing the internet as consumption. Silverstone
and Haddon's (1996) model presents domestication as an instance of the
private consumption of commodities produced by industry and
distributed by the market. Some of that was certainly taking place when
people bought devices and paid subscription fees, but the activities that
followed the purchase in the case of the internet were quite different
from those involving earlier communication technologies. Instead of
slouching back (see Morley's (Chapter 2) albeit disapproving, discussion
of this difference) and consuming entertainment and news, people were
indeed leaning forward and engaging in all sorts of projects whose
trajectory passed through the connected computer at home. Chatting
with family and friends, corresponding with fellow hobbyist, contribut
ing to the discussions of a virtual group, consulting sources for work- or
study-related assignments, doing research on all sorts of topics,
maintaining personal websites and other such active undertakings
formed the backbone of internet use at home. Given the sheer number
of words typed and sent away in cyberspace by users, the thought that
went into them, the ingenuity with which web searches were performed
and their unbreakable link with goals pursued in different spheres of
offline activity, it was clear to me that the internet connection was much
more a tool in a productive process than a consumer good. Even when
users were navigating the Net in relation to a consumer product they
wanted to buy, they referred to what they were doing as 'research' as
they were finding information and carefully weighing it in preparation
for their purchase decision.
Thus, while I understand the underlying logic of dichotomies such
as public-private and production-consumption forming the central axes
of the domestication model, none of them was easy to sustain in the face
of the observation material generated by my studies of internet use at
home. In my experience, the process of conversion, which the original
domestication model represented only as a thin secondary stream of
meanings generated by household members and socialized through
interpersonal exchanges outside the home, in the case of the internet
was abundant and engulfed internet use as a whole. Conversion of
individual users' understanding of the internet was taking place when
friends and other 'warm experts' (see Bakardjieva 2005) were coming

into the home in order to help set up the internet connection and give
novices their first lessons in what this medium could actually do for
them. The whole stream of content and activity coming out of the home
and adding to the substance of cyberspace could also be seen as
conversion. Entities such as virtual communities, for example, are
constituted exclusively out of what their individual members post in
them while sitting in their homes. Personal and group websites, and at a
later stage, blogs, are probably the best expression of conversion of
private meanings into public items. And even the jingle announcing one
of my buddies' appearance at my virtual door converts the meaning that
the medium has for him or her into a loud shareable message.

W hat is left?
If my field observations managed to undermine to a measurable degree
the idea of the household as a bounded unit with a stable moral
economy on the one hand, and the idea of consumption as the
overarching social process under which domestication is subsumed, on
the other, what is left of the original domestication concept and model?
I believe the most valuable tenet of domestication, to my mind the user
agency, remains intact and in fact is let to 'run wild' after these confines
are removed. Of course such a liberating gesture cannot be absolute and I
have found it necessary to make two substitutions in order to frame the
revised concept of domestication in a responsible manner. In place of
the idea of the household, I have introduced the concept of 'home' as a
phenomenological experience. Home in this definition is not necessarily
a real-estate unit, but a feeling of safety, trust, freedom and control over
one's own affairs. It is a home-base, 'a fixed point in space from which
we proceed and to which we return in due course' (Heller 1984). Home is
the terrain on which I believe I have agency to negotiate and change my
conditions of existence. It is, as de Certeau etal. put it: a protected space
at one's disposal where the pressure of the social body on the individual
does not prevail, where the plurality of stimuli is filtered, or, in any case,
ought to be (de Certeau et a l 1998, p. 146). Home is the container of
interpersonal relationships that are supportive of my identity project,
nurturing of my personal development and, overall, encouraging to the
growth of my human capacities. Home is where I, as an agent, maintain
my integrity and devise my strategies for action in places less hospitable,
or in the face of oppressive forces.
De Certeau, in his discussion of strategy and tactics, recognizes the
capacity of social subjects with will and power - 'a business, an army, a
city, a scientific institution' to create 'an interior, a place that can be

delimited as its own and serve as a base from which relations with an
exteriority ... can be managed' (de Certeau 1984, pp. 35-6). For him,
ordinary men and women are deprived of such a capacity. They are
forced to operate on the terrain of the Other devising subversive tactics.
Following bell hooks's (1990) account of the role of 'homeplace' in the
survival and struggle of oppressed black people, however, I contend that
home represents the 'interior' created by the powerless.
Black women resisted by making homes where black people
could strive to be subjects, not objects, where w7e could be
affirmed to our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship and
deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity
denied us on the outside in the public world.
(hooks 1990, p. 42)
Seen from the vantage point of this, albeit extreme, historical
experience, home is the locus where the agency of even the most
marginalized is reaffirmed and regrouped. It is that place, 'which enables
and promotes varied and changing perspectives, a place where one
discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference' (ibid., p.
148).
With respect to communication technology, then, home is interest
ing in that it allows for varied perspectives on the meaning and practical
usefulness of a device, and its pertaining content and functionality, to be
discovered and enacted. It is the point where the powers of technologies
meet with the meaningful activities and self-affirming projects of
ordinary users. In the case of the internet, home can literally become a
home-base, from which a whole range of actions can be projected onto
the outside world. The materiality of the home, certainly, remains
important as much as it provides the resources that user agency can
mobilize and draw upon the technologies under consideration here
being one prominent example.
This substitution of 'household' by 'home' avoids the shortcomings
of a static notion and allows for the dynamic of a constantly changing
relationship between exterior and interior to be adequately considered.
The activities, in which individuals are involved, do not stop or
drastically change at the doorstep of the home. On the contrary, they
cut through both interior and exterior. The significant difference
between the two realms, then, is not that between production and
consumption, or between civic involvement and a self-centred 'private'
life, but lies in the sense of agency and control in shaping the conditions
and choosing the priorities of one's actions.
The second substitution in the domestication model that I find

necessary to perform is that of 'consumption' with 'everyday life'. The

notion of consumption keeps the analyst captive to the economic
understanding of production, with respect to which consumption
appears as the subordinate twin. Domestication is consumption when
seen from the standpoint of designers, producers and marketers. From
the standpoint of users, it is part of everyday life. Everyday life as an
analytical category, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive notion
than consumption. Phenomenological sociology construes the everyday
lifeworld as 'the region of reality in which man [sic] can engage himself
and which he can change while he operates in it by means of his animate
organism' (Schutz and Luckmann 1973, p. 3). It is also the region, in
which man experiences other people (his fellow men), with whom he
constructs a shared world. These two qualities, taken together, make the
everyday lifeworld 'man's fundamental and paramount reality' (ibid.).
Importantly, the lifeworld is a reality which we modify through our acts
and which, for its part, shapes our actions (ibid., p. 6). In Schutz's
classification scheme, the counterparts of the everyday lifeworld are
other provinces of meaning such as 'the scientific-theoretical' attitude
and the province of dreams and fantasies.
From a markedly different position, critical theorist Lefebvre (1991)
concurs that, everyday life is 'profoundly related to all activities, and
encompasses them with all their differences and conflicts; it is their
meeting place, their bond and common ground. And it is in everyday life
that the sum of total relations which make the human - and every
human being - a whole takes its shape and form' (ibid., p. 97). Opposed
to everyday life in this taxonomy are all the specialized and structured
activities characteristic of formal organizations and bureaucracies.
Notably, Lefebvre does not place production outside of everyday life
by confining it to economic organizations. He proposes an extended
notion of production where the term signifies 'on the one hand spiritual
production, that is to say creations (including social time and space) and
on the other material production or the making of things; it also signifies
the self-production of a "human being" in the process of historical self
development which involves the production of social relations'
(Lefebvre 1971, pp. 30-1).
Everyday life is the sociological point of interaction and feedback
between all different types of production. Therefore, even though users
are typically excluded from the economic production of technical
artefacts, their dealings with technologies constitute a different type of
production relatively open to free and creative engagement. Instances of
production in this broader sense, I believe, have been captured in
numerous studies of home-based internet use. These are the moments in
which the internet has been domesticated in the most imaginative and

emancipatory sense. To insist on seeing them as nothing more than

'consumption7 of a communication technology is detrimental to the
analysis.
Furthermore, the home is an important, but not the only, site of
everyday life. Communication technologies are being appropriated as
'means of pursuing significant individual and group projects in
numerous settings outside the home that also deserve attention and
consideration. In these other settings - such as clubs, classrooms, offices
- users draw technologies into their activities and transform them in the
process.

.. To the mores of a culture

Finally, does domestication research provide any insights into the nature
of the social world in which domestic practices are embedded and to
which they give substance? A lot of domestication research, including
my own, has been preoccupied with the mechanics of how home users
appropriate or tame technologies. Not enough reflection has been done
on what the results of domestication processes are and what they add up
to when similarities and differences in patterns of use across households
are examined. It would be unfair to accuse early domestication research
of being only descriptive. This research did help us see the domestic
environment in its rich dynamic and deep structure. However, the
analysis it offered limited itself to the micro level and provided no
direction as to how these micro patches of social fabric could be woven
into a larger whole. What are the upshots of domestication and how do
they matter to the distribution of freedom and control, power and
knowledge throughout the culture of which they are a constitutive
element? Lefebvre's notion of 'critique of everyday life7 gives this lapse
its proper name. Can domestication research furnish a critique, an
examination of domestic practices and their larger social consequences
from a normative perspective oriented toward change? Can it cast light
on possibilities for technological democratization (see Feenberg 1999)?
My research on internet domestication made me experience that
deficiency in an acute way. As I was conducting my interviews and
observations in households, a heated public debate was raging around
the social role and implications of the internet. The polar positions in
that debate were bordering on the utopian, on the one hand, and the
dystopian on the other. Would the internet prove to be a force of
democratic empowerment in matters of economic well-being, personal
control over one's life, collective action and political participation, or a
source of further alienation, commercial manipulation and hegemonic

oppression? And of course, from my perspective, it was logical to ask how

the mundane decisions and routines users were devising around the
connected computers in their homes could give us any hints about the
resolution of that titanic controversy.
Reflecting on the nature of everyday life in the modern world,
Lefebvre pointed out that it represents a diptych of misery and power.
On the one hand, there is the monotonous existence under the
conditions of alienated labour and pre-programmed leisure, but on the
other, everyday life holds a tremendous creative potential as much as
human spontaneity, sociability and desire form an inseparable part of it.
The objective of the critique of everyday life that Lefebvre advocated was
to separate what is living, new, positive - the worthwhile needs and
fulfilments - from the negative elements: the alienations (Lefebvre 1991,
p. 97). Lefebvre advises that the diverse activities making up everyday life
should be examined in their historical concreteness and on that basis
concrete distinctions between what is 'life-enhancing7 (ibid., p. 82) and
what alienated should be made. He saw this distinction as a necessary
prerequisite for the emergence of a critical and self-critical conscious
ness, which could transform everyday life.
So, there are two challenges to the original domestication approach
to be discerned here. One is the need for a method through which the
results of the domestication process unfolding between the walls of
numerous homes across society could be summed up and analysed in
their similarities and differences. The second is the search for a critical
edge that would allow the description and classification to be extended
into a critique and blueprint for change.
To address the first challenge I have borrowed and reworked the
linguistic concept of genre. Similar to speaking a language, using a
communication technology represents a formative strand of activities
that have their specific motives, intents and recipients, and unfold in
typical situations. Discovering how a new technology could fit appro
priately into the typical situations constituting the everyday life of
diverse groups of people is the main achievement of users. It is the
creative and imaginative aspect of domestication. I still remember the
day in the fall of 1992 when it dawned upon me that in my situation of
an international student in Canada, I could use the internet to subscribe
to a newsletter containing information about the dramatic political
events unfolding in my native Bulgaria as well as to stay in touch with
my family through a relative connected to Bitnet. Such revelations were
present in most 'origin stories7that I heard from the users I interviewed
in the late 1990s.4 A long-term immigrant to Canada was discovering
that with the help of the internet he could finally restore his bond with
his native country painfully missed in his situation. A battered young

wife was finding the virtuality of computer communication to be an

antidote to her forced isolation from friends and social support outside
her home. A woman with a work-related injury was drawing the internet
into her efforts at retraining and redefining herself.
Gradually, it became obvious to me that these different everyday-life
situations played a crucial role in how people perceived and employed
the internet. To emphasize this intrinsic connection between the
immediately experienced situation and specific ways of using a new
technology and medium, I introduced in my analysis the concept of 'use
genre' (see Bakardjieva 2005). 'Use genre' is not dramatically different
from a 'way of using', but it suggests much less of a free choice or
random origin. It is contingent upon the inbuilt functionalities present
in a technology, but is not designer-configured (see Woolgar 1991),
rather it emerges out of a concrete practical situation as experienced and
defined by a user. It is not synonymous with 'style of use' as the elements
of the situation, rather than a personal or social characteristic feature of
the user, determine its nature.
Phenomenological as the concept of situation might sound in this
specific application, it can also be given a materialistic read. Subjectively
experienced and tackled practical situations are generated by a
combination of material and ideological forces characterizing the larger
social formation at a particular moment of historical time. Looking back
at the examples enlisted above, it will be reasonable to suggest that the
immigrant's situation of uprootedness and nostalgia has emerged out of
global economic and political dynamics sending millions of people on
the move away from their places and countries of birth and original
identity formation. Throughout different historical periods, the driving
forces, scope and speed of these movements have been quite different, of
course, but in each of them, characteristic situations of personal
experience have come to pass. The situation of the battered wife is quite
typical of a male-dominated culture where putting up with an abusive
marriage is enforced by economic dependencies and cultural attitudes.
This situation is quite distinct, however, in a society where women's
education and involvement in the workforce (where else would the wife
learn how to use a computer and connect to the internet?), has
introduced new elements and resources. The situation defined by a loss
of employability and its associated insecurity has everything to do with a
post-Fordist economic order and the dissipation of social welfare.
Tellingly, in this situation the network itself has been construed as a
life preserver to hang on to.
In the same way that speech genres tend to bring together typical
situations, with their pertaining speech motives and goals and
characteristic language forms (see Bakhtin 1986), use genres feature

typical technical forms such as, in the case of the internet, email or
browsers, newsgroups, webcams, or various combinations of these. It is
not the technical form, however, that defines the genre, rather the
specific fit between situation, action plan and technical functionality. I
have tentatively attempted to name some of the use genres I have
identified in the course of my empirical studies: sustaining globally
spread family and social networks, holding together a fragmented
national and cultural identity, participating in online support groups,
talking back to institutions and organizations, doing research on
everyday activities, and so on.
By virtue of their inseparable connection to typical situations that,
for their part, are rooted in social relations of a higher order, use genres
can be understood as the meeting point between micro-practices and
macro structure. Technologies and media institutions represent compo
nents of the macro structure. They shape and at the same time are
disturbed, challenged and changed by use genres stemming from the
lifeworld. By inventing use genres, meaningful and effective in the
context of their local situations, users influence the course of
technological and media development. This is not always and necessa
rily an emancipatory process, however. Templates or scripts of use genres
are widely propagated through advertising, political, futuristic and
techno-cultural discourses. These are equivalent to authoritative state
ments that become engraved in the imagination of users and effectively
highlight the 'proper7, 'respectable7, 'cool7 uses of the technology in
question. Not all genres are created equal and not all user-invented
genres are intrinsically empowering. There are escapist genres, hatemongering genres and terrorist genres, as our most recent collective
experience with the internet has demonstrated. The point of notice
amidst this breathtaking proliferation and diversification of use genres is
their intricate connection with forms of life that constitute the human
condition in the contemporary global world.
After the intermediate position of use genres between particular
patterns of domestication at the micro-level and the macro relations in a
society and culture is duly noticed and accounted for, it is time to
consider how to address the second challenge to domestication: What is
there to be done to turn the study of its genres into a transformative
critique?
A critique of everyday life, Lefebvre insisted, endeavours to separate
the 'living7, emancipatory elements from the alienations. It is certainly
not a straightforward task to apply this approach to internet domestica
tion. How are wre supposed to sift the 'life-enhancing7 activities spun
around the internet in everyday life from the old and new alienations
that it introduces into it? The touchstone of this evaluation, I believe, is

the capacity of the medium to empower users to produce freely and

creatively: social time and space, social relations, material or virtual
things, as well as their own self identities. By bringing to light such forms
of disalienated production, domestication research could demonstrate
the varied possibilities for the medium's progressive development
discovered by users. Furthermore, it could suggest technical and political
choices that need to be made in order to consolidate these fleeting
individual discoveries into a stable democratic trajectory.
Fortunately, the tug-of-war between alienation and empowerment
involved in internet use does not need to be mapped out from outside or
above by an enlightened researcher who applies her elevated criteria to
the daily practice of naive subjects. Domestication is the business of
mindful, critically-thinking users who may not be employing terms such
as empowerment and alienation when gauging their choices and
activities, but certainly consider their options carefully with a view to
what feels reasonable, right and rewarding to them. The involvement of
women in internet domestication clearly illustrates this point.
Unlike competence and role division around other communication
technologies, for example, the video recorder (see Gray 1992), women
were taking an active part in the domestic appropriation of the internet.
Being more often the household member who needed to masterfully
juggle work duties outside the home with those inside it, women were
often the champions of the internet connection at home. Somewhat
'naturally' the preoccupation of children with the new technology made
it imperative for mothers to come to terms with it as well. Most of the
time that meant learning how the technology worked and what was to
be expected from the content available online. Thus, the entry of the
internet into the household, as opposed to its career in the research lab,
was marked by the massive participation of women, those managers and
conductors of everyday life at home. Following the steps of these new
actors in the internet world, it became clear to me that first of all they
made it their mission to mitigate the alienating potential of a powerful
technological system designed to accelerate unbridled consumption from Pokemon stickers, technical gadgets and bandwidth to sexual
scenes. Along with that, women were discovering the communitymaintaining and -building possibilities and embraced the technology in
a spontaneous and non-alienated manner. The internet was being used
by them as a tool to enhance relationships with their children inside the
home, as well as with numerous relatives, friends and complete strangers
outside it.
The ways in which users were taking up electronic commerce
represented another example of the daily struggle to resist the
alienations while making the most of the empowering potential of the

medium. As in a heaven of controlled consumption, the internet

marshals an incessant parade of banner ads and pop-up windows across
users7 screens calling attention to different products and consumption
possibilities. If the full 'script7 of these techniques was to be realized,
users would have clicked their way directly from banner ad to order
form, to online purchase. Instead, users were blocking or ignoring the
pop-ups with all the inventiveness they had in stock and tried to marshal
the internet to help them make informed, reflexive and reasonable
purchase decisions. The intrusiveness of the commercial appeal was
making many users more vividly aware of the intended manipulation of
desire. In response, they were firming up their position of resistance and
loud protestation against the disrespect to human will and dignity they
saw transpiring in this practice. Interestingly enough, some people saw
their participation in the domestication-focused study I was carrying out
as a way to take these feelings out of their living rooms into the public
domain. Users, I fathomed, were hoping and trying to turn my study
into a vehicle of conversion.
I have to admit that this turn of events found me, and my guiding
domestication model, unprepared. Faced with such an expectation on
the part of users participants, a researcher should stop to consider the
political potential of his or her own project. After all, how is a
domestication study different from a marketing one? What are its
unique insights and how can they be applied to the ongoing enterprise
of internet (or any medium, or technology) development? Who do they
benefit in the final analysis? 'Universities suck knowledge out of people
outside the university, put it through a special filtering procedure
provided by social science, and confine it to specialists. ... It serves the
organization of ruling people, rather than serving people7 charges Smith
(1992, p. 130). What kind of defence can domestication research put up
against such harsh accusations?
As a domestication researcher I certainly did suck up a lot of my
respondents7 personal time. I enjoyed their patience and goodwill. I
learned a lot from them about internet use and the medium's status in
society. I led them to believe that I was taking their stories seriously and
knew how to retell them so that they would be heard and noted in those
powerful quarters that chart the course of future internet development.
After all the data is collected and transcribed, analyses performed and
shared within the community of my academic colleagues, papers written
and published, a lingering question remains: Has my research brought
about any benefit to users? Is domestication research indeed guilty of
putting the knowledge extracted from users to the service of users7
alienation? Or is it simply another 'ivory tower7exercise deprived of any
social consequences?

I argue that in order to avoid these possible scenarios, in order to

become part of a transformative programme, the results of the critique
domestication research performs have to be returned to users themselves
as a form of knowledge that enhances their critical and self-critical
consciousness. Domestication research has the potential to transform
the process of domestication from a silent achievement, an indistinct
'murmur of everyday practices' into a clearly audible legitimate public
discourse. This discourse, then, could inform the choices and organize
the activities of numerous individuals whose local sites of internet use
may be geographically and temporarily dispersed and institutionally
various (see Smith 1999, p. 158).
Thus I come to the conclusion that domestication research should be
research for users, similar to the 'sociology for women that Smith (1987)
has called for. Starting from the immediately experienced local world
users inhabit, perceiving this world from their standpoint and absorbing
its situated knowledge, domestication research should go on to perform
the critique of this everyday world by separating the alienations from the
empowerments and unveiling the social forces at play behind the local
scene. Importantly, by bringing the 'life-enhancing' achievements of
users into view, domestication research has the capacity to contribute to
a more inclusive and hence democratic technological development.

Post-scriptum
What is democratic about me chatting with my son over the internet? Is
the triviality of extended family communication, now supported by
voice and image over IP functionalities, worth the attention that the
version of domestication research I have proposed in this chapter draws
to it? The possibility of my well-organized working day at the computer
being punctured by virtual visits by childhood friends is certainly of an
ambiguous value. Down goes my productivity and up rises my feeling of
comfort and security in my here and now. These two simultaneous
effects would be judged differently from the perspective of different
moral economies. Democratic development steps in when the rationality
of a mode of use deviating from the hegemonic moral imperative is
given a chance to be considered. This is, I believe, a matter of the
unglamorous but consequential everyday politics that domestication
research is well positioned to bring into view.

Notes
1.
2.
3.

4.

Courtesy of Howard Rheingold (1993): 'A slice of life in my virtual

community7.
Cowan's (1987) contribution being a notable exception.
To the misfortune of million investors world-wide, venture capital
ists had not heard about domestication and hence the disaster of the
year 2000.
Curiously, they did not come through so distinctly in the narratives
of the users interviewed only a couple of years later. This raises
interesting questions about the different stages of domestication
throughout the career of a new technology as in the course of time it
blends into the background of taken-for-granted assumptions and
recipes.

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tion. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, pp. 57-80.
Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. (1973) The Structures o f the Life-world.
North-Western University Press: Evanston.
Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996) Design and the domestication of
information and communication technologies: Technical change
and everyday life', in (eds) R. Mansell and R. Silverstone, Commu
nication by Design: The Politics o f Information and Communication
Technologies. Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, pp. 4474.
Silverstone, R., Hirsch, E. and Morley, D. (1992) Information and
communication technologies and the moral economy of the house
hold', in (eds) R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch, Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Routledge: London, pp. 1531.
Smith, D. (1999) Writing the Social. University of Toronto Press: Toronto,
Buffalo and London.
Smith, D. (1992) Remaking a life, remaking sociology: reflections of a
feminist', in (eds) W. K. Carroll, L. Christiansen-Ruffman, R. Currie
and D. Harrison, Fragile Truths: Twenty-five years o f Sociology and
Anthropology in Canada. Carleton University Press: Ottawa, pp. 12534.
Smith, D. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology.
University of Toronto Press: Toronto.
Woolgar, S. (1991) Configuring the user: The case of usability trials', in
(ed.) J. Law, The Sociology o f Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and
Domination. Routledge: London and New York, pp. 57-102.

Em pirical studies using the

dom estication fram ew ork
Leslie Haddon

While the broad theoretical outline of the concept of domestication has

been widely cited (especially Silverstone et ah 1992) the subsequent
British empirical studies are perhaps less well known. The first part of
this chapter introduces the history of British domestication projects
conducted during the 1990s, with some indications of how all these
studies contributed to thinking in the area of ICT policies, as well as
observations about how the domestication framework might be
extended to social networks. The second part describes how the
domestication framework was itself developed by examining some key
themes arising principally from the ESRC's Programme on Information
and Communication Technologies (PICT). First, it reconsiders both the
boundaries of households and the influence of different household
compositions on ICT use. Second, it looks in more depth into forces at
work beyond the home. Third, it considers how the domestication
approach can be combined with complementary forms of analysis, here
exemplified by cohort analysis. Finally, it examines factors shaping the
longer-term careers of ICTs in the home.

The 1990s dom estication studies

The PICT studies, each of which lasted a year, examined how ICTs were
experienced by teleworkers, by lone parents and by the young elderly.
These target groups were chosen for strategic purposes in order to
develop the original domestication framework further, as outlined
below. In each of the studies we conducted in-depth interviews in 20
households. Where there were two partners we attempted to see them
both separately~and togeffieT7'OTfhe"Tirst oc'ca^tarr'fo^pprrciate IvTiat
1ffie^Ead~T<T~ ~say~ independM
interaction. In addition, eafch adult interviewee wrote out a week's
time-use diary and observations about the home were noted. This
included photographing various ICTs and the context in which they
were located as well as taking pictures to capture the appearance of these
homes and their locale. However, the more detailed ethnographic

element of the earliest domestication studies was not repeated. While

the first three-year study at Brunei had explored various methodologies,
the Sussex research was more focused in this respect, especially due to
time considerations. Hence, the central research tool was in-depth
qualitative interviews around a set of themes.
The first PICT study, conducted in 1992-93, was of teleworkers
(Haddon and Silverstone 1993, 1995a). This group were chosen in order
to explore the relationship between home and paid work under
conditions when the boundaries between the two were being challenged
in a particularly dramatic form by homeworking using ICTs. Some of the
insights from this study apply to certain non-teleworkers as well: for
example, those who bring some work home after leaving offices, those
who allow themselves to be contactable at home and those who work
non-standard shifts so that their free time is out of synchronization with
other household members and social networks.
The second year of the programme, 1993-94, dealt with lone parents
(Haddon and Silverstone 1995). These were chosen in order to explore a
household structure that was different from the nuclear families of the
earlier Brunei work. But this study also had a number of other
dimensions. In practice, the lone-parent households were mostly
female-headed, and so they provided an opportunity to look at the
dynamics involved around ICTs when no adult males were present. A
large number of our interviewees were living on state support, or earned
a limited amount. Hence, this was also in part a study of the
consequences of poverty and of the strategies to overcome problems
and hardship. In those cases involving the break-up of relationships, the
research also acted as a study of trauma, of upheaval and the dramatic
dissolution and reformation of households and household life.
The final year, 1994-95, was spent examining the young elderly
(aged 60-75) (Haddon and Silverstone 1996). This group was chosen in
order to reflect upon differences in the experience of ICTs arising at a
stage in the life course when the children had left home and paid
employment had ended. But the young elderly were also useful for
considering cohort effects: the fact that people are born, grow up and
live their earlier adult lives at particular historical moments, with
particular social and economic conditions and technologies available.
In addition to the PICT studies, there was one EC-funded study of a
particular and newly released technology, CD-z, (Silverstone and Haddon
1993). Some of this material fed into a book chapter aimed at combining
an understanding of how users were conceived in the production process
with the domestication approach to analysing ICT consumption
(Silverstone and Haddon 1996a).
The first commercially sponsored study (Silverstone and Haddon

1996b) was for the cable company Telewest. Its staff had shown an
interest in how the domestication approach might help them to
understand the low take-up of their cable service by what is in the UK
social class AB: managers and professionals. This 1995-96 study was able
to cast some light on the values of this group, specifically how they
evaluated TV and associated cable with more TV (which was under
standable given cable's marketing strategy at the time). In addition, the
study drew upon the interest of domestication analysis in people's time
schedules and showed that, after prioritizing the news, the remaining
time slots that many of these managers and professionals had for TV
watching in the weekdays mitigated against their ability to watch films,
one of the key selling points of cable.1
The second commercial project arose when the firm NCR was
interested in the future of electronic commerce. While this topic
provided one important focus, the company was also interested in the
internet more generally, as this was the early period of its growth as a
mass-market phenomenon. The study focused on a middle-class sample,
since this group provided the main adopters at the time of the study in
1998. It explored differences in early experiences of the Net that related
to an emerging literature of internet 'apprentiships' (Jouet 2000; Lelong
and Thomas 2001; Horrigan and Rainie 2002; Haddon 2004). But as in
the case of the cable study, it examined people's time structures, their
time commitments and hence 'free' time slots. It became clear how these
provided important constraints on usage that challenged contemporary
speculations within the industry about the prospects for increasing
online time substantially.
The other novel dimension of this particular NCR study was that it
entailed a five-country comparison involving Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway and the UK. This study provided a heightened
appreciation of the particular challenges of cross-cultural comparisons of
qualitative studies (see especially, Livingstone 2003 on this point). For
example, the participants agreed to operate within the domestication
framework, covering the same areas in interviews and addressing an
agreed set of questions when producing a country report. Even then,
there was often some uncertainty as to whether different observations
from the various national teams reflected actual national differences or
whether they reflected the particular insights and background sensitiv
ities that the researchers brought to the analysis.
A third commercially sponsored study was conducted for Telecom
Italia. This involved a five-country survey conducted in France,
Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK (Fortunati 1998). The earlier PICT
studies had examined the ways that people sometimes developed
strategies to control communications. They usually did this either

because of the costs of outgoing calls or the disruptiveness of incoming

ones, especially if the latter occurred at certain inconvenient times
(Haddon 1994). Together with an analysis of the strategies people used
to keep their communications private, this focus on control strategies
formed one of the strands explored in the survey. A critical perspective as
regards what can be and is being measured in surveys was reflected in the
questions asked and the statistical tests that were chosen. On the one
hand, the survey material contrasted with the bulk of domestication
studies that have been associated with qualitative methodologies. On
the other, the research explored avenues that, while not being unique,
were also not so common in more traditional surveys of ICTs - touching,
for example, upon issues of domestic politics.
This 1996 survey provided an opportunity to examine the generalizability of these experiences of communication, to see to what extent
controlling communication was an issue for people and the degree to
which any strategies aimed at dealing with perceived problems were
used.2 For example, it was striking how much the cost of telecoms was an
issue within the European countries studied, across the social spectrum,
and how much this affected interactions within households, for
example, in terms of complaints about other household members' use
of the phone and attempts to limit this use.
In addition to the commercial studies, the domestication framework
was also used to explore policy issues.3 In particular, several publications
addressed the issue of social exclusion, looking at how access to, and use
of, ICTs related to debates about new haves' and 'have-nots' (Silverstone
1994; Haddon 2000). Through considering some of the studies outlined
above, especially the PICT ones, it was possible to explore what the
presence and absence of ICTs meant to people in everyday life, the
possibilities they opened up or closed down. Although the earliest British
domestication analysis looked in detail at tliFprocess^s by whictTTCTs
were fitted inTo^our Tfves," it never insisted thatTKeyTTad to beTTEese
PICT studies revealecf s'oine'of the ambiguities felt about iCTsTeven wellestablished ones like the TV and phone, and showed why people might
not always choose to embrace new technologies.
Finally, more recent work has explored in principle how the
domestication framework could provide insight into the experience of
technologies such as the mobile phone. It had always been clear that
while the British domestication framework provided insights it also had
its limitations through an emphasis on interactions within the house
hold. For example, some of the processes shaping the popularity of
technologies occurred outside the home (Haddon 1992). Indeed, some
Norwegian work using the domestication approach has looked to other
sites outside the home, for example, places where computer hackers

meet and develop their individual and collective domestication

strategies (Hapnes 1996). The case of portable ICTs, such as the mobile
phone, also require us to think how the domestication framework could
be expanded to consider how interactions with wider social networks
can have a bearing upon the experience of these technologies (Haddon
2003, 2004).

Household structure and dynam ics

The PICT studies in particular enabled more reflection upon the effects
of household composition on ICT use. Across the studies, we
considered ways in which household boundaries could be more porous
than had been depicted in the early Brunei studies. For example, this
occurred when children from first marriages 'flowed' in and out of a
household depending on which parents they were staying with at any
one time. Another example would be when adults, and sometimes their
children, moved back to their own parents' home when their partner
ships split up.
Because the households were asked about their earlier experiences,
including earlier experiences of ICTs, it was also possible to appreciate
the consequences of the diverse living arrangements they had lived
through in the past. This included the degree of communal living
experienced by students, by other young adults, as well as by some of our
lone parents. Then there were the households shared by just two adults
whose relationship could consist of various degrees of closeness: where
they might be partners, gay or heterosexual, friends or just otherwise
sharing for cost reasons or to provide company. Finally, there were the
arrangements whereby families or couples of whatever age define a
household primarily as their family, but then have extra people staying
with them, be they friends, other relatives, au pairs, longer-term lodgers
or bed and breakfast guests.
To the extent that technological resources are shared between a
number of people, there can be more complex, collective decisions and
negotiations about access and use. Sometimes this can extend to the
acquisition of ICTs since these adults can pool group resources to buy
new ICTs that might be neither affordable nor justifiable for any
individual. For instance, when we applied the domestication perspective
to the study of CD-z, the earning power and limited demands on the
income of one gay male couple was such that they could afford an
extremely rich and up-market technological environment. To the extent
that individuals in shared households lead separate lives, they some
times duplicate ICTs like computers or audio equipment. Alternatively,

such households can provide the chance for some members to

experience the technologies of others prior to acquiring their own set
ups. Finally, particular issues can arise around those ICTs financed on a
pay-per-use basis. For instance, some of those lone parents and
teleworkers who had lived in shared households recalled the extra
interest they had had at that time in monitoring phone usage, as well as
devising systems for financing it. Indeed, some had implemented various
systems for blocking outgoing calls. Clearly there can be some concern
in such shared households with the surveillance and control of
technologies.
If we turn now to lone-parent households, although not all of these
had a low income, many, * usually female, lived on social security
payments and/or part-time work. The absence of a second adult could
create particular constraints, demands and household dynamics. For
example, many lone parents felt trapped in home in the evenings
because there was no one else to mind the child. Organizing the logistics
of child management, such as getting someone to pick up a child from
school, could be more complicated for just one parent. And older
children could sometimes achieve a stronger negotiating role as regards
household rules when only one parent was present in the home.
Moving on to the consequences for their experience of technologies,
limited income often meant that anything beyond very basic ICTs such
as the phone or TV was beyond the horizons of many lone parents. The
poorer ones also tended to be more conscious of costs such as phone
bills, sometimes even rationing their calls and those of their children.
Such constraints, and the lack of options to even investigate whether
new ICTs and services could play a part in everyday life, can be
considered to be one more dimension of deprivation. It shows a lack of
ability to have access to the same resources as peers and hence
participate fuily in the social world. The dynamics of how ICTs were
acquired often reflected limited economic resources: for instance, phone
handsets, old TVs and VCRs were more likely to be gifts and/or second
hand. Apart from the effects of low income, the phone was often more of
a social lifeline for those trapped in the home, and certainly it could take
on substantial significance as a tool for organizing and coping with daily
life. In effect, stronger voting rights for children meant that they
sometimes had a larger say in how ICTs were consumed.
We saw at the start of this section that household composition could
also be somewhat fluid. This could have implications for ICTs. Travelling
between homes meant that equipment was sometimes duplicated in
different households, for example, having a video console in both. Or
else portable ICTs such as Walkmans were carried from one household to
another. Meanwhile, children, or indeed adults, spending time in two

different households could experience different rules and regulations,

different regimes, relating to ICTs. For example:
It's the violence that I don't like. Mark loves Terminator 2 and all
those sort of films, which is what he watches. His dad bought
him that video and he sees films at his dad's that I would never
allow him to watch. We have discussed it but that's just one of
those things ... (my ex-husband) makes decisions about what
they watch when he's there and he lets them watch horror films
and Terminator and other things I don't know about.

(Joy)
From her perspective, Joy had lost some influence over this part of
her children's lives through not having control when they were at their
father's place. Of course, from the children's perspectives, the ability to
operate in two different households might have actually given them
more freedom. The same applied in Paul's case:
Their mother has never allowed them to have it because ... I
mean my youngest boy, his favourite author is Stephen King.
He's into horror and the most horrific video that he could
possibly get his little hands on, that's what he'll go for. Mind you
they go round their friends' houses and they've all got (these)
bleeding videos. You name it, they've seen it.
(Paul)
Lastly, part-time household members can have access to different
equipment in different households:
I believe my husband's got satellite. They've been watching The
Simpsons round there and they're quite pipped that they can't
watch The Simpsons here.
(Linda)
Linda's children had clearly expressed some dissatisfaction that she did
not have satellite when their father did - she was seen as technologically
deprived given their other reference point.
In sum, household composition can be complex, and indeed it
sometimes forces us to think about what counts as the boundary of a
household and how flexible this is. Moreover, people often have a far
wider experience of different household forms and the very transition
between household forms can require some readjustment in life, which
can itself give rise to new demands on ICTs.

The relationship between home and the outside w orld

People's experience of ICTs can be influenced by their commitments to,
and roles in, social networks outside the home. In principle that had
always been acknowledged in the formulation of the concept of
domestication. But in the earlier British work much more attention
was given to the interaction between household members relating to
ICTs and how people presented themselves to the outside world, as
shown in the notion of 'conversion7 (Silverstone et ah 1992). The PICT
studies provided a chance to explore the relationship with the outside
world in more depth, as later researchers using the domestication were
also to do (for example, Lally 2002, looking at social networks and
computer use in Australia). Below, the three examples discussed are paid
work, unpaid work and links to the extended family.
Commitment to paid employment outside the home influenced the
amount of time that was available to spend in the home and hence the
time available to use PCs, to watch TV or otherwise participate in other
ICT-based leisure. In an era before the mass market for mobile phones, it
also influenced the time when people were contactable by phone or free
to contact others. Moves towards more flexible working hours and to
shift work in organizations operating 24 hours a day had led to more
varied times to consume ICTs, although time-shifting technologies such
as the VCR and answering machines had enabled people to cope better
with being out of synchronization with more mainstream leisure times.
Apart from structuring time, work reached into the home in various
ways, certainly as telework but also as overspill work (or in terms of
second jobs) where people brought home some work or else initiated or
received work-related communications at home. This often led to ICTs
coming into the home to support work, either through bringing the
laptop home or else re-duplicating in the home work facilities such as
the PC. In these studies from the early 1990s, some mobile workers had
their next day's work faxed to them at home or else it was relayed to
them as a phone message. Nowadays we might anticipate that email
would take on this role. Even in the early 1990s, work-related
commuting had also led some people to utilize portable ICTs in order
to make more productive use of travelling time.
Portable or home-based ICTs acquired for work were subsequently
often used for non-work purposes. Teleworkers who would never have
acquired a variety of equipment for purely domestic or personal reasons,
including PCs, could now justify this because of work and then discover
non-work applications (for example, printing out shopping lists, using
the home fax for trade union matters). Indeed, the equipment was
sometimes free in that it was funded or loaned by an employer or client.

Once in the home, not only teleworkers but also other family members
could gain familiarity with the technology, experiment and develop
their competences and awareness of its possibilities. The home-based
work fax machine was sometimes used to contact relatives, the work
photocopier was used for school projects.
But paid work entering the home could also change the experience
of existing ICTs. The best example from our research concerned the
phone. Where a second work line was not justifiable, the domestic
phone took on an additional role as a work tool. As a result, rules
concerning its use often had to be renegotiated. Household members,
including children, had to learn how to answer appropriately, or when
not to answer. Issues arose over other household members blocking the
phone line at certain times with their social calls if this might prevent
work calls from arriving. And the whole sound regime of the home had
to be reviewed. Hence we have examples of teleworkers deciding where
the phone was to be relocated and controlling domestic background
noise in an attempt to create a good impression of their working
environment when dealing with calls from prospective clients and
employers. Related issues emerged over access to PCs where telework
now competed with computer games, school homework or other
applications.
Unpaid work can, of course, include domestic labour, but the focus
here is specifically on voluntary commitments outside of home. This can
include 'voluntary work' helping others, taking part in committees,
running sports clubs, and participating in interest groups, be they
hobby-orientated or concerned with wider social issues. Across the PICT
studies we found a considerable involvement in the wider community,
with greater and lesser degrees of formality. A teleworker might head the
school board of governors, a lone parent might organize activities for
Gingerbread (the organization of and for lone parents) or a retired person
might captain the local bowls team or run a church group. In fact, many
of the young elderly were especially active as they sought to replace paid
work with constructive and social involvement that could structure dayto-day life, keep them mentally alert and add purpose to life.
These involvements often generated organizing work, administra
tion and other forms of production. For example, teleworker Simon
described how he used his equipment:
Simon: I did some tickets for a hockey club. I've organised the last two or
three karoake/disco-ey-type things, and I just knock the tickets
up upstairs and print them off. When Eliza was born, I scanned a
picture of her face in and blew it up and that was the, you know,
she's arrived', you know.

LH:

But do you find because you;ve got this equipment here, other
people come up to you and say, 'well, could you do this or could
you do that on your .. .'?
Simon: No, nobody's actually asked me. Actually, at church on Sunday, I
suggested or offered to do the weekly news-sheets which has
gone by the board because the guy who used to do it is no longer
doing it. They tend to be sort of hymns and songs which I could
put into the computer quite easily. And then just, I want number
1, number 47, number 36, just pop them all together and shove
them on the page and print them off.
We have other examples of computers being used to word process school
reports, update records of hobby groups (for example, what records have
been listened to in music appreciation societies) and handle official
correspondence on behalf of clubs or maintain a treasurer's accounts.
Equipment such as photocopiers has been used for reproducing the
music scores for bands. Meanwhile, the telephone was the medium for
organizing outings and other events, arranging speakers and players or
calling meetings. Other telecoms equipment such as answering
machines and even mobile phones could find similar roles. Less
formally, others within social networks made use of our participants'
ICTs as a resource, asking if it was possible to use the fax or other facility.
Here we see the modern-day technological equivalent of asking to
borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbour.
Lastly we have the case of support for and from extended family.
This was most acutely illustrated in the study of the young elderly, many
of whom had commitments in terms of either caring for their own
infirm elderly parents or minding young grandchildren. In managing
these tasks, the basic telephone in particular became an important
organizing tool for arranging visits and travel, as well as for monitoring
developments in their relatives' households or providing security in the
case of emergencies. The other technology of significance for the
extended family was the camcorder, as either the young elderly or their
children took on the role of preserving family memories. However, this
was not always embraced by other family members. Retired Chris
described why he and his wife Hilda had first acquired a camcorder:
Chris:

LH:
Chris:

Because it was a year when there were three big events in the
family. Well, big events ... I think the grand-daughter was being
born ... my son was getting married, and Hilda and I were going
on a Nile cruise.
So how often would you use it now?
Spasmodically. Mainly holidays, birthdays, Christmas.... special

events ... like Fm putting together some films to ... Well, I say
films, some of the family for my son out in Oman, for example,
just to give Christmas messages and show him what the
weather's like, you know; This is rain if you'd forgotten.'
LH\
So do your various children actually ask you 'Can you come and
video this?'
Chris: No, they don't. I poke the camera at them and they say 'Oh no,
not again!'
Hilda: We videoed my son's wedding and he still hasn't seen it. They
don't want to see it.
Through these various examples we can see the many ways in which
what happens outside the home has a bearing upon the organization of
domestic time and space and involves commitments which shape the
place and use of ICTs in the home, as well as their acquisition and
regulation.

Cohort analysis: the influence of earlier life

experiences
Applying the domestication framework to the analysis of a particular
topic or group does not preclude combining it with other forms or levels
of analyses. For example, each of the PICT studies contextualized their
subjects by borrowing from the literature analysing the social construc
tion of childhood (for example, James and Prout 1997). The studies
reflected upon such things as recent historical developments in work
practices, in legislation, in media representations and in financial
circumstances. Based on this they could ask what it meant to be a
teleworker, a lone parent or young elderly person in 1990s Britain in
terms of options, perceptions, expectations, constraints, and so on.
Another form of contextualization involved considering the biographies
of our subjects, in particular as cohorts of people born at a certain time
and sharing some experiences over the course of their lives. This was
clearest in the study of the young elderly group, although the form of
analysis has a wider applicability.
Many of this young elderly cohort were originally from workingclass backgrounds and had undergone upward social mobility in their
own lifetime as middle-class occupations expanded. Hence, it was
common for them to have lived as a child in somewhat austere
conditions from the pre-war era into the early postwar years. Although
they had enjoyed more affluence from the 1950s, in certain respects
non-consumerist values were retained. Our interviewees would often

talk about knowing the value of money. They were careful spenders,
interested in getting value for money. They often resisted rushing to buy
the latest version of a commodity and had always been more inclined to
replace items when they were sufficiently worn out. On the other hand,
many had enjoyed a lifestyle that had been somewhat different from the
previous cohort: with holidays abroad, a car-oriented culture and
shopping patterns long geared to supermarkets. Some had experienced
the break-up of traditional working-class communities and many had
seen their children and friends move away with the prevalence of
generally greater geographical mobility.
The second set of considerations relevant here is at what point in
their biographies various technologies became more widely available and
how they evolved over the course of this cohort's lives. Radio had
become a mass-market product when these interviewees were in their
youth. Familiarity with the phone had often come first through work as
it became an increasingly common tool in many jobs, especially the
expanding white collar ones. Television had made its in-roads into the
home in their early adult life in the 1950s and early 1960s. But on the
whole this was still not the computer generation. Many of those now
nearer to being 75 years old in the 1990s had not lived through office
automation during their working lives. Others had actively tried to avoid
computers - being very near retirement age they had not wanted to have
to take on new ways of working and learn computing skills at this stage.
At the same time, their own children had usually been too old to be
swept up by the computer and games boom of the 1980s. For most, the
computer was beyond their horizons not only because it would be
difficult to master but because they could not envisage how they would
fit into their lives and routines.
While basic phones, televisions, multiple TVs, TVs with teletext,
VCRs and various audio equipment could usually be found in the homes
of this cohort, there was a conservatism as regards acquiring newer ICTs,
or additional facilities. We saw that they were not impulse buyers and
hence acquisitions had to be justified. The young elderly argued in terms
of not needing7 any more equipment, facilities or services rather than
not desiring them. They would often point out that they had been
without various facilities for all their life so far and had managed. While
some were more adventurous, most clearly did not want to try too much
experimenting at this stage and so they were not interested in some
innovations.
In contrast with some of their own parents, most of this cohort of
young elderly were at ease with the phone, having gained competence in
using it so early in their lives. Most had had their own phone for many
years. It had been and was still important for maintaining social contact

with dispersed friends and children. And many knew through years of
practice how it might potentially be used - for instance, phoning to pay
by credit card or phoning ahead to check whether something was in
stock at a distant store to which they had to drive. Phone-related
equipment was usually a fairly straightforward extension of the familiar:
with modern or additional handsets and some cordless phones. But in
the early 1990s, answering machines were still rare among this group
and mobile phones virtually non-existent.
Radio listening in the evening had already been largely displaced by
TV-watching habits developed over a few decades, but this generation
still resisted TV in the morning and during the day. For many musical
tastes, if not classical, were predominantly from the pre-1960s popular
music era. Although most of our interviewees had been willing to take
on a VCR, often at the instigation of their own adult children, at the
time of the research satellite and cable were too new, and not justifiable.
Apart from some interest in war programmes by those who had taken
part in action, the films from their cinema-going days often appealed as
did travel programmes relating to their own visits abroad. Some soap
operas were attractive because they portrayed a sense of community that
they had lost. The fairly universal critical standpoint on forms of realism
and particularly sex and violence on TV reflected in part their earlier
exposure to broadcasting based on very different values in the 1950s.
Overall, we see the various ways in which past shared experiences
have helped to shape habits and routines, values and tastes and the very
perception of what that technology can offer. In principle, this form of
analysis could be applied to any cohort, as in media commentaries on
postwar 'baby-boomers or more recently in discussions of the specific
ICT experiences of children growing up in the 1990s (Haddon 2004). The
purpose of discussing it here has been to show how approaches such as
cohort analysis can complement domestication framework, adding extra
insights.

The longer-term careers of ICTs

Earlier British formulations of the domestication framework paid
particular attention to the initial career of ICTs, through the period
when they first entered the home and to some extent shortly afterwards.
Turning now to the longer-term processes changing the experience of
ICTs, one set of factors covered in some depth were the changes in
people's circumstances4 that altered their interest in and use of ICTs.
This might include the arrival and growth of children or changes in
factors external to the household, such as work (Haddon 2004). In the

PICT studies we focused not only on transitions into telework, lone

parenthood and the stage of being young elderly, often involving
retirement, but we also observed subsequent and the ongoing changes.
For example, the new demands on space and evolving timetables of
growing children could lead to changes in where telework equipment
was located and when it was used. As the financial position of some lone
parents improved, this could lead to them using ICTs that they had
previously not considered. And the communication patterns of the
young elderly could alter as grandchildren arrived or their social
commitments changed.
In addition to these dynamic processes, people's use of ICTs was
itself influenced by the new technologies and services on offer. Others
have subsequently referred to this in terms of the 'shifting environment'
of ICTs (Cummings and Kraut 2002). Of particular interest here is how
the entry of new ICTs into the home affected people's relationships to
the existing ones (Haddon and Silverstone 1994).
While products such as computer peripherals, videos and satellite,
and answering machines can be regarded as separate ICTs, their entry
into the home also affected the existing computer, TV and telephone
respectively - that is, the generic technologies. Obviously, such
additions enhanced the functionality of existing ICTs, adding new
options. Less obviously, these additions could create new problems or at
least give rise to issues that had to be handled in the household. Some of
the parents remembered new conflicts with their children over access to
the TV when video games consoles first entered the home. By requiring
the TV screen for display, games had competed with broadcast
programmes. Other interviewees had been wary of how the additional
programme choice offered by the introduction of satellite or cable might
make the familiar TV too tempting - they might find themselves
watching more TV than thought was appropriate. So both by offering
new possibilities and requiring new decisions, what we might call the
new TV-video-satellite-game display technology system had gone
beyond the boundaries of and was a different entity from the old TV.
The multiplication of technologies and the acquisition of second
and third phone lines, TVs, computers, and so on can have implications
for the experience of ICTs. For example, in some of the teleworking
households we examined, upgrading a computer meant that partners of
teleworkers and their children could now have easier access to the old
PC. While this meant a change in the 'career' of those particular old
computers, it also had implications in terms of the computer's general
place in the home. It could reduce conflicts and anxieties arising from
the fact that different people wanted to use the machine at the same
time. There was a parallel in the case of second TVs. The arrival of a new

TV not only meant a potentially new role for the old set. It could also
change the experience of viewing, reducing communal TV watching and hence 'family time together' - as on occasion some household
members retired to another room to watch the programmes they wanted
to see on their own TV.
We should not forget how even more minor or mundane innova
tions can have significant consequences. In the 1980s, the introduction
of phone extensions going into private spaces such as bedrooms enabled
more privacy for individuals within the home. But that in itself could
also lead to conflicts of interest as it allowed some teenage children to
evade more easily the surveillance of their parents. Yet, some parents not
only wanted to know who was being phoned, but, being conscious of
phone bills, preferred such phoning to take place in a space where it
could be monitored. As a result, in some households, there had been
attempts to deny children the use of the extension phone (and cordless
phone, which raised similar issues).
Another instance of change in media is that of the services
deliverable via ICTs, most particularly via the telephone, including
ordering by credit card, access to technical helplines, to social support
lines (for example, the Samaritans), and to chatlines. For some lone
parents undergoing the trauma of separation and social isolation, the
availability of these support and chatlines had been a social lifeline. In
other households, the fear of teenagers running up huge bills on
chatlines, or accessing sexlines, had led to some anxiety and conflicts.
ICT-related innovations such as the radio phone-in, initiated by the
broadcasting industry, have created whole new forms of messaging. TV
competitions, where the audience was invited to phone in with answers
- at premium phone call prices - had also required new forms of
negotiation within households, with some parents limiting how much
their children could take part in these competitions because of the
implications for the phone bill. Clearly, the increasing availability of all
of these options, making the role of the phone more and more complex,
had the potential to cause new types of interaction and regulation
within households.
The earliest British formulations of the domestication framework
drew attention to the biography of objects over the longer term. But the
focus on the first moment of consumption and shortly afterwards and
the very metaphor of 'taming the wild' could lead to the misleading view
that domestication was a one-off set of process leading to an end-state in
which the ICT is finally domesticated. This was not an intended
implication, as was even clearer in S0rensen's contemporary observation
that artefacts become redomesticated or even dis-domesticated as we
give them up (S0rensen 1994). The changes outlined in this section as

well as the dynamics of households themselves, serve to underline this

principle that domestication is actually an ongoing process where we
have constantly to reassess our relation to ICTs over time.

Sum m ary
The history of the 1990s British projects shows how the domestication
framework has been 'applied'. For commercial purposes, it helped cast
light on the use, as well as non-use, of ICTs. Its appeal to industry lay
largely in the fact that much traditional market research is very focused
on individuals, and indeed often draws upon theoretical frameworks
orientated to individuals such as 'uses and gratifications' model of media
use, or Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the British domestication studies
the unit of analysis was the household,5 or when commenting on
individuals at least it placed them in a context where one could
appreciate the role of interactions with others as well as the structures,
such as time commitments, within which they acted.
The domestication framework has also been 'applied' in the sense of
informing policy, the main example being in relation to digital divides
or social exclusion. But empirical material has also been policy relevant
in terms of being used to comment upon the claims and aspirations
associated with the 'information society', be that in terms of questioning
broader visions of revolutionary change (Silverstone 1995) or in
reflecting upon the practical experience of one icon of that vision:
telework.
The second half of this chapter showed how the follow-up PICT
studies were designed to fill out the areas that had received less attention
in the earliest formulations of domestication. First, the PICT studies
highlighted how the composition and dynamics of households were
relevant for ICTs. Indeed, they drew attention to ways in which the very
boundaries of what counts as a household or a family can be somewhat
fluid. Second, the studies looked in far more depth at the implications of
relationships with outside world, providing more insight into the
context in which households and their members operate.
Third, we saw how in actual studies the domestication framework
could usefully be complemented by other forms of analysis. Domestica
tion analysis had always argued how households or families had previous
histories or biographies that had a bearing upon current interactions
around ICTs. We could now broaden this appreciation of histories to
consider the role of generational experiences.6 Finally, the PICT studies
underlined how it was possible to understand the experience of ICTs as
an ongoing and dynamic process in the longer term.

Notes
1.
2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

The results are described in more depth in Haddon 2004.

The original Italian chapter on this topic is Haddon 1998. The full
English version of the Italian chapter can be downloaded from
http://members.aol.com/leshaddon/Date.html
Indeed, when the EC's Bangemann report on the future of ICTs came
out in the late 1990s, some of the material described here informed
the report to a high level group of experts brought together to
respond to this report and develop policy initiative. That contribu
tion was later published as Haddon and Silverstone 2000.
Such dynamics have also been considered in a variety of French
studies, such as Claisse 2000, looking at evidence on changing
gender communications patterns over the life, and Manceron et ah
2001, exploring the impact on communication of the arrival of the
first child. Both are discussed in more depth in Haddon 2004.
Norwegian studies have discussed and illustrated ways in which the
framework could be used to understand domestication at a house
hold level and an individual one (Aune 1996; Berg, A.-J. 1997). This
individual level of analysis reflects processes described in some of the
consumption literature (for example, McCracken 1990), one of the
very roots of the domestication framework.
The cohort analysis was inspired in large part by the work of Sibylle
Meyer and Eva Schulze from BIS in Berlin, with whom we had
contact at an earlier stage and who later part participated in the EC
sponsored EMTEL network of researchers looking at ICTs in everyday
life.

'Fitting the internet into our

lives': IT courses for
disadvantaged users^
Deirdre Hynes and Els Rommes

Introduction
This chapter presents two case studies documenting the domestication
experiences of participants taking introductory courses in computers and
the internet in the Netherlands and Ireland. Both courses specifically
aimed to reach disadvantaged users, for example elderly people, people
from ethnic minorities, unemployed, and single parents. All of them live
in a disadvantaged area of Amsterdam: 'Westerpark7, or in the 'Ballymun7
area of Dublin. While neither course was specifically aimed at reaching
women, both attracted more women than men. Both courses were
offered as part of a community-wide attempt to promote IT skills
through free 'introductory7 courses conducted in public spaces.
Our aim is twofold. First, we aim to explore the practical and
political usability of the domestication concept. Domestication is a
notion that calls attention to the relevance of the symbolic meaning of
artefacts and to the various phases a user goes through when facing a
new technology. We explore the contribution our analysis could make to
policy-makers and course developers when designing courses. We argue
that, in addition to material resources and tuition, course designers
should also address the symbolic resources people bring with them; that
is the reasons and motivations to learn and attend the course, and the
importance and meaning the artefact holds to the individual. Second, we
extend the current conceptualization of domestication to address how
introductory computer courses can influence and intervene in the
domestication process, especially in more problematic cases.
Little attention has been paid to domestication processes that are
problematic, reversed, stopped altogether, or influenced by factors such
as the availability of resources or the presence of a course.2 In other
words, the concept ignores the diversity of users. In this chapter, we
show that the concept can be used to analyse these kinds of cases and we
demonstrate the way in which the organization of the Dublin-based
course considered the social and cultural capital of the participants, in

the sense that it supported participant interest, motivation and the

processes involved in ascribing meanings to ICTs. The Dublin-based
course, with its sensitivity to user need, facilitated a greater level of
success in the domestication process than the Dutch course.
We start by introducing the concept of domestication: the ways in
which it can incorporate more diverse users, and the place a course may
have in the domestication process. Following this, we introduce our
research methodology and compare the courses we have studied. We
discuss the ways these courses influenced the phases of domestication
for the course participants. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions
on how courses can be improved; ways in which the domestication
concept can be adapted to include more diverse users; and we consider
the influence of a course on the domestication process.

The concept of dom estication

In our understanding, domestication is, first of all, an analytical tool,
which helps to illuminate the process where the user makes the
technology 'his/her own7; a process through which both the technology
and its user are changed. This process takes place through various phases
or dimensions and the artefact is fitted into the routines and practices of
the everyday life of its user (Silverstone et ah 1992; Berg 1996; Lie and
S0rensen 1996; Mansell and Silverstone 1996; Frissen 1997; Mackay
1997). Although the term 'domestic' suggests a household environment,
the concept is also applicable to other areas of everyday life, such as to
study the introduction of computers at work (Sorensen et ah 2000;
Pierson, in this volume), or in our cases, in a teaching environment and
in public settings.
Perhaps the main advantage of the domestication concept is the
explicit attention it brings to the symbolical meanings of technologies.
By domesticating technology, users may ascribe new and changed
meanings to the artefacts (Gay et ah 1997, p. 95). According to
Silverstone:
Both [domestication and design] constrain and enable the
capacity of consumers to define their own relationship to the
technologies that are offered to, or confront, them. These
constraints ... are embodied in design and marketing and in
the public definitions of 'what these technologies can and
should be used for'.
(Silverstone and Haddon 1996, p. 46)

In terms of the domestication approach the design of an artefact is seen

as enabling and constraining its users, both in its materiality (through
design) and by, for example, 'marketing' and 'public definitions'. In this
chapter, we suggest that meanings are ascribed to ICTs as a result of
participation on a course.
In addition, Silverstone flags that constraints can also be found at the
level of the user. In this chapter, we show that users' different access to
resources or forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986) is decisive in their ability to
domesticate computers and the internet. Of these, social capital points at
participation in social networks and the resources that can be mobilized
through this network. Cultural capital can be defined as a configuration of
achievements, dispositions and value orientations of various forms,
whereas economic capital points to the financial resources at our disposal.
Forms of capital are not randomly distributed in society. As
Cockburn remarked 'hidden within the innocent concept of resources
... is ... the historical patterning of the social by class, race and gender'
(Cockburn 1992, p. 45). Hence, it is important to diversify users, on the
basis of age, gender, ethnicity and educational background (Aune 1996;
Berg 1999; Sorensen et al. 2000), as it is the gendered configuration of
resources that influence our capacity to domesticate a new technology.
This is especially relevant when studying late adopters or 'laggards':
people that are late in adopting new technologies. In general when
compared to early adopters: they have less formal education; are less
likely to be literate; have lower social status; a smaller degree of upward
social mobility; and they have every (financial) reason to be slow in the
adoption of new technologies (Rogers 1995, pp. 280, 279). Indeed, we
show in our empirical section, that the course participants had very
rational motives relating to their lack of resources, for not domesticating
the computer sooner.

Dimensions of dom estication

How can a course change the domestication process of a technology?
The answer to this question may be different for each step of the
domestication process. This process is divided into dimensions or phases:
'appropriation' (sometimes called 'commodification'), 'objectification',
'incorporation' and 'conversion' (Silverstone et al. 1992; Berg 1996; Lie
and Sorensen 1996; Silverstone and Haddon 1996). In the appropriation
and conversion phase, emphasis seems to be on the symbolical meaning
an artefact has, whereas during the objectification and incorporation
dimension, the material expression of the symbolic meaning of the
artefact is more relevant.

Appropriation is an activity within which both actual and potential

consumers engage. It consists of imaginative work: commodities are
constructed as objects of desire (or as something they do not want) and
not only to fulfil specific functions but also as a construction of the
desire for difference and social meaning (Silverstone et al. 1992, pp. 623). For some participants, the course influenced their decision to buy and
use a computer. And this phase was relevant for those who already had
access to computers and the internet, as it influenced their willingness to
invest time and energy in attending the courses, complete homework
and use more functions of their computers and internet connections.
Some users (divided by class, age, gender and ethnicity) never pass the
appropriation phase as they never make a 'technology-representation' of
computers that fits their self-image; they simply never transform the
public meaning of the artefact towards a personal meaning of something
that is 'desirable'.
Several authors have noted that in non-domestic situations studying
the appropriation phase by users becomes redundant because it is not the
users who decide to buy the technology (S0rensen et a l 2000; Silverstone
2001). We would like to add to this observation that this is often also the
case in household situations, where one member of the household
decides for all members whether a computer should be purchased.
Haddon, for instance, showed how girls were dependent on the
appropriation decisions taken by their brother on what games they
would play on the computer: the 'girls "just played" the games which
were available' (Haddon 1992, p. 91). Hence, as other feminist researchers
of technology (Bakardjieva 2001; Berg 1999), we want to call attention to
the importance of who decides which technology is being appropriated,
rather than studying the family as a unit and ignoring the different
positions of various family members. In both cases we studied all
appropriation decisions on what to use during the course, were taken by
the course developers, leaving no agency on the part of the user.
During the phase of 'conversion', the personal meaning that the user
has attached to the artefact is conversed, made part of the public meaning
again. During this phase, the user displays his or her ownership and
competence both materially and symbolically in a public culture, 'to
whose construction it actively contributes' (Silverstone and Haddon
1996, p. 65). Thus, conversion is of importance in explaining how
potential new users gain their representations of computers, once again
starting the domestication process for new users. In a sense, a course can
be regarded as a form of conversion instigated by course designers and
teachers, consciously starting or intervening in the domestication
process of the course attendees. Hence, depending on how course
teachers conversed the meaning of the internet to participants, some of

them decided to appropriate a computer at home, whereas others

decided not to.
During the incorporation dimension,3 in order to become functional
a technology has to find a place into the routines of daily life. Hence, the
main focus in this dimension is a temporal one (when it is used and for
how long), whereas during the process of objectification, the object is
given a space in the home. The analytical focus is on 'how values, taste or
style are expressed in the display of the artefact' (Berg 1999, p. 5). We
found that some disadvantaged users never pass these phases, as they
never buy their own computer and continue to use computers at public
places, with relatives, or during the course hours. Some stopped using
computers altogether after finishing the course. In the following
sections, we will discuss how the courses we studied contributed to,
affected or even hindered the domestication process of computers by
disadvantaged (potential users), showing how 'messy' the process can be
(Lie and S0rensen 1996).

Methodology
For the Amsterdam introduction courses, four male and six female
participants were selected on the basis of age and ethnic background.
Their ages ranged between 44 and 70 and three informants originated
from a country other than the Netherlands, namely Indonesia, Surinam
and the United Kingdom. The informants were also diverse in their
family situations and educational and professional backgrounds. Only
two of them had a job.4 On the whole, they seemed to be representative
of the course participants in general. A longitudinal approach was
adopted.
Semi-structured interviews were held during the time that they were
following the course and a year after the course; five of them were
interviewed in person and two by telephone. The first round of
interviews were either held in the community centre, 'Westerpark',
where the course was provided, or in their homes. The second round was
held in their homes, to see what place the computer had obtained in the
household. The informants were observed during the courses and
documents of the course were studied. Interviews were held with the
dominant actors who had set up the course, for example the leader of the
community centre, the trainer and the course-material developers.
The Ballymun case was part of a wider doctoral project focused on
domestic users of new multimedia technologies. Six informants were
chosen for this case study from a number of school-run courses. Each
informant had access to a computer and the internet in their homes. No

informant had any prior training with computers other than tentative
use at home. This case study employed both in-depth interviewing and
participant observation (at home and at school) to achieve insights into
how the computer is regarded in an educational sense (during the
course) and also as a domestic technology (as another machine for the
home). In addition, time-use diaries were used to get a sense of how the
computer/internet fitted into the network of domestic media technol
ogies available. Due to the fact that the informants were also compliant
in a comprehensive study of domestic use of ICTs, it was possible to
construct an understanding of how attending an IT course was
influential in the way the technological artefact was further domes
ticated.

Description of the courses

Both courses were financed largely by the local municipality.5 Partly as a
result of this, both were aimed at a similar audience of those previously
'excluded7 from the information society and participants from dis
advantaged areas.6 Courses were provided in a local community centre
in the Dutch case and a local school in the Irish, where the practice of
teaching courses of various kinds already existed. Moreover, in this way
advantage was taken of the computer equipment and child care facilities
available in both places.
Ballymun qualifies as a disadvantaged area of Dublin as the social
and economic problems facing the area are complex, including
unemployment, educational attainment and progression levels, welfare
dependency, drug and substance abuse. The inhabitants of Westerpark,
an area of Amsterdam, are very similar to those of Ballymun, and they
also have a relatively low income, relatively high unemployment rates
and high levels of ethnic minorities, and 80 per cent live in rental
houses.
The backgrounds of the informants of both courses were varied but
most were from working-class backgrounds and unemployed. The
informants in the Irish case study were either parents of young children
or had a connection with the school in some capacity, as the courses
were school based and aimed at parents of young children attending the
local school. The Westerpark case had a wider catchment area due to the
decision to locate the course in a community centre. According to an
evaluation of the introductory course, a total number of 264 people have
participated in 32 course groups (Rommes 2003). Almost half of these
people had a non-Dutch ethnicity.
While not overtly aimed at women, they were in both cases in the

majority among the course participants. This can partly be explained by

the fact that both courses were held one day a week during school hours
to facilitate ease of access of minority groups (parents and women) who
would otherwise be excluded from attending privately arranged courses.
As a further incentive, free child care was provided by the schools to
enable parents to avail themselves of the course.
Both courses were initially offered free, taking into account the low
level of economic capital available to these groups. However, if students
wished to pursue additional tutorials in advanced features of both
computers and the internet, they were required to pay a fee. To aid the
delivery of the course, public terminals were installed with free access
throughout the Westerpark area. In the Ballymun area, public access to
the internet was available only in the local library, yet as in the
Westerpark study no informant testified to actually using the internet in
a public space.
Although both courses were presented as an 'introduction to
computers/internet', there were several differences between the courses
in terms of course content and course organization. The Ballymun
weekly course lasted one and a half hours and was delivered over a 10/12
week term, while, the Westerpark course consisted of four lessons of two
and a half hours each.
The first two lessons of the Westerpark were aimed at familiarization
with the technology, starting with basic skills, such as turning on the
computer, learning to use the mouse, the keyboard and file manage
ment. In addition, an introduction to word processing was given, and
students were instructed in internet uses and functions. The participants
were provided with a course book to compliment the tutorials. The
course book was primarily based on technical skills, with only one page
dedicated to practical, everyday functions such as useful website URLs.
The teachers delivering the course were previously employed by the
community centre to teach other computer courses. They were drawn on
by virtue of their patience and ability to stand back and allow the
students to 'learn by doing.
Similarly, the Ballymun course also set out to familiarize the course
participants with the non-technical uses and functions of computers and
the internet. This was achieved through the course content which
demonstrated 'everyday' uses of the technology, such as designing
household budgets using spreadsheet applications or using the internet
to conduct research on summer holiday destinations.

Analysis of the dom estication process

This section explores the role that IT courses play in the translation of
the computer/internet from foreign object to an object of value and
significance. In this process, it is important to address the types of
resources participants bring with them. We argue that IT courses should
not only provide the material resources for users, such as the hardware,
the instruction, or access privileges, but that they should also support
the symbolic resources, such as interest, motivation and the importance
and meaning of the artefact to the user.
The following sections assess how influential the courses were in the
process of domestication. We identify a problem with the 'ideal' fourstage model of domestication proposed by Silverstone. We regard the
phases of appropriation and conversion to be intrinsically linked
through their association with meaning generation, symbolic impor
tance and value of the technology, while the objectification and
incorporation phases are deemed to be concerned with use and material
features of the courses. Moreover, a 'stages' model seems to suggest that
one stage directly follows the next. We do not perceive such a linearity,
especially in the objectification and incorporation dimensions. We show
that the domestication process is not necessarily a linear process; users
may stop halfway, or skip a stage.

Appropriation and conversion

The motivations and reasons associated with attending the course and
getting to know computers are firmly located in the appropriation phase
of the domestication process. As explained in above sections, appropria
tion is concerned with ownership or the first phases of 'getting to know'
the technology. This phase is also bound with the symbolic interpreta
tions of the technology.
Respondents from both case studies gave very similar reasons and
motivations for attending the course. It seems that the increased
visibility of ICTs in all aspects of daily life - from work environments
to domestic spheres, has generated a perceived pressure for people to
gain technological competencies and computer literacy in order to
maintain a grip on modern society.
As a course participant in Ireland remarked:
I think kids need to know it, for them, because in a couple of
years time that's all it's going to be, and that's all it's going to be
in the workforce. The computer's for the kids. Whether they're
going into the mechanics of it, like fixing things, or whether

they are going into office work, they are going to need computer
skills.
(Jenny, Dublin)
Similarly, a Dutch mother and a grandmother stated:
It was more for the children ... it is for the boys' homework.
Well, they do grow up in a computer-world. I did not really
think of myself when I bought it.
(Judith, divorced mother of two children, Amsterdam)
You have to experience and learn, you have to participate with
everything. Especially now I have grandchildren, I want to help
them with the computer. And I want to keep in touch with my
children in Surinam.
(Eva, 71-year-old grandmother originating from Surinam,
Amsterdam)
From these quotes, it becomes clear that a major source of
motivation for (grand)mothers to want to use computers is to be able
to support their children (see also Smith and Bakardjieva 2001) and, for
some older Dutch women, to keep in touch with their (grand)children.
In addition, we get a sense of societal pressures, such as the changing
nature of work to include a computer, which has a shaping influence on
the ways computers are perceived. Computers are no longer seen as a
luxury item or as an entertainment commodity but are now regarded as
key instruments associated with education and employment, either for
increasing their own chances on the job market, or, more often, for
increasing the chances of future employment for their (grand)children.
Some of the Dutch participants seem to have been more motivated
by other reasons, as mentioned by John:
I have always said: what do I need such a thing for? Because I do
not need it, right? But, well, most of my friends use computers
and they talk about the Internet and I think, my God, what are
they talking about? ... I really feel like I should join, 'cause
otherwise I will be looked at like I am backward. The only one
who cannot use a computer.
Qohn, Amsterdam)
As John makes clear in this quotation, he identified use and knowledge
of computers and the internet as means of maintaining a grip on
technological advances and for not feeling excluded, which may be very

significant for those that have been left out in one way or another, either
by being unemployed, disabled or retired. They wanted to keep up with
societal change, to avoid falling behind (technologically). The computer
for them clearly was associated with a quest for social meaning and the
desire for difference (Silverstone and Haddon 1996); or in this case, for
the desire for sameness. Similarly, several Dutch course participants
signified that they wanted to follow the course to know what their
partner, son, children or grandchildren were so enthusiastic about, to
feel involved in the world of significant others around them. Hence,
social resources in the form of pressure of peers were decisive in their
decision to domesticate a computer (Rogers 1995).
Finally, we found that some participants were eager to gain access to
the information offered by the internet. Course participants, for
instance, expressed the desire to seek information relating to gardening;
nature; 'how things work'; the body; information on public transporta
tion; and about where to travel with a disabled child. Many informants
highlighted the feeling of security that knowledge associated with
computers and internet provided. This was further enhanced by the
majority of the course participants having little, or no, educational
prowess.
The motivations we have summarized seem to relate to 'usefulness'.
Hardly any of the course participants mentioned motivations associated
with having fun or playing with the computer, or using the computer for
no other reason but to explore 'what can be done with it'. They seem to
feel a pressure to use the computer, with few enjoying the experience.
Dutch course participant, Aram, comparing learning to use the
computer, which he had to do for his job, with filling out a tax form:
not fun, but necessary.
Did the courses satisfy those needs and motivations through the
course curriculum and set-up? If the appropriation phase is to be passed
successfully, it is vital that the personal meanings attached to the
computer are translated into something that fits into their lives and their
personal motivations, that is: addressing the cultural capital of its
attendants. In these cases, the courses needed to guide course
participants in how they could support their children with their
computer use, improve the skills needed for further employment
chances, and help in learning how and where to find the information
for which they were searching. Furthermore, in order to support
participants in their desire to 'keep up with the information society', it
may have been helpful if they were taught some of the language
associated with computers, and to learn about what can and cannot be
done with computers, so that they could feel they had a grip on the
information society again.7

Did the conversion8 of the symbolic resources that were provided by

the course organizers and instructors match the symbolic resources,
expectations and desires of the participants? Did such factors lead to
their appropriation of the computer? For several Dutch course partici
pants the answer is no, and they became 'informed rejecters' after the
course (Wyatt 2004). Early on in the course, they felt pressure from their
social environment to keep up with modern society by using computers,
whereas after the course they did not feel this pressure and they had
some clear arguments relating to rejection of the computer. Participants
could not find significance in learning some basic skills such as file
management, or searching the internet. As John said after seeing the
internet and after finishing the course: 'I feel very disappointed, I really
am disappointed. I had imagined something nicer. Now I feel like I
wasted my time, it is a real disappointment' (interview: John,
Amsterdam). John decided not to buy a computer and not to continue
with other courses. This is not to say that a course is 'unsuccessful', the
question is whether participants were adequately 'informed', and
whether an alternative course design could have conversed a meaning
that would have made more sense. In this case, the course did not
converse relevant meanings and it did not help movement through the
appropriation phase.
The Dutch informants that continued to use the computer after the
course had been regular users of the computer and the internet before
participating in the course. Interestingly, the functions they used had
little relationship to the course content and participants seemed to have
found their own more meaningful activities, such as downloading and
listening to music, finding information on public transportation, using
chat and SMS programs with friends, helping their children with using
the internet and photography processing programs. It seems the Dutch
course failed to help course participants to find relevant meanings in
computers;
The Irish case seems to have been more successful: the informants
spoke about how the internet began to 'fit' their lives after the course. It
transpired that the course designers successfully found ways of making
the technology appealing and discovered instances where the technol
ogy could work for the users. The end product resulted in a shift of
meaning, where the computer/internet, initially conceptualized as an
educational tool for their children, became something increasingly
meaningful for the course participant. The quotes below highlight the
process of how the computer and internet achieved this transformation:
I didn't have any previous experience with computers. Oh! I'd
say in the beginning I literally didnt know how to turn it on and

now I can do the majority of stuff. There is still stuff I don't know
about it but there was things I didn't know how to do like
installing stuff, but now I'm installing things.
(Interview: Jenny, Dublin)
In Jenny's view the fact that she can now 'install things' is seen as a
measure of her progress or as a positive outcome of the course. The
computer has lost its sense of being an impenetrable alien object, and
has become a formidable technology, deeply meaningful to her.
This is a common theme among the Irish respondents. Each spoke
about their motives for joining the course in objective terms (for
example, gaining knowledge for someone else's benefit) only to realize
its functions and uses in subjective terms. The informants speak of how
the computer/internet achieved a sense of embeddedness and meaning
to them through use:
I don't think of it as something special. Maybe I would have
beforehand, but seeing it now, I think it is just there ... At the
beginning I thought it was great or something special, but I am
used to it now. It's just another part of the place.
(Interview: Jenny, Dublin)
It is interesting to note that the computer is still regarded as holding
some sort of interest or intrigue for Jenny in the ways she still wants to
learn. In a similar fashion Marie confirms this:
I was absolutely terrified of it ... and ... of breaking it or
anything else, you know ... but I feel more easy and since I
started doing classes and since we got this (computer), I feel
easier about the one at work. I feel more relaxed about trying
something I wouldn't have tried before.
(Interview: Marie, Dublin)
The Ballymun course was successful in showing how the computer and
internet are translated into something useful and meaningful to the
participants on the course. It facilitated the domestication of the
technology by teaching women the relevant skills and competencies so
that the computer/internet could become something they could master
and use in a meaningful manner. The Dutch course fell short in this
respect as it adopted a 'one size fits all' approach in the course content
and in its organization. Instead of designing the course from the
participant perspective, addressing the needs and motivations of the
participants, the Dutch case used a 'top-down' approach that assumed

the skill level and technological competencies of the participants were

homogeneous. It offered the participants a course which the participants
had to fit themselves around instead of shaping the course to fit the
requirements of the participants. In other words, it did not take the
cultural capital of the course participants into account.
The appropriation phase is also concerned with issues relating to
access and ownership. As stated before, the Ballymun course participants
had access to the internet and computers at home while attending the
course, whereas in the Westerpark case, not all informants had access at
home. Hence, the Irish and Dutch participants differed in how far they
had progressed in the phase of appropriation, which also may explain
why more Dutch participants reversed the domestication process and
decided that computers were not relevant to their lives. In the following
section we discuss the relevance of owning a computer and the
significance of giving it a place and a time in the home. These factors
are crucial during the objectification and incorporation of new
technologies.

Objectification and incorporation

During the objectification and incorporation dimensions of the
domestication process, the computer is given a physical location and a
timetable of use. To support these dimensions, courses need to appeal to
course participants in the 'everyday' sense of practicality and usefulness.
This is especially pertinent in the case of the Dutch participants who
experienced a higher level of use and interaction with the computer
during the course period but failed to continue using the computer after
the course finished. It seems that the course provided its own rationale
for using the computer on a temporary basis for the duration of the
course. For example, it was used for completing course homework or
practising skills, such as typing. Since many of the course participants
did not fully pass the appropriation phase, this use of the computer was
not integrated into their everyday pattern of life and they stopped using
it all together after the course ended.
In reverse, the Ballymun course concentrated on bridging the gap
between course work and everyday uses of the computer, which
facilitated the transition from course-focused use to domestic use. This
is very evident in the analysis of the time-use diaries which suggest that
the computer and the internet have become a greater part of the
everyday lives of the course participants. In 5 out of 6 diaries, the media
consumption patterns of the course participants clearly show an
increased use of the internet and computer following the course. It is
interesting to reconcile the changing image/perception of the technol

ogy with the evidence produced in the time-use diaries. The following
quotes highlight how the informants have witnessed the domestication
of the technology.
To me, it's nearly like the hoover, stereo, but yet it is special.
Even, though when you buy something within weeks because
you have worked for it and you have bought it and are delighted
with it, it loses its novelty like everything does. I found the
computer still lost the novelty of being a wonderful thing. But I
find it a god send for me the knowledge is still there, I just think
there is so much you can do with it.
(Karen, Dublin)
Whether course participants had ownership of their computer influ
enced the domestication process and this was related to their economic
resources and cultural capital. The Irish respondents spoke of how homeuse increased the meaning and significance of the technology in their
lives. They spoke about the importance of being able to interact with the
artefact in a private sphere. In reverse, not all of the Dutch participants
had access to computers and the internet at home. Moreover, in the year
following the course, each of the course participants with access at home
experienced major problems with using the computer for a longer period
of time, as their computer broke down and needed to be repaired or
replaced.9
As an alternative, the Municipality of Amsterdam included access
to public terminals consciously as part of the project and several
locations were opened to offer increased access to public terminals, in
an area considered to be a 'safe' place for women: the public library.
However, none of the informants had even considered using public
terminals as an alternative, nor did they regard them as attractive.
Truus, who had not followed the course, stated that she 'would feel
ashamed if she used it in a public place and it would not go well. It may
be the case that the usage of computers in public spaces is less attractive
for women than for men. Indeed, Rommes has shown that public
terminals users in Amsterdam were mostly young males (Rommes
2002). Using computers in public spaces converses technological
competence to the outside world, an image that in our society more
readily fits with younger male users.
Some of the Westerpark course participants who did have access to
the internet at home did not incorporate it in their everyday-life
patterns. For example, Esther and Ine, both women of around 60 from
Amsterdam, had bought a computer with their respective partner and
spouse. After a while, Esther concluded that her partner should keep the

computer in his house, as she never used it. Similarly, Ine, a year after the
course, rather than using the computer herself, watched her husband use
it. For these women, the phases of domestication do not necessarily
follow each other and the process is not completed. It is possible for a
user to follow a course, buy a computer and give it a place in the home,
but this does not necessarily mean that the user will incorporate the
artefact and ascribe it meaning in the home. Hence, the domestication
process is not always successful and can stop when the user loses interest
in the technology.

Conclusions
In this chapter, we have shown how the potential for domestication of
technology is not the same for all users, because some can mobilize
resources and capital in a more effective way than others. As a result,
some users have to perform more work and adapt their lives more than
others, or give up on a new technology altogether. Indeed, as Rogers
remarked, new technologies often enlarge pre-existing differences in a
society. In the cases presented, pre-existing differences in access to social,
economic and symbolic resources impact on the extent to which the
domestication process is successful. This notion of resources, both in a
material and symbolic sense, is central, and social, economic and
cultural resources have been shown to influence peoples' understanding
of, and approach to, certain technologies and the ways they may or may
not begin to domesticate these technologies. Use of the concept of
domestication draws attention to these factors.
In addition, we have extended the current conceptualization of
domestication to incorporate the influence of IT courses on the actual
process of individual domestication of the computer. We wanted to
move away from the idea that only users are active in the domestication
process and, instead stress that external factors such as courses are also
influential, for example, through the conversion of the meanings of
computers via courses or other users. And we demonstrated that
domestication is not an activity solely reserved for householders to
experience but can also occur outside the home, even though this did
seem to be much more problematic, as the lack of use of public terminals
demonstrated.
We found that the concept of domestication, with the addition of
attention to the different kinds of capital, seems to offer valuable
insights for course developers, especially in terms of how to better
support disadvantaged users in their domestication process. We have
argued that IT courses should not only provide the material resources for

users, such as the hardware, the instruction, or access privileges but that
they should also support the symbolic resources, such as interest,
motivation, the importance and meaning of the artefact to the user.
Furthermore, course developers should consider the reasons why users
invest time and money into these courses, what they expect to
accomplish by completing the course and how the meaning of the
computer and internet can change over time in the same way that
people's needs and motivations change. We have shown that these
expectations and motivations may be very different for 'laggards' than
for earlier adopters, and that course designers often make assumptions
about participants' individual needs and requirements.
As we have shown, the courses were, to some extent, successful in
addressing participants' lack of resources. They addressed the lack of
economic capital by participants through offering the courses for free
and offering public access to computers. Social capital has proven to be
crucial as motivation for using IT. Similarly, Stewart (2002) and
Bakardjieva (2002) highlighted the importance of the presence of 'warm
experts', knowledgeable friends or family, to help users in their
domestication process of ICTs. By employing patient teachers who had
some time for personal attention, this social capital was offered to the
disadvantaged users we studied. It has, however, also become clear, that
the Dutch course designers seem to have overlooked the importance of
addressing the cultural capital of the courses participants. The course
design did not take into account participants' previous and existing
knowledge and meanings associated with computers; let alone that the
courses could converse new meanings that fitted the lives of the
participants more adequately.
Some Dutch course participants exhibited high levels of computer
and internet use during the course and did not continue to use the
computer after the course had finished. Hence, the course design needs
to improve in conversing relevant meanings relating to the everyday
lives of participants. On a theoretical level, this demonstrates that
domestication can be momentary, reversed, or non-linear. Hence, we
argue that the ideal phases domestication model could be renamed a
multi-dimensional model of domestication.
We have shown that both the courses and the involvement and
activity of users in all aspects of the domestication process have been
crucial. By removing the agency of people or skipping over certain
phases the end product (domestication) is disrupted. Courses not only
support the domestication process, but conversely can disrupt the
process of domestication, especially when the organizers and course
material, as in the Dutch case, insist on a fixed or static translation of the
computer that fails to complement the cultural capital of the potential

user. We feel that courses should provide opportunities for participants

to shape or construct their own personal interpretation of the
technology through use. We suggest that by focusing the course
curriculum on 'everyday' life uses and functions, the meanings
associated with the computer become less prescribed and more open
to flexible translations.

Notes
1.

2.

3.

4.
5.

6.

7.

We are grateful for the financial support of the Information Science

and Technology programme of the European Commission for the
SIGIS project under which we conducted the case studies reported in
this article. We are profoundly indebted to all of those course
participants and course organizers who gave generously of their time
to help us with the studies. We would also like to acknowledge the
input of Katie Ward and of colleagues in the SIGIS network on
developing the case studies that this work is based on (Hynes 2004;
and Rommes 2003, 2004).
As S0rensen et ah wrote: 'in social studies of computing, there has
been a surprising lack of interest in studying how people learn to use
computers' (Sorensen et ah 2000, p. 246).
We regard the 'incorporation' and the 'objectification' phase of an
artefact more as dimensions than as phases, because they do not
necessarily follow each other in time.
Descriptions of all the course participants can be found at Hynes
(2004) and Rommes (2004).
In addition, the Dutch courses were sponsored by national govern
ment, whereas the computers of the Irish courses were sponsored by
the local education authority. The computer hardware was supplied
by the 'Tesco: computer for tokens' initiative aimed at furnishing
primary and secondary schools around the country with computers.
In terms of advertising the courses, potential participants for the
Westerpark courses were reached with the help of door-to-door
leaflets. The school in Ballymun used a number of methods to attract
participants. First, the course was advertised in the local schools via a
notice sent home with the schoolchildren or by a notice displayed in
the window of the main entrance to the school. Second, the school
also employed a home-school liaison officer whose responsibility it
was to ensure communication between families and the school. In
this role, the officer also invited and encouraged parents to
participate in school-run courses.
Although for some it may have even been enough to feel connected

8.

9.

to society again to be able to say that they had followed a course, or

that they did own a computer (whether or not they used it, as Berg
showed: Berg 1999).
Whereas in most domestication descriptions, the conversion phase is
concerned with symbolic meanings of the computer as they are
conversed by its user (in this case, the course participants) as shown
in the way the user presents the computer (material and semiotic) to
the outside world.
This was partly the result of the fact that many of them used secondor third-hand computers. See also Thomas and Wyatt 2000 for the
relevance of this for the trickle-down assumption in innovation
studies.

The bald guy just ate an

orange. Domestication, work
and hom e
Katie Ward

Boundary m anagem ent: creating home and

m anaging w ork
John,2 a participant running a business from his home study, explained
how his work was computerized7 and how living and working in the
same place demanded the management of boundaries separating work
from home within the domestic environment. John explained the
strategies of boundary management and how clear distinctions were
maintained between work and family life. He talked about the rules and
patterns surrounding the use and the physical location of the computer
and mentioned an anecdote which indicated the fragility of home-work
boundaries and the way in which they can easily collapse. A vigilant
family member had carefully inspected the contacts of his wastepaper
bin, which was kept just outside the study door and announced to other
family members, 'the bald guy just ate an orange!7 This illustrates both
the need for successful, and sometimes the failure of, boundary
construction in the home as a means to organize and control or
'domesticate7 the internet in the home environment. Access to a
computer and the internet facilitates 'home-work7 and engenders a
situation where work becomes computerized and symbolized by the
presence of ICT technology.
Working at home requires not only an ability to complete the day's
tasks, but also a degree of skill in the management of physical and
symbolic boundaries relating to the public and private spheres and work
and family life (Salaff 2002). The importance of 'boundary work7 was a
reoccurring theme throughout the majority of the 25 home-based
interviews3 that were implemented as part of a larger ethnographic study
carried out over two years in a coastal town in North County Dublin,
where I lived and worked. The interviews were concerned with the use
and 'shaping7 of the personal computer and internet media4 by families
in the domestic environment. They ascertained how families thought,
felt and discussed the computer and internet media; whether it resolved

problems; created arguments, and the extent to which it both

transformed and slotted into existing household and family routine.
The purpose of this chapter is to focus on boundary management
strategies employed by home-workers5 to define 'home and family' and
'work space' within the domestic context. Using the data, I demonstrate
the dynamic process that emerges from users' attempts to integrate and
manage their computer technology within the home. Furthermore, with
a focus on the home-workers' domestication6 of the computer and
internet, which facilitates working at home, I suggest that there is a close
relationship between the stages of the domestication process, to the
extent to which they merge and overlap, highlighting the fluid nature of
the process. It will be suggested that the function ascribed to the
technology by the user determines the way in which the technology will
be displayed. Since one of the main uses of the computer is for work
purposes, it is displayed in a study/work room that is distinct from other
family space within the household in its spatial and temporal arrange
ments and rules.
It was clear that computers used for home-work purposes were also
used for other activities by other family members. For example, John's
wife used the computer to maintain contact with family members.
However, when used for home-working, it was apparent that the user
working at home spent time thinking about how to shape the
technology to meet work-related needs. This involved specific spatial
and temporal arrangements, which defined the use and display of the
technology. Such arrangements enabled the control of work and
provided the means to confine it within a routine. Before moving on
to further examine the way in which home workers domesticate their
internet technology, which is representative of their computerized work,
I explore the notion of 'home' and provide an overview of the
domestication concept and its stages.

W here is home? Towards a definition

In exploring the consumption of media technologies, Silverstone (1994)
establishes the household as a site for explicating the dynamics, conflicts
and values surrounding both the performances of consumption and
domesticity and their intrinsic character. Careful attention is given to
the understanding of domesticity and it is explicated in three dimen
sions: home, family and household. In explicating the notion of 'home',
Silverstone provides an understanding, which avoids imposing a
normative conceptualization onto this complex web of relations.
Silverstone (1994) notes that the concept of 'home' has received

criticism, suggesting that the idea of household is breaking down, is

steeped in patriarchy and an outmoded concept. Yet, despite the
problematization of 'home', he claims that notions of it have survived
and conceives of it on a symbolic level, where its boundaries are 'under
construction':
Home is a construct. It is a place not a space. It is the object of
more or less intense emotion. It is where we belong... Home can
be anything from a nation to a tent or a neighbourhood. Home,
substantial or insubstantial, fixed or shifting, singular or plural,
is what we can make of it.
(Silverstone 1994: 26)
Conceptions of home are also informed by the work of other scholars
who have defined it with reference to its imagined and symbolic
boundaries. Morley (2000) notes, for example, that it is difficult to
separate the idea of family from that of home privatization and
domesticity. He argues that homes are created not only by networks of
connections, but also through consumerism, where the consumption of
television is often at the heart of homemaking and the privatization
process. Drawing on Douglas' work relating to the idea of the home as a
'gift economy', sustained by a system of exchanges, Morley suggests that
viewing television has moved towards replacing social rituals surround
ing mealtimes as one of the most significant keys in gift exchange and
the ordering or time and space. Significantly, 'homemaking' is
frequently depicted on television as a desirable activity and demon
strates the way in which television not only allows the emergence of the
private family, but also demonstrates how to perform 'private-ness',
domesticity or home; indeed, 'successful' home and family life.
Thus, for Morley, the notion of home is a fluid and imagined
construct, which emerges from webs of interaction and communication
that identify those included and those excluded. Other scholars have
also explored the symbolic value of the home. Berg (1999), in her study
of the smart home uses gender as a vehicle to distinguish house and
home, she states that 'there is a crucial difference between a house and a
home. It is women, in the main, whose work and skills make the former
into the latter' (Berg 1999, p. 312).
Following Silverstone (1994) and others I present a version of home
which is defined as operating at both a material and symbolic level.
'Home', in this instance, refers to the domestic, private sphere, and is
understood as a symbolic space, constructed by the family who live in a
particular household. The family is regarded as a web of human
relations, whose interactions within a household construct a home: a

symbolic entity that articulates the values and habitus of the family,
while also finding constitution within those values.

Moral economy of the household: from form al to

personal economy
The household is a site which enables the production of a home and
within this process, the household has a complex double-edged role,
where it is a site for consumption, allowing the creation of a symbolic
reality representing 'home; and the home, in turn, supports the values
that allow its constitution and (re)construction. The construct of the
home provides grounding for what Silverstone et a l (1992) term the
'moral economy of the household. This refers to the process by which
alien and alienating commodities are appropriated from the 'formal
economy and brought into the domestic sphere, where they are
inscribed with private meanings and transformed into acceptable
symbolic objects, which construct and articulate the values of the home.
Thus, the moral economy of the household is conceived of as both
an 'economy of meanings and a 'meaningful economy (Silverstone et
a l 1992, p. 18). The household is identified as a significant unit of
consumption; the point at which goods are both consumed and
appropriated into the private sphere of domesticity. Households,
through their consumption of goods and services, become actively
engaged with the formal economy, allowing the appropriation of
consumables into the domestic realm; or their appropriation into a
'personal economy of meaning. Commodities are given meaning
according to the values of the home and are redefined, shaped and
ascribed a function to adhere to the homes established routines,
patterns and social hierarchy of gendered and aged roles. Through their
introduction into the household, commodities become enmeshed
within an economy of meanings, where they are moulded in accordance
with the habitus of the home to produce a 'meaningful economy, which
articulates of the values of the home. Thus, the home articulates the
values that constitute it, which not only provides a knowledge base
enabling meaningful consumption and display of artefacts, but also
allows the basis for the creation of a household identity.
For the home-workers in this study, the computer and internet are
ascribed status within an economy o f meaning relating to the organization
of work and home; time and space. These arrangements for the
technology are implemented through a dynamic process of accommoda
tion and management and articulate a symbolic reality. They also play a
role in producing new meanings, domestic arrangements and relation

ships. Not only do home-workers play an active role in shaping and

constructing, domesticating and organizing the computer to contain
and organize work, but their domestic arrangements are, to an extent,
reconstituted by ICT technology and work. Thus, when explicating the
introduction and integration of the computer and internet into the
household, attention must not only be given to the users' cultivation of
the technology, but the way in which the technology has the capacity to
both sustain, reflect and reform domestic arrangements.
This tension is clearly articulated in the work of both Silverstone
(1994) and Lie and S0 rensen (1996), where it is acknowledged that the
domestication process is problematic, not always seamless and some
times unsuccessful. Indeed, it is argued that in appropriating media
technology families not only integrate the technology, but also to a
certain extent change their behaviour because of the technology. This
theme is implicit through Silverstone's body of work and in particular it
is evident when he discusses the way in which television has 'spawned
supporting technologies and created new spaces: TV dinners, the TV
lounge, the open plan itself (Silverstone 1994, p. 100). The implication is
that although families actively engage in the domestication process, the
technology plays a role in changing some habits and behaviours.
Although he recognizes that media technologies represent a site of
struggle and that artefacts can have an impact on human action, he
states, 'it is the computer which is, as often as not, transformed by ...
incorporation, much more than the routines of the household' (ibid., p.
20).

Domestication: a conceptual fram ew ork

The 'domestication' concept (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992; Silverstone
1994; S0rensen 1994; Lie and S0rensen 1996, S0rensen et al. 2000)
informed the analysis of the data as a means to analyse users' struggle to
manage the internet and work in the home. This concept has developed
from perspectives which emphasize the 'social shaping of technology',
where the user is perceived to take a dominant role in defining the
nature, scope and functions of the technology. This approach aims to
question discourses surrounding technological determinism, where
technology is perceived to develop independently of society, having a
significant impact on societal change (MacKenzie and Wacjman 1999).
The concept of domestication and subsequent development and
criticism (Ling and Thrane 2001), provides a framework for analysing the
'career' of media technologies in the home, and is presented as a struggle
between the user and technology, where the user aims to tame, gain

control, shape or ascribe meaning to the artefact. When examining the

relationship of technology to human action and human shaping sociotechnological relations, Sorensen (1994, pp. 3-6) favours an approach
that is sensitive to the agency of the user, an approach that 'in principle
empowers consumers/users' (ibid., p. 5). Tinkering' or the 'production
acts of consumers' are seen as key factors in the shaping of the
technology. The artefact is given meaning through a 'multi-dimensional
process of negotiation, involving humans and non-humans', consisting
of conflict as well as collaboration. While users have the capacity to
actively shape the technology, the artefact has the potential to influence
human action as well. For Sorensen, one of the key questions about the
relationship between humans and technology is whether artefacts are
used in the prescribed or intended manner or are changed and shaped to
meet a specific set of needs.
It is reiterated that 'there is no technology without action'; the
premise being that users' actions matter, allowing a degree of
'interpretative flexibility' when they attempt to integrate a new
technology into the domestic routine. Artefacts then are ascribed with
meaning and functionality, which is bound with the reproduction and
transformation of relationships. It is emphasized, however, that the
domestication process is not necessarily harmonious, linear or complete.
Rather, it is perceived as a process borne of, and producing, conflict
where the outcomes are heterogeneous and sometimes irresolvable. For
example, it is noted that needs and households change, through divorce
or children leaving; the implication being that the domestication
process must continue, shaping the technology to new relationships
and the emergence of new needs in the household.
Similarly, it is suggested, by Silverstone (1994) that technology7 is
consumed within specific and localized contexts, where it becomes
inscribed with meaning, while reproducing values and transforming
relations. The household is a space where technology is adopted,
consumed, argued about and, with varying degrees of success, integrated
into domestic culture: the site where technology as an object and as
mediator of public culture is shaped to meet the needs and reproduce the
values of the home. In exploring the centrality of the media in everyday
life and its integration into domestic patterns and routines, Silverstone
provides a model through which consumers' relationship with the
television can be approached and analysed. It is noted that in bringing
media technologies such as television into the home, they must be
managed, allowing them to find an appropriate place in the structure of
the home. This process is referred to as domestication: 'By domestication
I mean something quite akin to the domestication of the wild animal...
a process of taming or bringing under control. Technologies, television

and television programmes must be domesticated if they are to find a

space or place for themselves in the home' (Silverstone 1994, p. 83).
Domestication, then, refers to the movement of the artefact from the
public realm to the private. The consumable, in the process of
domestication, is transformed from cold and meaningless product into
a desirable part of the home. In appropriating a good, consumers enter a
struggle for control and the artefact becomes a site for the negotiation of
meanings. For example, when a television is located in the home, rules
and routines are applied, to allow the household to sustain routine and
rearticulate its values. The domestication of media technology requires
active involvement, allowing the good to be integrated into the existing
patterns in the household. It is at this level that families produce their
media technology, creating them to reflect and articulate the habitus of
the home.
The process of integrating media into the household is referred to as
the process of domestication where six moments of consumption are
identified. This begins with production within the formal market
economy and ends at the stage where the family is using the good to
make a statement about the values of the home.8 Following the
production stage in the process, and before the consumer reaches the
purchasing stage, it is observed that he or she enters the phase of
imagination, where advertising fuels desire for the artefact. Subse
quently, the good is purchased, and this is referred to as the stage of
appropriation. This consists of objectification7 or the active shaping of
the object to merge with the physicality of the household and of
incorporation7 or the process of ascribing meaning within household
rituals and rules. Thus, throughout the process the object is given
meaning so that it not only reaches a taken-for-granted status in the
household, but is also used to carry symbolic values about the home to
the outside world. This final stage is called conversion (Silverstone
1994; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992).
Silverstone is careful to state that the stages of domestication, can be
considered as neither discrete, nor necessarily as evenly present, in all
acts of consumption (1994, pp. 123-4). Indeed, it is emphasized that this
approach to consumption is a model or sketch: an ideal type. In building
on this notion, I use examples of data to illustrate the often untidy7
process of domestication. More specifically, I focus on the objectifica
tion and incorporation7stages of the domestication process to examine
the tensions, changes, organizational processes and value judgements
that emerge when a computer and the internet are used in the domestic
sphere for work purposes. I provide rich illustrations of the way in which
home-workers arrange the household and change temporal routine to
accommodate the computer, while also shaping and integrating the

computer into the existing habitus of the household. Furthermore, I

confirm that the stages of domestication are not necessarily discrete or
linear (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992; Silverstone 1994; Sorensen 1994) by
suggesting that participants blur the predefined stages of incorporation
and objectification, not only rendering them indistinct, but also
indicating that the process is far from smooth, frictionless and precise.

Home and w ork

For those whose work was largely home-based, the computer technol
ogy, facilitating homework, presented tensions which manifested as a
struggle between the accommodation and management of the technol
ogy and its (re)construction as an acceptable and useful artefact and
symbol within the household. Although the computer and internet
presented challenges and created tensions, it emerged that home
workers did attempt to exercise some control over the technology.
When discussing the techniques employed to manage and accommodate
the technology and distinguish work from home, participants invariably
referred to three factors:
the careful organization of space, domestic and technological
artefacts to distinguish work from leisure/home/family space;
the division of time into 'work7 and 'family/leisure7;
the attachment of specific meaning to all household media to
distinguish work and leisure activities.
However, such careful attention to domestic arrangements points not
only to a desire to shape the technology and curb the presence of work,
but also suggests how the intrusion of the technology can incite certain
behaviour patterns, as home-workers begin to accommodate the
imposition of the technology in private space. The integration of the
computer into the domestic environment is double-edged in the sense
that the arrangements made to accommodate the technology also serve
as the means to integrate and domesticate it, thus highlighting the close
relationship between the management and accommodation of the
technology and its reproduction as a meaningful, domesticated artefact.
The computer, as a focus for work in the home, while undergoing a
'shaping7 process also becomes a catalyst for transformation and I
identify the emergence of a complex dynamic between management and
accommodation, or organization and acceptance of the internet and its
intrusion into the private sphere. For example, although considerable
attempts are made to 'tame7the technology in the sense that it is placed

in a specific room and ascribed a routine that poses minimal disruption

to family life, participants such as John, who had deliberately created a
home study, could be perceived as being 'determined' by the technology;
the changes to temporal routines and spatial arrangements in the
household merely harbouring the encroachment of web-based work into
private space.
Those working at home prioritized the negotiation of physical space
and spatial and temporal boundaries and in Silverstone's frame of
reference, this activity would be understood under the headings of
'objectification' and 'incorporation'. Objectification refers to the display
of technology and incorporation refers to the integration of technology
'into the routines of daily life' (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992, p. 24).
Although Silverstone recognizes that the boundary between objectifica
tion and incorporation is often indistinct, he makes the point that 'there
is a difference between use and display [...] which of course has a special
relevance to technology' (ibid. 1992, pp. 14, 29). For household users
working at home in this study, the line between objectification and
incorporation is ambiguous. Furthermore, the struggle to manage and
accommodate the technology and the active creation of boundaries to
distinguish work from home is shown to disrupt the stages of
objectification and incorporation, blurring and rendering them indis
tinct.
When a home computer is introduced into the domestic environ
ment, it becomes integrated into the household's routines and activities
(Lally 2002). For participants who worked at home in their own business;
as a journalist; freelance; or on a day a week basis, the computer and
internet began to represent work, where work activity was facilitated by
ICT use. Indeed, the technology symbolized work and this was
demonstrated in the way that the computer was seen as a work tool,
and in some cases prioritized for work purposes. For example John's
children did not use his computer as it was used for work purposes and
perceived as 'fragile': 'The children are not into it, but they know that
that's work and I can't ... the system is fragile.'
When a computer is introduced into the home and used frequently
for work purposes, it becomes difficult to distinguish the technology
from work. When asked about how he structured and managed his day,
John started to talk about the demands of email, which indicated the
way in which the internet technology engenders a situation where work
activity is indistinguishable from the features of the technology: 'If you
asked those people to break down their working day, how many hours
are spent on the mobile or email and a lot of online stuff is the sort of
stuff that you would have put off in the past. Email demands a response.
I start my day with email.'

Given the close relationship between work and technology it

becomes difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other ends.
Similarly, work and home overlapped. For example, Michael talked
about the close relationship between work and home: 'Work and home
overlap. I might be sitting up at my desk upstairs - I might be dealing
with domestic matters, but people do that at work.' He noted that such
blurred boundaries were not confined to home-workers, but also
experienced in traditional workplaces. However, his observation in
dicates how it becomes important to manage the boundaries separating
'work' from 'family' life and this is achieved through the active
implementation and management of strategies to mark the two
activities. For example, John talked of the way he separated work from
family activities through the use of temporal boundaries: Til occasion
ally be doing projects that do require me to work at the weekend because
you promise a good end product to a tight deadline. When that happens
at the weekend, I might say I need one of the days at the weekend. Then
the family activities are kept separate.' Conversations with participants
included a focus on management strategies and the ways in which the
introduction of the technology and computerized work was balanced
with its integration into the household routine. The creation of a
meaningful 'home and family' space, which was perceived as separate
from work was of paramount importance to participants who managed
work at home and most participants recognized that conscious attempts
are required to manage boundaries.
The internet can disrupt the intricate dynamics and balance of
household routine and value system, provoking a need to manage the
intrusion; prompting users to reaffirm the family's sense of stability and
coherence. The interviews and conversations with users are intriguing,
providing insight into, and appreciation of, the manifold processes
embarked on by home-workers in attempting to shape and organize the
internet. Most users carefully balanced the 'intrusion' of the technology
and its ability to disrupt the household's value system, accepting the
inevitability of some changes, with active attempts to domesticate the
new medium. Indeed, on the one hand, the internet provokes purposeful
changes in the household's arrangements, relating to issues such as
spatial and temporal arrangements, suggesting that the user is 'shaped'
by the technology; yet, on the other hand, the user gives thoughtful
attention to the ways the computer can be organized in terms of its
function, location, spatial and temporal boundaries and the relationship
with other media in the household to maintain and perpetuate the
family's value system and sense of stability.
For the remainder of this chapter, the domestication concept and its
application to those participants who worked from home are further

developed. I demonstrate the way in which participants engage in a

struggle with the technology, and the work it brings, in an attempt to
achieve a balance between accommodating and managing their intru
sion and integration into the home environment. Furthermore, the
fluidity of the domestication concept will be highlighted and the way in
which the stages merge together, producing a non-linear process of
integration.

Dom esticating the internet: Objectification and

incorporation
As Silverstone (1994) indicates, all the stages in the process of
domestication merge together, and for the remainder of the chapter I
focus on the stages of objectification and incorporation, illustrating the
close relationship between the use and display of the technology and the
way in which these stages of domestication merge alongside the
struggles and tensions surrounding the integration, management and
accommodation of the technology in the home. I show how the two
stages are often rendered indistinct in the sense that the organization of
routine and rules and the physical arrangement of the household are
closely bound with the creation of a physical space to suit a set of specific
needs.
Participants made conscientious attempts to create and manage
boundaries and all of the participants, when working from home, were
keen to separate their family and leisure time from their work life and
this involved the creation of symbolic boundaries in the household.
They created and attached specific meanings to the computer and
internet, confined its use to a particular room and defined times for use,
allowing the creation of symbolic boundaries in the home. For example:
Jenny and Richard located the computer upstairs so that it would not
intrude on the family space in the living room; Siobhan used her laptop
for work in an upstairs study. Alex found he had to relocate his computer
to an area that was conducive to work as he needed to redefine his leisure
and work time: Its usually located in the study, it was in the sitting
room I would spend far too much time watching TV as well. I would
have to be more strict about the TV and the internet.
John also divided the house so that the study represented work and
the remainder of the house symbolized time spent with the family.
Indeed, the house had been divided into zones, where the front room is
used as an office, indicating that a careful decision-making process had
been applied to the locating and display of the computer and internet:
Theres a room at the front, which is the office and when Im in there

I'm at work ... I do shut off from 5.30-8.00, which is when everyone is
fed and bathed, busy time for the kids, and then depending on what's
going on in the evening I can get back to it.'
John's decision-making process suggests that he has made a set of
specific arrangements to control the technology. To some extent John's
arrangements have been determined by the imposition of the technol
ogy and of computerized work. Yet, on the other hand, John's attempt to
contain the technology could also be perceived as an attempt to tame
and regain control over it, indicating that domestication is a conflictual
and dynamic process. Hence, although John had made special arrange
ments to accommodate the technology, he successfully imposed a
temporal routine on his computer use and work life. Through effective
time management, the participant ensured the construction of a
domestic 'home life', which involved time spent eating meals with the
rest of the family and engaging in routines surrounding children's bath
and bed time. To make the distinction more apparent, the participant
had established a number of 'rules' surrounding the use of the computer
to distinguish it and internet as tools to be used for work purposes. The
main use centred on the running of his business; his wife occasionally
used the email facility as a means to maintain contact with family and
friends abroad, but the four children did not engage with the computer
or internet as the participant feared the system was delicate and did not
want to risk losing valuable material.
These strategies to manage the technology demonstrate the close
relationship between objectification and incorporation, illustrating the
ways in which use and display are closely bound when attempting to
contain work within the domestic environment. Similarly, Michael was
concerned to make the distinction between home and woxk using
temporal routine and the division of space as means for dividing home
and work life. He went on to talk about the struggle experienced in
maintaining convincing boundaries and the importance of temporal
routine in maintaining domestic structure:
I rarely work downstairs ... I do close the door at 6.00 and relax,
because that's work, you do have to close the door at some stage
... It's hard to keep home and work separate - I do try and stop
at 6.00 when my wife comes home. If she's coming home late I
work late.
Like John, Michael also observed that he managed his internet use via
the imposition of temporal routine and the division of the house into
zones. The home office was located upstairs and the downstairs was
perceived as the area for performing 'home life' as opposed to 'work life'.

Again, a focus on the separation of home and work time and space
demonstrates the close relationship between use and display and the way
in which participants are often required to make changes to their spatial
and temporal arrangements to accommodate and manage the technol
ogy and computerized work.

The dom estic organization of w ork and leisure

There is a close relation between use and display of the technology. The
dynamic process of domestication, however, can also be identified in
relation to the organization of work and leisure. Home-workers pay
careful attention to the domestic organization of work and leisure,
suggesting that the definition of leisure time and space was paramount
in maintaining control over work in the home.
In an attempt to preserve her home life as a space separate from
work, Siobhan divided the house into 'work7 and 'leisure7 zones and
devised a strategy relating to financial organization and telephone bill
payment. Siobhan accepted that work-related email frequently infil
trated the domestic arena, but in attempt to maintain certain zones in
the house as symbols of 'home7 installed two phone lines, where the
upstairs line in the study room was used for work purposes and the
downstairs connection in the living room for leisure and entertainment.
Furthermore, the two phone lines allowed the participant to exercise
control over the cost of the internet which further differentiated work
from home. Having two phone lines ensured that she was in a position
to monitor the payment situation; calls from the downstairs line were
associated with leisure and therefore perceived as her responsibility:
'When I do that [use the internet for leisure/entertainment/personal
research] I pay for my own calls. I have an itemized bill, so any calls for
work, I call from the upstairs line. Calls from down here I pay for myself.7
As with John and Michael, Siobhan, in her endeavour to manage
work at home was keen to establish boundaries in relation to work and
leisure and in doing so gave careful attention to the routines
surrounding use of the technology and its display. On the one hand it
could be suggested that Siobhan has been shaped by the impact of the
technology and computerized work, highlighting the specific spatial and
financial arrangements to accommodate the presence of her work. On
the other hand, it could be suggested that through the installation and
use of two phone lines; the division of the house into zones; financial
management; and the creation of specific patterns relating to the
consumption of content, Siobhan effectively created 'two versions7 of
the internet, which had unique patterns and rules relating to use and

display, allowing effective domestication and governing of the technol

ogy. Nevertheless, it seems that Siobhan has experienced the manage
ment and domestication of her technology as conflictual and dynamic
in terms of its use for both leisure and work: the manifold nature of the
process exemplified by her use patterns. Siobhan discussed, with
enthusiasm, her use of the internet for leisure purposes and explained,
with amusement, her self-imposed rules of access. Indeed, when the
internet was accessed downstairs it was associated with home and leisure
and she carried out activities such as personal travel-related research and
shopping. By way of contrast, when used upstairs it was strictly as a work
tool: 'At home, it is associated with leisure ... I have stopped buying
magazines. I go to their website for make-up tips and fashion. I sit down
with a cup of coffee and the internet, but that's down here [in the living
room] and not up there [in the upstairs study]!'
Siobhan made an interesting point relating to the resonance of
specific use and display patterns and their intrinsic value in the
maintenance of symbolic boundaries. When using the internet for
leisure she sits downstairs ('not up there!') and further defined this
activity through sitting down with a cup of coffee and consuming
magazine content from the internet. In consuming the internet in a
specific manner, Siobhan effectively created her 'own' internet that not
only had meaning within her household, but also allowed the manage
ment of work in the domestic environment. Furthermore, her use of
language is interesting and revealing. Although Siobhan had two phone
lines in the home for work and for leisure-related use, she referred to
'home' use in the context of 'leisure' time because she unequivocally
associates home with leisure, as opposed to work. This illustrates the
importance of boundary creation and management and the ways in
which use patterns and display of the technology are closely bound in
the management and domestication of the computer in the home. She
further defined her work and leisure activities through the use of two
email addresses, one for work and one for personal communications. She
acknowledged however that imposed boundaries separating work and
home sometimes fail.
Similarly, as indicated above, John divided the house into work and
leisure zones. These divisions were further reinforced, however, through
the meanings that were attached to other media in the household and
the way that they were defined in relation to the internet. For example,
John strongly associated the television with leisure and relaxation,
whereas the internet was used purely for work. Hence, John gave
different meanings to the TV and internet as a way of managing work in
the domestic environment.
In this household, the television and internet, both in terms of

location and use patterns, were set up in opposition to each other as

means to protect the boundaries of home from those of work. For John,
the symbolism of the television and internet were central in helping to
define those boundaries. The internet was perceived as a work tool and
not associated with leisure or relaxation, whereas the television was
given status as a medium of leisure. In defining the television's function
as a tool of entertainment and the internet as a medium of work, the
participant has created a situation where the media conserve and
separate 'home' from 'work' activity. Again, the attachment of specific
meanings to different household media shows that domestication is a
dynamic process, in the sense that effort has to be made to give symbolic
meaning to all media outlets in the household. Yet, the process of
ascribing meaning allows John to gain effective control over his work.
Similarly, Alex talks about the way in which he imposes temporal
routine on his work and leisure time and the way in which the TV is used
to define relaxation, symbolizing an end to work activity: 'I don't use the
internet after 8 p.m. I swap over to the TV. I use the internet more for
work than entertainment, but I do use it for entertainment.'

Conclusion: a dom esticated internet?

Wellman and Haythornwaite (2002) present the internet as a system that
is incorporated into the routine of everyday life. They suggest that it has
become embedded into community building, family connections,
education, complementing individuals' existing networks, attitudes,
behaviour and experiences. Similarly, Salaff's (2002) study of home
workers has suggested that the home internet has been constructed as a
tool to be integrated into the fabric of everyday life, rather than an entity
divorced from mundane domesticity. This chapter has suggested that the
integration of computer technology and computerized work into the
household and home is a complicated process, where participants must
negotiate the intrusion of both the technology and work in their home
lives.
The findings from interviews with domestic users have been framed
in relation to literature relating to domestic media consumption;
specifically, the domestication concept as developed by Sorensen
(1994) and Silverstone et a l (1992, 1994). I have argued that the
integration of technology into the household is most accurately
described as non-linear, where the stages of domestication begin to
merge together. Certain stages in the domestication process can be
recognized in the data, but participants do not impose a linear career
onto their technology. Rather than progressing through the stages of

domestication, participants often blur and merge specific stages in the

domestication process. Many home-workers prioritized a particular stage
in the process and organized their computer and internet in a way
appropriate to the household.
Using the domestication concept, I have also illustrated ways in
which specific rules and routines surrounding spatial and temporal
organization are established to govern patterns of use and display of the
computer, to accommodate the presence of computerized work. It has
become apparent that integration of technology into the household is
dynamic, and does not follow a predefined career or process. Working at
home is an interesting case to that end. In building a home office,
participants not only make decisions about the purchasing and
appropriation of technology, but also about specific spatial and temporal
arrangements to segregate 'work' from 'family' activity. Home users
played an active role in organizing and personalizing 'their' internet, for
example, by creating two versions of the internet using different phone
lines and different financial arrangements as Siobhan did.
The process is, however, not always without conflicts. It can be
ambiguous, implying that the technology has a degree of 'agency'. John
for example, a home-worker with young children, made special
arrangements when positioning the technology in the household,
suggesting a conflictual relationship between user and technology. On
the one hand, this can be seen as an active attempt to control and
organize the technology to suit the needs of all the individuals in the
household, but on the other, it could be suggested that the users are
'determined' to make these arrangements by the very intrusive nature of
home-working.
Both S0 rensen et a l (2000) and Ling and Thrane (2001) refer to the
needs of individuals in their theses. Likewise, the requirements of
individuals in the household were also significant factors for the
participants in this study, when incorporating a computer into the
domestic setting. The main aim of home-workers was to create physical
and symbolic boundaries between work and home, and participants
employed a number of strategies, such as the organization of space, time
and media consumption to achieve the management of those bound
aries. Home-workers make significant choices about the way in which
they organize spatial and temporal routines and individuals' access to
the computer as a means of segregating work from home.
Home-workers were concerned with the domestication or organiza
tion of the computer and one of the most significant features in this
organizational process was the computer's positioning in the relation
ship with other media in the household. Participants were eager to
organize the internet alongside their existing patterns of media

consumption and defined their computer and internet use in relation to

other media. Engagement with, and meanings attached to other media
were also important in terms of participants dividing their homes into
zones. For many participants the television symbolized leisure, whereas
the computer was associated with work. Thus, like the organization of
time and space, the computer and internet's relationship with other
media plays a significant role in its domestication. This can be seen in
the cases of John and Alex where the television was used to define home
and leisure, both in terms of space and time. The challenge offered by
other media in the household coupled with the struggle to manage and
accommodate the technology may constitute one of the many relevant
questions for future domestication research.

Notes
1.

I would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues in the EMTEL

II network in the completion of the research. I would like to thank
Paschal Preston for his encouragement and mentoring throughout
my participation in the EMTEL network and beyond.
2. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the users.
3. See Appendix for details on participating households. See also
Chapter 11, by Jo Pierson, on the blurring of boundaries between
home and work.
4. Internet media refers to electronic communication in the form of
email, bulletin board forums, email listservs and interactive and
non-interactive websites. All the participants in the study accessed
web-based content through an internet enabled PC. A few partici
pants had, in addition, a set-top box, but preferred to use the PC. The
PC was preferred as it allowed navigation using a mouse, whereas the
set-top box was perceived as limiting in its capacity for browsing.
5. Home-workers refers to those participants who had chosen to work
from home.
6. The domestication concept has been developed in the UK and
Norway and has been applied by others in Europe and Canada (see
Ling and Thrane 2001; Smith and Bakardjieva 2000, and Introduc
tion of this text).
7. In his body of early work, Silverstone develops the domestication
concept largely in relation to television. In later work (1999)
Silverstone makes reference to the internet as a medium that is
actively shaped and integrated into the everyday domestic environ
ment.
8. The process of domestication has been explored consistently in
Silverstone's body of work relating to media consumption. However,
there is some variation in the model between the different texts. For
example, in earlier work (1992) four stages of domestication are

recognized and in later work (1994) there is elaboration of the initial

stages in the consumption process.

Making a 'hom e'. The

dom estication of Inform ation
and Com m unication
Technologies in single parents'
households
Anna Maria Russo Lemor

Introduction
In the most recent US census (Fields and Casper 2001), there were 12
million single-parent households. Population projections estimate that
half of the American children born in the 1990s will spend some time in
single-parent households (Amato 1999). Despite the growing presence in
the USA as well as in Europe (European Commission 2001) of single
parent families, qualitative research on these households is at present
fairly limited, especially in relation to mass media. Nevertheless, there is
much to suggest the need to explore, more fully, the ways in which this
cohort incorporates new and old media use into their everyday lives.
In recognition of the increasing social significance of single-parent
families, this chapter, based on the author's dissertation study, stresses
the importance of considering family arrangement as an influential
factor in individuals' attitudes towards media and their consumption
practices within the contexts of everyday life. Indeed, this chapter
illustrates how the roles of media and ICTs as symbolic sources and
resources in single-parent families are influenced by social, material and
emotional factors, which affect their everyday life.
On the one hand, the particular lifeworld of these families strongly
supports the complexity of the processes, especially those of appropria
tion and incorporation of ICTs, involved in the twofold relationship
between households and ICTs described in the domestication theory
(Silverstone et al. 1992, p. 16). On the other hand, these parents'
particular family structure and everyday life complicate the concept of
the moral economy within the domestication theory, which presupposes
only one household as a unit whose boundaries are, although flexible,
still traceable. In the case of my informants, the line delimiting their

home is rather blurred and confused, since for their families, there are
at least two households (the home of each parent and sometimes also the
one of a new partner) involved, with their own independent but
interconnected moral economies, which have a rather consistent weight
on both parents' decision-making processes regarding rules and routines
for the children, including, also, their consumption of ICTs. In addition,
this 'extended' household is also immersed in what some of the
interviewees called Village', the large social network of friends and
non-family members that has a rather influential role in the life of these
parents and in relation to the choices of media for their children.
This social network reflects the negotiation and adaptation processes
that the interviewees have gone through in order to shape their everyday
lives to their changed realities and to adapt and react to the social,
cultural, economic constraints that affect their family practices. There
fore, the impact of the values and everyday life practices of the other
parent along with the ones of one's own 'village', make ICTs' adoption,
incorporation and conversion (Silverstone et a l 1992, pp. 20-1) rather
complex. Such constantly shifting processes are dependent on a vast
array of 'reasons' and happenings that the day brings into the life of
these families. Hence, such level of complexity stresses how the
processes involved in the twofold relationship between individuals/
families and ICTs do not necessarily occur in the consecutive order in
which they are presented as part of the domestication process. Rather
they are fluid practices, whose meanings and dynamic change according
to the particular social, economic and cultural factors involving the
household and its members.

Sociological accounts on fam ily diversity and single

parenthood
Along with a wide public consensus among academics and lay people,
that the best family structure for children is the one produced by
marriage among heterosexual couples, in the last decade there has been a
growing body of research stressing the necessity of accepting and
considering alternative family structures, because there is no effective
standard to which family types need to conform (Coontz 1997; Stacey
1999; Demo et a l 2000; Dowd 1997).
One of the main issues facing single parents is diminished income as
a consequence of divorce or separation. Consistent research relates the
problems associated with single parenting to the poor economic
conditions that these families experience (Teachman and Paasch
1994). It is poverty rather than single parenthood that is an influential

factor in the child development, future career, job placement and self
esteem building (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). Furthermore, income
influences the time the parent spends with the children and, when low it
is responsible for the lack of adult mentoring and of educational
opportunities.
Other factors affecting the family life of single parents are: the legal
allocation of parental responsibilities, the visitation arrangements, the
common pressure to ensure that the children maintain a happy
relationship with both parents, the forced relocation of one of the
parents, and the change of lifestyle due to limited financial resources. In
addition, research shows that single parents encounter difficulties in
adapting to raising their children without the help of the other adult
(Smart 1999). Indeed, both parents experience anger, pain .and loss for
different reasons and go through a process of self reassessment in order
to adapt their role of parenting to the new situation or, in some cases, to
create a new identity as a single parent and establish a new relationship
with the other parent (Thompson and Amato 1999; Smart and Neale
1999). In post-divorce situations, roles and expectations become fluid
and negotiation is essential in order to establish a relationship with a
partner who, in some cases, is no longer well regarded. In many of my
interviews, this issue emerged in relation to disagreements on children's
rules and habits; the parent indicated his or her constant attempt to
maintain a civil relationship with the ex-partner for the sake of the
children while, at the same time, criticizing the other parent's rules and
habits. Indeed, the parenting and relational choices of single parents are
continuously negotiated with the ex-partner and current partner (when
present), as well as with the children. As a result, these negotiations
between ex-partners, current partners, and children played a central role
in the articulations of beliefs and practices surrounding ICTs for each of
the families interviewed. In particular, most of the parents interviewed
expressed their frustrations at having to leave their children in the home
of the other parent: an environment they did not find agreeable or have
any influence upon.

Audience research on fam ily media consum ption

and everyday life
Since the introduction of television in the 1950s, many scholars have
been interested in understanding the role of media within individuals'
private lives. This project is particularly indebted to the strand of critical
audience research initiated in the 1980s by James Lull (1980), Dorothy
Hobson (1980, 1982), David Morley (1986), Jan-Uwe Rogge and Klaus

Jensen (1988) whose work focused on the household as an important

space, in which media play a prominent role as symbolic resources for
social and cultural practices within the context of everyday life. In
addition, Rogge and Jensen's (1988) study also pointed out that the
single-parent families used media to compensate for emotional defi
ciencies, poverty of experience, lack of closeness between parent and
children, and lack of alternative leisure activities owing to the parent's
financial and temporal constraints.
Starting in the 1990s, reception studies on families have focused on
the introduction of 'old' mass media and 'new' ICTs in the households
and their impact on everyday life practices and values. Audience
researchers such as David Buckingham (2000), Ellen Seiter (1999), Sonia
Livingstone (1997,1998; Livingstone and Bovill 1999), and Toni Downes
(1999) have shown, in their studies of children, differences in media
consumption patterns that are related to the cultural and social
backgrounds of the parents.
Nevertheless, within household research on ICT use, there is little
written on the processes of negotiation that occurs among couples in
relation to media consumption practices, especially after divorce or
separation. The research on issues of power among married couples
within the context of television consumption (Morley 1986; Hobson
1980; Lull 1990) are few and mostly on conflicts and resolutions.
However, Walter Gantz (2001) suggests interestingly that as for other
matters, television can be either a source of conflict among partners who
are already dissatisfied with their relationship or a useful means to bring
a troubled couple together. In fact, as my interviews demonstrate,
following Gantz, conflicts around media are associated with other
aspects of the intimate relationship among the couple. Such conflicts
might have been sedated by the overall harmonious and satisfying union
and surfaced once the relationship was ended.
Finally, the most influential work for my study lies within the first
and most celebrated extensive study on the introduction of ICTs in the
household and their impact on meaning-making and everyday life: The
Household Uses o f Information and Communication Technologies project
directed by Roger Silverstone between the mid-1980s and 1990s. It is
within this research that Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley (1992)
developed the domestication concept and where Leslie Haddon and
Roger Silverstone (1995) focused, in one of the reports, on the use of
communication technologies in lone parents' households. Consistent
with my findings, the two British scholars stressed the significance of
television and telephones as means of communication and entertain
ment for the families, due to economic constraints that limit the
possibility of alternative recreational activities; and, in the case of the

telephone; for social networking and daily arrangements. In addition, in

agreement with my analysis, these scholars noted that space and time
constraints impacted on the patterns of media consumption, as well as
the degree of privacy afforded to individual family members. This
chapter, therefore, discusses the constraints that the single parents
interviewed face while trying to build a 'home'. Home is utilized in the
sense suggested by Haddon and Silverstone (1995): the emotional and
conceptual idea of a having a place of residence, a place one belongs to,
that, at times, confers security or anxiety, influenced also by public
discourses on the family. In particular, the authors stress that obtaining
such feeling of 'home' is for single parents an achievement which
involves not only having to deal with time and space issues but also it
'... involves, among other things, the appropriation of both
objects and machines, meanings and media .. .
(Haddon and Silverstone 1995, p. 15)
It is the project of making a home that provides the central framework
for understanding my informants practices relating to ICTs. Hence, it is
with this notion in mind, and in the light of literature presented here,
that the narratives of my informants, analysed below, contribute to a
better understanding of how temporal, spatial, economic and social
arrangements influence the uses of, and meanings drawn from, old and
new media technologies.

M ethodology
This chapter is drawn from the authors qualitative dissertation study
(Russo 2003), carried out within the context of an ongoing, multi-year
research project, the 'Symbolism, Meaning, and the New Media @
Home.1
The interviewees were selected according to a 'maximum variation
sampling approach, which aims to roughly mirror the demographic
characteristics of the American population, and a 'snowball sampling
approach, which refers to the strategy of asking informants to help locate
other interviewees (Lindlof 1995). I concentrated on single parents who,
at the moment of the interview, had their children living with them at
least 40 per cent of the time and were not living with any other adult in
the house. I wanted to ensure that they all had considerable experience
of daily parenting issues and household responsibilities.
For the purpose of this research, I have analysed the accounts of 6
single fathers and 16 single mothers. They are predominantly Caucasian,

although three of them have mixed ethnicity and they were working at
the time of the interview in a vast range of professions mostly within the
service industry. Three parents had a high-school degree; the others
mostly had some years of college, followed by few with a bachelor's, an
associate's, or a graduate degree. The families' income ranged from below
$15,000 to over $75,000 annually. However, it is important to point out
that in divorced or separated households, due to alimony issues, the
measure of income is rather different from two-parent families. Indeed,
in some families the income was rather unstable due to recurrent
changes in child support arrangements as well as in changes in the
profession of one of the parents.
For the purpose of this study, almost all of the members of each
household have been interviewed twice, once together and once
individually. The interviews have been conducted by a team of
investigators, including the author,2 and followed the informants'
privacy guidelines issued by the Human Research Committee of the
University of Colorado. Thus, names and any other information that
could reveal the interviewees' identity have been removed from the
transcripts and this study.
Finally, while I acknowledge the bias that the researcher brings to
the interviewing process (for more on this topic consult Hoover 2003;
Haddon 1998), I still believe that the present study offers an informed
and useful analysis of some aspects of single parents' lifeworlds and their
everyday life.

Analysis of the experiences of my inform ants

In the light of literature mentioned above, this section will show how
time, space, economic and socio-psychological issues of single parent
hood impact on media consumption within the context of everyday life
practices, through the voiced experiences of some of my informants.

Temporal and spatial constraints affecting media use

The story of Katy Cabera illustrates clearly how economic and time
constraints, as well as the size and shape of the household impact on
media consumption. Katy, at the time of the interview, was living in the
family housing complex of the university where she worked at as an
administrative assistant, while studying for a bachelor's degree in social
work. She is 32 years old, Hispanic, and has been divorced for four years.
Her ex-husband is in the Navy, as she was previously, and he rarely sees
their two children but supports them financially. Their combined income,

including child support, is around $35,000. Katy considers herself lucky

because her boss allows her to be flexible with her working hours (32
hours per week). On top of that, Katy is involved in several organizations
as a volunteer, many of which include her children. The Caberas live in a
two-bedroom apartment. They own one television and a VCR, which are
located in the living room, whereas a brand new computer sits in the
kitchen. When asked about her media consumption, Katy explained that
she adopted a different pattern of use when the children were present
from when they were not, while also noting her felt need to adapt her
media habits to a very hectic schedule of family activities. In relation to
computers, for example, this is what she answered:
Interviewer: How many hours each day do you think you use the
computer?
Katy:
I don't know that there's an average. I can go a week without
it. It just depends, really, on what's going on. ... Ah, when
they're (the kids) here, since this is our only television - if
they're watching TV, then I'll log on. I'm not necessarily
emailing. I may be looking for recipes. Or if something
sparks my curiosity, I'll look it up online.
Katy's experience represents one of the many cases where parents' media
uses, pressured by time issues, are structured by the need to oversee and
entertain the children, run errands, as well as the need to share media
technologies. Katy comments on her experience:
Interviewer: I'm curious why you decided to put the computer in the
kitchen rather than in here [living room]. Or upstairs.
Katy:
I wanted it upstairs eventually. But I haven't bought a desk
yet. So it was in the kitchen until I was able to have the
funds to buy a desk. And I never have the opportunity [to
buy a desk]. I don't want it in here [living room] because I
think that there would be too much chaos going on [both
Jake and Helena are playing on the floor in front of this as
she says this]. At least in the kitchen, it's just off to the side.
Here she explains the computer's somewhat unusual location (in the
kitchen) in relation to her need to both oversee the children's internet
activities and to engage simultaneously in other household chores. The
time pressures of single parenting, combined with the burden of child
care, affect both the way that media are utilized and the way rules are
negotiated in the home.
Due to time pressures, another common practice for the families

interviewed was the negotiation of rules for the children to account for
their often hectic and changing daily routines. Indeed, rule negotiations
between parents and children are rather common, and dependent, along
with weather-related factors, on the daily routines of each family
member. Many of the parents interviewed explained that they had
different routines for their children in winter and in summer, which in
turn would affect their consumption of media as well. Work-related
activities also played an important role, especially if the parent has to
bring some business home in the evenings or on weekends. As Jeff Stein
(41) comments on his daughter's use of media: .. I'd say it varies b u t ...
I guess the more busy I am with things in the house I am doing the more
likely she is to be using some form of media ... on the computer and on
television.' Jeff has been divorced for seven years and has Rachel 50 per
cent of the time. He has his own business, so, like Katy Cabera, considers
himself pretty lucky, in terms of the flexibility of his working schedule
that allows him to organize his work around his ex-wife's job schedule,
so that Rachel would not spend any time in daycare centres. However, at
the same time, being self-employed puts a lot of pressure on earning a
stable income to make a living, which fluctuates between $20,000 and
$35,000, forcing him to work quite a lot.

Economic and temporal issues affecting entertainment choices and

attitudes towards media
Along with space, lack of time and money are also responsible for the
limitations on recreational activities outside the home and for the
scarcity of media within the household. Almost all of the families
claimed that they did not have money to invest in computers, cable,
stereo systems, or a second or new TV set. Indeed, they tended to stress
the desire to fulfil other necessities if they had had the economic
opportunity. An example is represented by the case of Anna Lally, a
single mother since the age of 16, who never received any financial help
from her family nor from the father of her son. Anna has a very old
computer handed down by a friend, so slow that it is incapable of being
connected to the internet. However, Anna does not have money for a
new one and admits that she is not interested in investing in a computer
- there are more useful things she could do with her money. As she
explains: Tt doesn't seem like a necessity to me. So I'm not motivated to
put my money into that. You know, if somebody walked up to me and
said, Here, have a new computer system", and it was internet ready, I'd
probably accept it. And I might use it too.'
Anna's case is very similar to the one of another informant, Jill
Allen (37). When talking about computers, Jill, the mother of two girls,

commented that even if she had money to buy one; she did not have
anywhere to put it. In addition, she had never used one, and her
parents let her daughters use theirs. However, at the time of the second
interview, eight months later, the prospect of owning the parents'
computer very soon (since they had ordered a new one) opened a
whole new horizon of possibilities for Jill's work enhancement and
social networking and, suddenly, 'space' was no longer an issue.
Hence, economic constraints can be disguised behind other types of
constraint that are felt to be less embarrassing or easier to accept
psychologically.
Furthermore, echoing public discourses around the impact of visual
media on children, many informants, while acknowledging that watch
ing television is a waste of time or often is just a time filler, could not
avoid using the medium for parenting purposes. Therefore, in many
cases, they had to compromise their values with their needs. As Roxanne
Conner (45, buyer in graphic business, currently unemployed) confesses
when discussing the use of media by single parents:
Roxanne:

Yeah. Um, well it comes into play because there, it's a big
presence, as far as entertainment. The internet and movies
and video games and the phone ... I guess that's sort of a
media thing ... And ... just, I'm surprised a t ... I guess how
lenient I am about the whole thing knowing when he was
little, or thinking when he was little, 'Oh, I'm certainly not
going to park him in front of the TV ... I'm never going to
be one of those parents.' And it's just ...
Interviewer: Reality intervened?
Roxanne:
Exactly. And very, you know, I don't try and shelter him
from it.
\

Roxanne, at the time of the interview, had recently been laid off from
her work as a graphic buyer. She had been working full-time during her
two marriages, of which the last ended two years ago, leaving her with
the primary physical custody of Jeremy, the son she had from her first
marriage. Although Roxanne has never suffered from economic
constraints, since her job provided her with financial stability even
before both divorces, she had several stories to tell about the stressful life
of being a single mother with a full-time job and the role of media in her
parenting of Jeremy.
Nevertheless, television is viewed as a waste of time and a negative
source of entertainment for children from both two-parent and single
parent families. One difference lies in the fact that, among the single
parents interviewed, those who do not have cable often justify this

decision firstly, by referencing a moral view of the medium, and

secondly, by the fact that it is a financial burden they cannot sustain.
Indeed, in the families that do not have cable there is a VCR and often a
large number of videotapes that the children watch repeatedly. This
practice is justified as being useful because it allows the parents to select
the programme for their children and to show it whenever necessary,
thus, affording greater control for the parents.
This is the case of the Fallons, who got rid of cable and the big TV set
because the mother, Wyonna, thought that her daughters, Jill and Uta,
were becoming addicted. In her own words: T guess that was my
motivation for not having TV - one was cable is expensive - but also we
watched way too much TV' (Wyonna, 39, part-time baker, school
custodian, student). However, they do own around 200 videos and
watch one everyday. In fact, if TV appeared to be negative for the
children, videotapes are allowed because they permit the parent to have
more control over the content and a more flexible viewing schedule that
can better adapt to the hectic and often unstructured life of single-parent
households. Besides, the introduction of the VCR, as Wyonna confessed,
was also the result of her compromise with the children, who otherwise
would have not tolerated living in a house with no TV.
Furthermore, in terms of rules that parents set for their children,
there are definitely more detailed and restricted parameters in relation to
television than to computers. Indeed, in relation to their childrens
computer use, my informants do not show the same moral concerns and
tend to trust their childrens use in terms of sites they visit. As in
Downess (1999) interviews, parents tend to have a different attitude
towards the new machines in comparison to television and associate
them with educational opportunities. When present, computers are
perceived as useful and necessary for childrens career development,
while for their personal lives they seem to often be seen as useful for
social networking, information retrieval and leisure activities, unless
they are involved in the parents profession (Russo 2003).

Custody arrangements, family practices, and media consumption

As mentioned in the sociological literature, divorce and separation
require that the parents adapt to the drastic lifestyle changes and build a
new parenting role (Demo et a l 2000). However, very often with this
new identity comes a new life, which is not materially as well equipped
as the previous one. In particular, single mothers face the most
challenges in trying to run the same household arrangements with a
reduced income especially when the separation has not been consensual
or when child support is minimal or non-existent. Financial instability

post-divorce had, for some of my informants, repercussion on their

children's education and leisure activities. Relocation to more affordable
neighbourhoods often results in a change of schools, which are not
always very strong in their educational structures; college funds are used
to pay divorce lawyers; and budgets are tight for entertainment activities
and machines.
The experience of relocation and its repercussions on family
practices was shared by several of the informants. One case is represented
by the Allens, who, since the divorce in 1995, had, up to the time of the
interview, changed place already five times and were risking having to
move again. Because of financial difficulties, Jill and her daughters had
been moving between their own apartment, when they could afford one,
and the house of Jill's parents, in which they all had to share one
bedroom. Four months before the interview, the Allens moved into a
three-bedroom house found through an organization that helps families
on a low income to find somewhere to live. However, since Jill had
recently kicked out her boyfriend because he was an alcoholic, she was
running the risk of being evicted because she was not able to afford the
rent on her own. Jill, who never attended college, works on the assembly
line in a factory and is planning to pick up a second job in order to afford
the rent. Her income at the factory was only $15,000 a year, and she is
the sole supporter of her two daughters. The father officially has joint
custody but lives far away with his new family and is not involved in the
girls' lives. The only help Jill receives is from her parents who have an
active role in her life. In terms of leisure activities, Jill complains that
they do not participate in many activities as a family because it is too
expensive to go out, so their only entertainment resource is the satellite
television, a play station, and her parents' computer: 'We talk a lot; it's
just that we don't know what to do. It's hard for me to be a single parent,
and sometimes it is hard to budget the money.'
Finally, the situation is even more precarious when the divorce has
not been settled and child support is not offered. This is the case of
Vanessa Miller (35, Wal-Mart cashier) who, after twenty years, left the
husband twelve months before the interview and had, since then, moved
already three times. She explained how the divorce had been 'tough' on
the children, whose grades at school had dropped since she left her
husband. Their life had been completely transformed since their
household income had dropped dramatically. In relation to media, they
no longer had cable or a computer, and that actually turned into a
positive situation for Vanessa, as she did not have to worry about what
their children were exposed to on the internet or on television. However,
their drastic lifestyle change was definitely felt by the entire family. In
cases like the Millers, divorce or separation radically changes the

mothers household habits, while the fathers tend to have not only cable
television but also computers; and the children, according to their
mothers, use them without much parental oversight or restrictions.
Indeed, this inclination reflects the economic disparity that is typical in
single-parent households between mothers and fathers.

Negotiating media habits with the other parent

An important issue that single parents have to face in their everyday lives
relates to their constant need to negotiate childrens rules with the other
parent, when involved. Both two-parent and single-parent households
generally claim to have guidelines regarding the types of material and
the amount of media they allow their children to consume. Yet in the
interviews there often seemed to be notable differences between the
media practices of the parent interviewed and those of the ex-spouse, as
if the rules in place before the separation were contingent to the union of
the parents, and the parenting practices previously held. Thus, media
rules were often a source of conflict and tension with the other parent,
which, in turn, affected the childrens relationships with them both.
A good example of such conflicting relationships is represented by
the story of Rayna Hancock (37). Rayna lives with her 7-year-old son in a
mobile home. She is in school trying to attain an associates degree and
presently her income is $13,000 a year. She is divorced and has physical
custody of her son; while the father, who sees the child quite regularly,
lives with his grandmother, his girlfriend and a new baby. Rayna owns a
refurbished computer as well as a television and a VCR donated by
members of her church congregation. When Rayna was asked about the
type of videos and games that she rented for her son, she explained
animatedly that the fathers son buys him games and lets him watch
films that are too violent. When asked how she dealt with Wess father
on the matter, she replied: 'I dont really have to tell him, he knows, he
knows that I dont agree with this and that, but, also I cant expect him
to change everything ... hes had to change a lot to meet my
expectations.
Raynas story is just one among similar narratives of disappointment
and incompetence that describe the other parent - mostly the father.
Definitely, the reason and modality in which the parents have split up
reflect the tone of these conversations.
On the same topic, another interesting pattern emerged within three
of the families interviewed, echoing an argument raised by Rogge and
Jensen (1988) in their study. Those authors claimed that women tend to
recognize computers as pertaining to the male domain and, thus,
consciously or unconsciously reject them because they serve as

reminders of the conflicts they have with their male partner. One
woman, Meredith Ricci, a nurse and mother of three daughters, voiced a
similar experience. Her ex-husband works in the computer business and
always had many computers in the house. When asked if she discussed
media rules with him, she explained that she did not. Computers in
particular were not discussed, she said, because they had always been a
'sore spot' in their relationship. Meredith bemoaned the fact that her exhusband had been constantly on the computer for work and for fun,
causing a great deal of tension in their marriage. As a reaction, she said
that she had not even wanted to touch one when they had been married,
and now barely uses them for the same reason. When asked if her
infrequent use of the computer was related to her experience with her
computer-user husband, she answered:
Uhm [yes]. Because I felt like it was taking away from personal
time or being able to do anything else you know. It's, it's a
scapegoat. It's like the people that read all the time because they
can't talk to somebody, you know they sit [miming somebody
reading a book].
(Meredith, 41)
Two interviewees, Sarah Taber and Eugene Arrington, similarly blamed
excessive television consumption as one of the reasons for their divorces.
In both cases, the husband was watching too much television and not
devoting enough time to the family in the view of their ex-wives. As a
reaction, both of these single parents do not watch television and try to
instil in their children the same habit.
Indeed, on the matter of the tension involved in discussing media
rules with the ex-husband, Sarah (41, Family Advocate counsellor)
explains:
Sarah:

That is and it was actually a huge issue when they were

young for me. That was another mediating [issue] because
he didn't have any boundaries. He would let them watch rrated movies and ... he doesn't have, that's the part of the
parent that he doesn't have. He doesn't pay attention to
what they are doing, and what they are watching and ...
and he is a TV-holic and that's why I don't, you know, I felt
like that I lost my marriage actually to TV.
Interviewer: Because he was watching too much TV?
Sarah:
He wakes up in the morning, he turns the TV on and goes
off when he goes to bed, you know? And basically our
conversations ended and TV was what filled that void so ...

so I went through years and years without even having a TV

at all ... So I do movies, I like movies but now I am very
selective of what, you know, when I watch TV ... so they
(her children) have been very exposed to a lot of things that
I was very against to, especially when they were younger. As
they have gotten older they have gotten, because of me I
think, where I come from, I finally realized through single
parenting that I couldnt protect them. I cant protect them
from their environment, I cant protect them from whats
going on over at his house ... in many ways they were still
getting what they needed, they needed a father and he was
there for them.
This excerpt reflects Sarahs frustrations with her ex-husbands lack of
supervision of her three childrens television consumption; a frustration
that echoes also the reasons for her divorce twelve years ago. Never
theless, she had to accommodate her ex-husbands different parenting
style with her own role as a mother. She learned that she could not
control her childrens lives when they were with their father, so she
decided to instil in them a critical capacity to discern among television
programmes, so that they could bring with them her teachings when
they were with their dad. In addition, Sarahs recognition that it was
important for her daughters to have a father figure in their childhood
forced her to compromise her dissatisfaction with the ex-husband
television habits.

Conclusions: negotiating media consum ption and

parenting practices
All the issues examined in this chapter have stressed the importance of
understanding media consumption within the social and cultural
contexts in which individuals lives are embedded, along with the
particular family arrangements in which their practices are entrenched.
Especially when discussing the future of new media technologies in
contemporary society, there is the general tendency to assume that
media are necessarily desired by all; hence, it is only a question of access
and ownership. Conversely, in many cases, as for some of my
interviewees, individuals are not interested in pursuing ICTs because
they are felt to be unnecessary, or are not viewed as a choice owing to
economic or cultural reasons. Although media have become naturalized
within the space of family practices, they do not necessarily represent
the primary concern of single parents. For my informants, making a

'home' (Haddon and Silverstone 1995), as mentioned earlier, is the most

important focus in their lives, while ICTs are not necessarily a priority
and, in some cases, they cannot be. Old and new media technologies are,
in fact, used and conceived of as useful tools and resources, to the extent
they are perceived by parents as relevant to their family and individual
practices. Indeed, the single parents interviewed struggle to create a
meaningful and stable environment for their children. They try to
maintain rules and habits the children had before the split-up, while
accommodating the larger demands and responsibilities they are
confronted with in their manifold roles as caretakers, breadwinners,
nurturers, disciplinarians, parents and playmates.
Further, this chapter has illustrated how social and material factors
heavily shape the everyday dynamics of single-parent households, and
by extension, the way mass media and ICTs are used as means of
entertainment, information and communication in these homes. The
narratives of the families interviewed are filled with examples showing
how lack of income and/or time impact on the ways that single parents
interact with their children and, thus, the modalities in which mass
media and ICTs are present and are used within these homes. In these
households, social and cultural guidelines are taken as the basis for ICT
use but are continuously negotiated in light of the particular
conditions in which the family is embedded. Indeed, my informants
face the constant need to negotiate between their desires and the
necessities that parenting entails when it comes to their family's media
consumption.
Moreover, the analysis of the transcripts indicated several ways in
which the lack of time impacts on the parents' use of media, especially of
computers, for their own consumption and their children's. On the one
hand, computers, when present, are recognized as useful, convenient,
and affordable tools for maintaining contact with friends and family or
for making new acquaintances. On the other hand, time for socializing is
rather short as there are demands relating to the supervision of children
or running household chores.
Another area in which time and economic factors are evident in
affecting the choices that single-parent families make is in the leisure
sphere. In terms of entertainment, my interviewees demonstrated the
rather limited set of choices that they have for themselves and their
children. In many families, the lack of money was responsible for the
scarcity and limitations of technologies available in the household.
Especially in cases of divorce and separation, some of these parents
described the ways in which their lives underwent radical change after
their split-up, and, thus, even media consumption habits changed
accordingly.

Further, this chapter has stressed the importance of considering

single parents7 media consumption when investigating issues of power
relationships within households and their impact on media uses. Indeed,
consumption patterns are recognized to be influenced by the different
power afforded by family members according to the (gendered) role that
they assume within the sphere of the home (Goodman 1983; Brody and
Stoneman 1983). In households with one adult, traditional divisions of
role between husband and wife are modified to the need and realities of
single parenthood. While the parents interviewed struggle between
being the caretaker and the breadwinner, the children tend to acquire a
larger role in the management of the household and in the decisions
related to family practices (Weiss 1979). Therefore, if the social roles
involved in family dynamics are reascribed to contain the particular
situation of single parents, then the power relationships within house
holds are also modified. The strong bond that ties single parents to their
children creates a different power dynamic from that of two-parent
families: a dynamic that is sustained by different structural and
emotional positions that affect family practices; the range of cultural
resources its members have at disposal for producing meanings; and
their media ownership and consumption habits within the home.
As the interviews presented confirm, the parents7 negotiation
between desires and actual practices in relation to their childrens media
consumption is also complicated by the relationship with the other
parent, when present. Almost all the parents interviewed, regardless of
their type of custody arrangement, expressed difficulty in having to
accommodate the other parents ideas and habits in relation to their
children's media habits. Not only do material constraints change their
family practices but also social and emotional ones. Many informants
voiced anger and disapproval of the ex-partners parenting practices.
This situation makes their parenting even harder because they feel that
they have to compensate for the other parent's (perceived) ineptitude for
the sake of their children, overburdening themselves with stress and
responsibilities. In most cases, the ex-partner is depicted as a heavy user
of media and ICTs and as being overly thoughtless about the children's
media consumption. Finally, parenting post-divorce is transformed and
complicated not only by the presence of two households, but also by
new family members (for example, a new partner), who often joins the
household, and whose presence affect the already fragile power relation
established between the two parents.
In conclusion, the uniqueness of the dynamics involving single
parent families stresses the complexity of the articulation of the
relationship between individuals and ICTs expressed in the domestica
tion theory. For the single parents interviewed, not only power issues but

also an intricate web of economic, social and psychological factors come

into play in the daily consumption of, and meaning-making associated
with, ICTs. Indeed, the complexity of single-parent families' structure
and lives stresses the importance of considering the four stages, in which
the practices pertaining to the domestication concept are divided, as
flexible phases one can return to, and whose dynamics can always
change along with their value within the moral economy of the
household.
It is, therefore, only when considering the complexity of parenting
practices and the fluidity and variety of family arrangements, for
example single-parents' households, that it is possible to understand
the role played by mass media within individuals' lifeworlds. Indeed, old
and new technologies participate in the intricate web of daily routines
adapting and influencing parents life organization and contexts of
interaction. Consequently, as the number of single parents grows, their
everyday-life experiences might reshape previously accepted norms of
family dynamics and the relationship between family life and informa
tion and communication technologies.

Notes
1.

2.

For more information on this project please consult its website,

http://www.mediameaning.org, or contact Professor Stewart Hoover
and Professor Lynn Schofield Clark at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, USA.
The research team is composed of: Joseph Champ (PhD), Scott
Webber (PhD), Michelle Miles (PhD student), Denice Walker (PhD
student), Monica Emerich (PhD student), Christof Demont-Heinrich
(PhD student), Jin Kyu Park (PhD student), and the author.

12 Dom esticating domestication.

Reflections on the life of a
concept
Roger Silverstone
All concepts, once having gained the light of day, take on a life of their
own. Domestication is no exception. And readers of the preceding pages
will have gained a sense of the threads, some elegantly twisted, some
uncomfortably knotted, that have emerged over the last twenty years, as
researchers have tried to use its spongy texture to define a way of
thinking about the incorporation of technology into everyday life - a
way of thinking which seeks to be true to experience and practice.
All concepts are metaphors. They stand in place of the world. And in
so doing they mask as well as reveal it. They offer an invitation to
compare, to seek illumination from somewhere else, to confront an
opaque reality with perhaps another one, and to divine some meaning
from their mutuality. Concepts that survive are, most often, simple ones.
Domestication is once again no exception. Perhaps this is surprising,
since the world they reach towards and attempt to frame is far from
simple, and far from stable. They survive, perhaps, through their
eloquence, and they disintegrate when the distance established between
the world and its thinking becomes too close or too far.
All concepts attempt to address an empirical reality, to offer the basis
for description, illumination and, with luck, explanation about the
world: to contextualize it and project it beyond the moment. The
invitation, if not the injunction, is to think one way, and not another. It
is to claim a preferred reading of the world, more accurate to its
dynamics and its power. But there is also a tinge of normativity: an
expectation of how things should be, ideally.
These are the bases on which a concept's usefulness can be, and will
be judged. Domestication is no exception here. In this concluding
chapter, I want to review, inevitably with the benefit of hindsight, what
was originally being claimed in framing the study of media, technology
and everyday life through such a metaphor, and what has become, and
might yet become of it, as it and the world which it addresses, inexorably
change.

O rigins
In the beginning there was technological determinism. Part of this, of
course, was common sense. As the twentieth century took hold, science
and technology were seen as laws unto themselves. It was part of
everyday culture to marvel at, but also to demand, the next great
invention, the next great machine (I remember the first sellotape. No
more sealing wax and hessian string on brown paper parcels). Science
and technology were changing the world, enabling communication
when none had been possible before, storing and retrieving information
in increasingly paperless spaces, improving the quality of life, re-skilling,
transforming the exercise of power in both public and private settings,
shrinking distances. Machines were becoming faster, smaller, more
efficient, more robust, more sensitive to human needs. Their capacity to
define how human beings would live with them, their transparent and
irresistible claims on the future, the obviousness of their direct and
immediate benefits: for health, wealth, and humankind were unchal
lenged. Engineers believed in this, politicians believed in it, capitalists
believed in it and so did we, the humble consumers, even when we
bewailed the risks and dangers of too rapid innovation, and too
confusing and destabilizing a transition to the next stage of modernity.
In history and sociology there is an equally long - indeed arguably
much longer - version of the technologically determinant. Not
unreasonable, one might think, when it comes to spurs, clocks,
gunpowder and the compass, or even to writing, printing and the
telescope, but arguably more challenging and contentious when it
comes to the fine tuning of information and communication technol
ogies in the increasingly complex and fluid global society of late
modernity. Yet in all these cases, what was being done was a singular
reading, more or less: from technological to social change, from the
emergence of the machine and its systems to the conduct of everyday
life, without the interruption of the wayward and the human, without
the disturbance of the emotional, the non-rational, the perverse. And
without these factorings of human need and desire on the one hand, and
of institutional interests and power on the other, the story was never
going to be completely convincing. Though it could never be entirely
wrong either.
By the 1980s, in the fields of science and technology studies, and
perhaps less radically, in the fields of media and communication studies,
this otherwise singular narrative of socio-technological change was
beginning to be challenged. From Latour (Latour 1987) to Williams
(Williams 2003), an arc of scepticism and humanism - some might say of
a more radical materialism - began to redefine the boundaries between

humans and machine. These theoretical approaches would continue to

pose a challenge, offering their own version of magical realism,
particularly in the case of Actor Network Theory (ANT), in which
technologies and bodies were offered as equivalent, where machines
spoke to the human and the human to machine, and where
technological consequences were social and social consequences tech
nological. In ANT power was diffused, rhizomatic, sub-Foucauldian,
intangible. In Williams, it was in your face: post-Marxian, shouting
vested interests and global needs. In both, by and large, the focus was on
the creation of technology, its invention, mobilization and distribution:
in other words its appearance, but not its consequence. While this might
be less completely the case for Williams, he too embraced new media
technologies, cable, video, the early signs of interactivity, as providing,
potentially and, in his case, hopefully, the drivers of (revolutionary)
social change.
Media'studies had by this time begun its own journey away from
determinism, in the guise of media effects, and towards constructivism,
in the guise of audience freedom and creativity. The talk was 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. This sense was increasingly dependent on their relationships to
information and communication technologies and mediated content;
the emergent and contested meanings, that flowed eternally through
their social and symbolic spaces.
The notion of domestication was a product of this moment. It was
an attempt to grasp the nettle of socio-technical change where it could
be seen to be both mattering most and where it was almost entirely taken
for granted: in the intimate spaces of the home and household. It was an
attempt too, naive perhaps, to link the way that we thought about our
contemporary relationships to the objects and forces beyond immediate
control to those consistencies in human history and culture which
indeed, precisely through those relationships, defined our humanity, our
capacity to be in the world. Domestication was something human beings
did to enhance and secure their everyday lives.
Wild animals then, wild technologies now: what's the difference? In
both cases, unconstrained, they pose threats and challenges. In both
cases, brought within the fold, they become sources of power and
sustenance. Domestication is practice. It involves human agency. It
requires effort and culture, and it leaves nothing as it is. Perhaps therein
lay an early error in its formulation: the impression that somehow only

the technology was transformed in its appropriation into the household,

the impression too that such a process was uncomplicated, linear and
without its own contradictions. This is not just about failure: the dying
PlayStations on the roof of the wardrobe or the advanced functionality
of the telephone lying dormant, or the video recorder becalmed in a sea
of blank tapes: nor is it, as it would later become, the hyper-intensity of
instant messaging or file sharing, examples of a kind of uberdomestication, now believed to be two of the great triumphs of
spontaneous media consumption.
The domestication of information and communication technolo
gies, on the contrary, notwithstanding its often apparent ease, a process
smoothed by marketing eloquence and fine design, nevertheless,
confronted established social arrangements and cultural values, at
individual and collective levels, as indeed many of the empirical studies
in the preceding chapters have amply demonstrated. Both parties to the
interaction, the human and the technological, and in both material and
symbolic ways, were, and are, in a constant dialectic of change. A
dialectic of change that is unending, that takes place across different
temporalities and different territories, and that is indeed the very stuff of
what everyday life now consists: the stuff of electronic communication,
information gathering, media gossip and media literacies; the stuff,
indeed, of mediation, the stuff of private and of public life.
Domestication was a seen as a process - a process of consumption in which consumption was linked to invention and design, and to the
public framing of technologies as symbolic objects of value and desire.
Domestication described a process of consumption that drew its
inspiration from the work of Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1988), Michel
de Certeau (de Certeau 1984) and Daniel Miller (Miller 1987), that
described consumption not as passive, but as active. The truism, then
and now, was that consumption was also production, a form of
engagement in material culture that was increasingly seen to be the
case particularly in the media, where any and every kind of textual
engagement drew on personal, social and cultural resources in such a
way as to leave the original, if such a thing could be identified, as
significantly affected in use. No stone unturned. No text untouched. No
technology untransformed.
The attempt to fix this otherwise amorphous process into the fabric
of the everyday, the hooks that still try to link its continuities and
contradictions to the conduct of the everyday, lay in the specification
of the dimensions of appropriation (commodification, objectification,
incorporation, conversion). Again one needs to be careful about their
reification, and to try and understand what it is that they are pointing
towards. They address the components of a process in which

information and communication technologies are located in time and

space, in the intimate times and spaces of the household and at the
interface between those spaces and the public worlds of discourse and
definition, and of the functionalities and potentialities that such
technologies in their systemic manifestations afford, and to which they
lay claim. Domestication as a process of bringing things home machines and ideas, values and information - which always involves
the crossing of boundaries: above all those between the public and the
private, and between proximity and distance, is a process which also
involves their constant renegotiation. How could it, in an age of
telephone and radio, of computer networking and mobile telephony,
be otherwise? And likewise, domestication can only be understood as
relational. While it can be empirically observed in the private spaces of
the front room or the bedroom, and while it can be analysed in the
negotiations of ownership and control of both new old machines and
the consumption of content, within the micro-pores of the domestic
setting and in the family or household relationship, the concept is, in
its essence, dependent on the juxtaposition of inside and outside, and
on its continuous negotiation.
Domestication bridges, a priori, the macro social and the micro
social: the continuous affordances of the wild and the environmentally
abundant out there, with the mobilization of material resources, skills,
cultural values and social competences and capabilities in here. This is
so, notwithstanding the sense that the boundaries around the home (of
which more shortly) are no longer what they were, that homes, hearths,
households in an age of mobility and fracture no longer have the
defensible borders that were once presumed to be their defining feature;
and that individuals, as they break free from the sedentariness and
nuclearity of family life and bedroom culture, shatter the bounds of
established domesticity. The sociological changes are unarguable, but
the phenomenological conditions remain. Information and commu
nication technologies have become a significant component of the
carapace of such personality and domesticity, both in their location and
their dislocation; and, precisely, in their capacity to help the individual
and the collectivity to define and sustain their own ontological security
wherever they happen to be.
Commodification, a more accurate framing of the otherwise too
general appropriation, and conversion, both link what goes on inside to
what goes on outside the home, or indeed within any other organization
in which technologies and their content are introduced into the
complexities of an enclosed social organization. Commodification refers
to that component of the process of domestication, which in design,
marketing, market research, the knowledge of pre-existing consumer

behaviour and the formation of public policy, prepares the ground for
the initial appropriation of a new technology. Machines and services do
not come into the household naked. They are packaged, certainly, but
they are also 'packaged' by the erstwhile purchaser and user, with dreams
and fantasies, hopes and anxieties: the imaginaries of modern consumer
society. This aspect of domestication: its inevitable and necessary
initiation, operates for the individual (my mobile), the household (our
broadband) and, as Jo Pierson has eloquently shown (Chapter 11), the
organization (our network).
Conversion involves reconnection; the perpetuation of the helix of
the design-domestication interface. Consumption is never a private
matter, neither phenomenologically nor materially. 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. Of course such an
interaction is fraught. There is an essential tension between the
technological and the social which has to be worked out at every level,
from the political and the personal. Neither party is stable in this,
though both, as it were, seek that stability. So designers and
manufacturers, as well as policy-makers, construct their objects and
functionalities with ideal users and optimum conditions of use in mind:
in their own ideal world of laboratory life, they have worked out the
benefits and adjusted to the risks; the technologies are designed to be
robust, functionally effective and socially consequential. Users want the
perfect fit: an enhancement of the quality of their everyday lives without
its destabilization; an extension of personality and power without a
disruption of identity; a freeing from the constraints of community,
without a complete dislocation from the moral order of society. This is
the constitutive dialectic of projection and preservation that users bring
to any innovation: preservation of the present, projection into the
future, and one that constantly challenges the linear logic of diffusion
(see Introduction), as well as the hoped-for maintenance of individuals'
power to control their own private space, their own media ecology.
Objectification and incorporation are the strategies, or maybe, if one
is to be true to de Certeau, the tactics, of domestication. Objectification
and incorporation involve placing and timing. The complexities and
instabilities of domestic life, both well established and essentially fragile,
move to meet the new arrival. Information and communication
technologies by definition offer a restructuring of the position of the
household and its members, both internally in the interrelationships
they have with each other, in the micro-politics of gender, generational

and sibling rivalries, and externally as the threads of connection and

disconnection, proximity and distance, extend into public spaces or into
the networks of the diasporic or the displaced.
Objectification (the location of information and communications
technologies in the material, social and cultural spaces of the home) and
incorporation (the injection of media technological practices into the
temporal patterns of domestic life), together are the infrastructural
components of the dynamics of everyday life, both, it should be said,
within and outside the formal boundaries of the household. Neither
leave the existing patterns of social life untouched; new machines claim
new spaces and new patterns of participation; new content challenges
existing rules of behaviour or codes of familial practice. But just as
equally such technologies enable the management of fracturing social
orders, connecting broken homes, or enabling family life to extend
beyond the physical and the face to face. This is not a matter of either
technological or social determination so much as, at this modest
domestic level, the mutuality of transformation that requires human
participation and a modicum of human responsibility. And the question
for us, as researchers, is that of understanding the nature of that
interrelationship and its significance both for those who are engaged, on
a daily basis within it, and for an understanding of the wider
ramifications of this dialectic at the heart of socio-technical change.
The latter issue is material. Technologies are political. Their
innovation is motivated by political and economic interests and
agendas. This is hardly new and hardly original. But power, and policy,
is never simply exercised, in this sphere, just as in any other. And an
account of its complexities and failings (even if in order to improve,
ultimately, its efficacy) depends on the disentangling of social process
from the otherwise singular rationality of unreflective governance. There
are unequal powers, of course, but no determinations, in the innovation
of information and communication. The concept of domestication, with
its all metaphoric strengths and weaknesses, is designed above all to
intervene in the otherwise singular account of technological change and
to instate the human at its centre, not in any dewy-eyed romantic way,
but to force all of those concerned with its nature to confront the
responsibility that all actors must take, both producers and consumers,
for the decisions they make, the choices they pursue, and the practices
they develop in the creation of the increasingly sophisticated and
increasingly salient strategies of communication and information
seeking in this late modern, global, world of ours.
Such an observation, one to which I will return in the final section of
this chapter, leads neatly enough to the next of the key terms associated
with the concept of domestication: the moral economy of the household.

The moral economy of the household

My colleagues and I were struck, in the very earliest phases of our
empirical research, by the efforts made by parents of dependent
children (and of course by the children too) to manage, monitor and
contain the influx of technologically-mediated content into their
home, to establish patterns, codes and expectations of behaviour
coherent with their own values and those that they wished to preserve.
Nuclear or not (and of course many of them, particularly in single
parent or aging households, were not at all nuclear), these primary
social groups, consciously or unconsciously, depended for the security
of their daily existence on the emergence of a sustainable but particular
common sense: a kind of signature set of values that held them
together in the face of the traumas of the public and the mediated
world, in the face of the challenges of peer groups and networks, and of
the arrival of unacceptable messaging services and websites and
personal videos. The relationships that formed around such innova
tions had to be grounded somehow, just as in the latest manifestation
of moral ordering, the individual and mobile young, as both Maren
Hartmann (2005) and Knut S0 rensen (Chapter 3) suggest, are
constructing their personal (but shareable) morality in similar ways.
These moral positions are also grounded in a sense of self, and in ideals
of appropriate values and behaviour that are equivalently (and by
definition) sustaining of identity and culture.
Our early research also revealed, perhaps less surprisingly, how
different families and households organized their own affairs, managed
their finances, exchanged and used money and other material and
valued objects as a way of maintaining peace, order and economic
viability within their four walls (and of course within their extended
relationships). It was interesting to note where and how these informal
and often taken-for-granted arrangements broke down, with whom and
under what circumstances and, of course, how they affected, and were
effected by, transactions that involved the purchase of information and
communication technologies, or subscription to their services. In the
obverse it was also clear that in many families and households the
abstract values associated with money in the formal economy would not
need to be, and were not, upheld: the private economy of help,
reciprocity and nominal payments for services rendered, did not depend
on any models of rational value and fixed rates of exchange. It seemed to
us, empirically, that such economic arrangements were grounded in a
family or household's sense of its self, a sense of self that could be
justified, more or less, with respect to traditions and the articulation of
value, and that such values and consequential practices constituted,

both in their manifest consistency and in the struggles to maintain

them, quite literally, a moral economy.
What makes an economy moral? What makes morality economic?
In what sense is domestication a moral force?
In the 1980s there was a certain sheepishness around discourses of
morality. I suspect there still is. The moral economy emerged from the
historical analyses of E. P. Thompson (1971) whose work on the
transition from traditional forms of economic life to that of capitalism
contrasted a set of arrangements and practices on the one hand
grounded in tradition and respect for the individual within a definable
and viable community, and the shattering of those often less than
rational or less than efficient procedures for distribution and exchange,
which advancing capitalism imposed, irrespective of local conditions,
beliefs and values. Such a perception of dichotomization was reinforced
in the anthropological work of Parry and Bloch (1989) on the meaning of
money, and of course in a whole slew of research exploring exchange
and reciprocity as a component of economic life.
Economies (all economies, even, strictly, capitalism) are built on
moral precepts, in so far as it is presumed that the relationships they
prescribe as both desired and optimum between participants have inbuilt
judgements of value - above all (though implicitly), the values ascribed
to the participants themselves, to the human participants, in the
exchange. The public, formal, zweckrational (Jo Pierson's calling on
Max Weber in this context in Chapter 11, is extremely suggestive)
economy of the Protestant ethic and of modernity placed participants
within it, in their anonymity and distance. The predominant values were
those of abstract calculation, efficiency and the pursuit of profit. The
private, informal, wertrational economies of traditional societies and
personal spaces, brought participants together in the full plenitude of
their identities and social roles, where transactions were not necessarily
governed by immediate expectations of reciprocity, equivalence or
profit.
Notwithstanding the obvious empirical objection that, at the end of
the twentieth century, and perhaps even more now, any boundary
between these could no longer be seen as viable. This was notwithstand
ing the fracturing of family life on the one hand, and the intrusiveness of
public claims and demands on the other. Notwithstanding the obvious
contradictions and instabilities at the heart of any family life or
household culture, such that perhaps what might be seen as its defining
characteristic lies in the absence of domestic coherence rather than its
consistency. Notwithstanding the increasing mobilities of individuals
and groups and the breaking down of tradition and ritual at both
personal and national levels, and therefore the argument that such a

notion - a notion of a moral economy - is no longer sustainable, I want

to sustain it.
In one sense the notion of the moral economy is naively empirical. It
asks the questions in what ways, if at all, households or families create
for themselves private and personal cultures, which have consequences
for the way in which the anonymous, homogenizing technologies and
services of public and commercial life, are used and valued. And, from a
lateral perspective, the question arises too of how we can relate an
understanding of patterns of information and communication technol
ogy use, resistance, participation and the rest to what we can understand
as the culture of the unit whose activities with which we are concerned.
In this sense, and without apology, the moral economy is a simple
sociological notion, bringing into a single frame the convergence and
contradictions of values and practices, and drawing comparatively not so
much (though this may have been unclear originally) on a distinction
between the moral and the immoral, but on the ontological differences
between constitutive forms of socio-economic order and behaviour.
How can we be so sure, empirical evidence apparently to the
contrary, that such distinctiveness in economic and social life, that a
distinctiveness which underpins what we want to call the private still
survives - that it still survives even when we hear so little of it in the
speech of those who talk about their media practice; or that it still
survives when we can no longer see tangible boundaries around families
and households?
There is a whole range of categories and referential practices which
we use, and which have been used throughout this book, to locate these
framing specificities in the use of information and communication
technologies, both old and new, and which - in locating them - become
impossible to understand without a grounding reality in reproducible
social practice. Ownership, belonging, performance, ritual. There are
common senses, etiquettes, narratives, memories, dreams. The con
sumption of technology is suffused by hopes and fears, threaded with
exhilaration and anxiety. The struggles over literacy and control, over
their mastery in the personal and the communal manifestations of the
home and household, as well as in their extension via the media into a
global realm, are specific (if not at some point generalizable) and they are
specific to the specific: I do media and technology differently from you.
Sometimes, and most superficially, and for the most part, those
differences are not significant. But significance itself is a slippery thing.
From the point of view of the machine and its systems, my difference
and the moral economy in which it is grounded and legitimated, barely
disturbs the surface of the commercial and political water; but from the
point of view of me and mine, and those like me, that difference is

material. It grounds my identity and, in its wider salience, could very

well intrude into the generalities of the formal economy in ways that
would become both unexpected and disruptive. That is why we study it.
A search for salience, and its accounting.

Articulations
A perception about the household (I will come to the relationship
between household and home in the next section) as a moral entity
opens up another aspect of this conceptual matrix: the issue of
articulation. I do not think that this was ever terribly clear or worked
through, yet it seemed to have a resonance, as a way of defining the
dynamics of the distinctive appropriation of information and commu
nication technologies and media technologies, as both material and
symbolic objects and as content, into domestic space.
There are a number of unresolved issues here and, as Maren
Hartmann points out (Chapter 5), most of them revolve around
mediated content. In an early, but actually quite distinct use of the
term articulation (Silverstone 1981), the reference was to structural
linguistics and the levels of significance arguably present in natural
language. The question that this initial discussion raised was the extent
to which television, in its textuality, and as a semiotic system, could be
considered such a language. The judgement inevitably was that it could
not, at least in the terms in which the problematic was posed at the time.
When it came to domestication, the notion of articulation emerged
as an attempt to answer quite a specific, and a rather different, question.
It was the question of the distinct nature and function of information
and communication technologies in the social and cultural environ
ments of the household. All technologies once appropriated, found, in
one way or another, their time and place in that space, and in their
placing were articulated as material and symbolic objects into the fabric
of everyday life. Information and communication added an extra
dimension. This was their second articulation, for they brought, through
the communications they enabled, a range of content-based claims, the
hooks and eyes of mediation, which established but also disturbed the
relationship between the private and the public spaces of communica
tion and meaning. The doubling itself was perceived as double: on the
one hand the mediated communications, perhaps above all of broad
casting (in news, soap opera, advertising and the rest), were seen to
provide the effective communications to reinforce claims of public
technologically-mediated culture in domestic settings. It was as though
the technologies were not inert (as a washing machine might be

considered inert) but brought with them, as if in a fifth column, the

means for their further integration and sophistication into everyday life
(actually, of course, the process of innovation and diffusion requires all
technologies to some degree to do this, above all in the creation of
dependency).
Information and communication technologies, however, must also
be seen to enable the substantive articulation of meaning, mediating
distance and proximity, personality and community, and the relations
between public and private spaces, activities and values. But they do so
only through the mediation that the social processes of reception, in
brains as well as in homes, generate in the dynamics of consumption. If
there is to be a third articulation (and I am nervous about such a
proliferation) it lies in the activities of the household itself as the
microcosmic location of the social and cultural work that is a constituent
part of the way in which public and private meaning and communica
tions are constructed and sustained at the interface with technology.
This is, in general, not a terribly challenging idea. But it is difficult to
pin down empirically. It requires, again as Hartmann points out, a
thorough-going epistemological and methodological commitment to
ethnographic approaches to research. And it requires something that was
consistently underrepresented in the early research: both an interroga
tion of texts and meanings, of their production and consumption in the
home, as well as of the ways in which the processes of articulation,
particularly now with mobile and personal technologies, have exploded
beyond the boundaries of domestic space, and have led to various kinds
of private appropriations of, and within, the public domain.
Such an observation allows the argument to move on one further
step. For it brings us face to face with the problem of the household and
the problem of home.

Household and home

Households, we are told, are no longer what they were. They have
become virtual, traumatized by the fracturing of cross-generational
cultures, peer-group pressures, the vulnerability of marriages and the
ephemerality of social relationships. They have become virtual, too,
through the radical attack on their integrity that information and
communication technologies have generated: the old ones, like televi
sion and video, as they have swarmed through the various private spaces
of suburban (and other) dwellings, enabling local and personal bedroom
cultures to develop, disconnected from the whole; and the new ones, the
Walkman, mobile phone and the internet, breaching the walls of

otherwise sedentary media consumption, and driving connectivity,

sociability and personality into the wild prairies of public space.
Households are having a hard time of it: no longer recognized
objectively as containers of social and economic life, no longer stable
in value or consistent in practice, no longer secure on the tossing seas of
mediated globalization and personal networking, no longer morally or
ethically self-regulating. Above all, the boundaries around the household
are breaking down. Thresholds are crumbling. The distinctions between
public and private spaces and frames of reference, always particular to
society and culture, are losing their force and their significance. Public,
private: who notices any more, who cares?
There is something familiar in these arguments, and, if I may be
forgiven for saying so, something both familiar and wrong. They
reproduce the arguments, still au current, surrounding the present and
future of the nation-state in the face of rampant globalization. There is
no need to rehearse all of these arguments, merely to say that their flaw
consists in their exaggeration of the new global challenges to the power
of the state, to its own power within its own borders and to its capacity as
a political unit to command its own destiny on the trans-national stage;
and, finally, in its consequential suggestion that such challenges are
terminal. Yet the nation-state, albeit transformed and less secure in a
number of different ways, is still paramount in the regulation of its own
domestic affairs, both economic and social, and it still holds (depending
on the resources it can command), considerable sway globally, in
political, economic and even environmental agendas. The nation-state is
still a pillar of global society, even though pock-marked by the steady
erosion of the acid of trans-nationality, and by the bullets of neo
imperial adventures.
The parallel with the household, while not exact, is close enough to
be plausible. Households, within the domestication enterprise, were
defined as social, economic and political units, within which a certain
stability of transactional culture in each of these domains enabled the
days to pass without trauma, and enabled values, however provisional
and fragile, to be created, sustained and transmitted. Households have
an objective reality within the macro-institutional frameworks of the
state: the source of taxes and the recipients of social benefits, the primary
political and socializing unit. People move in and out of them, of course.
They are fractured by divorce and personal independence. They are,
however, consistently present, not to say ineradicable, in the social
investigation of technology and mobility, and as the necessary starting
point of any investigation, even of their vulnerability to self-conscious
denial (so, as individuals in their own self-reflective discourses, seem to
value 'the household' not at all, they nevertheless ground their dismissal

on its absolute presence and the implicit recognition that without the
structure it provides their lives would be impossible). In these investiga
tions (there are many examples in this book), the household is still there
as the starting point and as the ground base for an understanding of the
social dynamics of media change.
And then there is a further parallel: between the national and home.
Maria Bakardjieva (Chapter 4) prefers home to household, and, in many
respects, for good reasons. The shift from the material to the
phenomenological is a necessary one, for a sense of place and placement,
a sense of belonging, a sense of location, is in each case and in their over
determination, just that: a sense, a perception - something inside,
intangible, fluid, mobile, transferable as well as ontological. The notion
of home is as a projection of self, and as something that can be carried
with you; a notion of home that extends from a place of origin to a
dream of redemption; a notion of home that attaches to the keypad of a
mobile phone or Blackberry, a technological extension of the self, and
one which means that you are never out of reach, never disconnected. It
is a notion of home that is performed on a daily basis through
interaction rituals both with other individuals and with the technologies
that enable those interactions.
There has, however, to be a dialectic between the phenomenology of
home and the political economy (roughly speaking) of the household.
Indeed, it is within this dialectic that so many of the tensions and
contradictions surrounding the take-up, use and consequences of use, of
information and communication technologies are to be found. The
dialectics of proximity and distance, of the personal and the political
and, as I will discuss shortly, the public and the private, are in each case
to be found at the interface between where I actually am and where I
think I am (or remember being, or wish to be); and at the interface
between me and my machine and my interlocutors and my sources of
information, power and identity. The sense of place, which sometimes
we wish to call - more or less benevolently - home, is a sense that
geographers and sociologists have for some time understood well. I
discussed these ideas and their importance, in this context, in Television
and Everyday Life (Silverstone 1994). And it, therefore, follows that place,
location, meaningful space, is something that increasingly now depends
both on our capacity to domesticate the technologically new, but also on
our, technologically-enhanced, capacity to extend the domestic beyond
the confines of the household.
Home, then, is no longer singular, no longer static, no longer, in an
increasingly mobile and disrupted world, capable of being taken for
granted. But if the human condition requires a modicum of ontological
security for its continuing possibility and its development, home -

technologically enhanced as well as technologically disrupted - is a sine

qua non. We cannot do without it, within or without the household. To
be homeless is to be beyond reach, and to be without identity.

Domestication today
The empirical chapters preceding this one have taken the concept of
domestication into the brave new world of digital technologies, those
that have extended the range and speed of global reach, and those which
have taken the personalization and the mobilization both of the
machine and of everyday life to new levels. All sorts of things are
changing and it is hardly surprising that it is the breaking down of all
that is solid in the domestic realm that catches the eye. The household
has become a relational category in which its borders and boundaries can
no longer be taken for granted and which shift, if not with the winds, at
least with the variations of technologically facilitated movement, both
symbolic and material, as individuals engage electronically with the
public world: in the invigoration of otherwise traditional social networks
distinctive to their own society (Lim, Chapter 10); in managing the
challenges of single parenthood (Russo Lemor, Chapter 9) and fractured
or migrant lives (Berker 2005); in the attempts to integrate the socially
marginal into the mainstream (Hynes and Rommes, Chapter 7); and in
the negotiations within the household, and between those within it and
those outside it, for a proper and sustainable place for a personal node in
the network society (Ward, Chapter 8).
Perhaps the primary articulation in this new miasma of commu
nication, one that was insufficiently in evidence in its early formulation,
is that between the public and the private. It is increasingly a
commonplace to observe that the electronic media have taken this
interface by the scruff of its neck. And in some senses, the distinctiveness
of what might constitute the new in new information and communica
tion technologies, will find its definition in the consequences that their
innovation has for our positioning in the world, and in the redefinition
of the boundaries between the personal and the communal, the intimate
and the shared, the self and other.
There is a distinction to be made, I think, and quite a profound one,
between the primarily centripetal mediated cultures of the twentieth
century and the increasingly centrifugal mediated cultures of the twentyfirst. In the first, mediated centripetal culture, the cultures of press and
broadcasting, whose orientation is towards the bounded community, be
it the nation, the region or the neighbourhood, and to the ingathering of
a shareable cultural and social space, what was (and of course still is)

involved is public talk and private performance: the circulation of

images and stories in public provide the resources in private for reading,
viewing, talking, identification and the sharing of values. In the second,
in the realm of mediated centrifugal culture, it is much more a matter of
private talk and public performance (Katz and Aakhus 2002), where, in
the public spaces of villages and cities, and in the equivalently public
spaces of the internet, it is the sharing of differences which provides the
connectivity.
Now it is the turn of private conversations to occupy public spaces,
and in their public performance (in blogs and in the public voices of the
mobile telephone, as well as in the display of the otherwise private lives
of public figures on front pages and television screens) creating new
kinds of public cultures. These changes are, arguably, so significant that
the familiar boundary between the public and the private is no longer
clear. And the performative, in so many different guises, comes to be a
defining characteristic of this digital culture of ours. Digital technologies
allow the breaking down of the conventional walls around the person;
and the make-over, literal, symbolic, digital, increasingly comes to
dominate the heartland of mass, popular, mediated, culture.
Katie Ward's account (Chapter 8) of the domestic struggles in the
village on the Irish coast to manage the competing demands of home
and work, and of the organization of everyday life around the new
possibilities of interaction and networking, provide an exemplary case
study of how these large-scale technologically re-released changes are
being confronted in the still viable and vital domestic spaces of her
informants. And Sun Sun Lim's account (Chapter 10) of guanxi in China
provides another version of this mediated restructuring, or in this case
the mediated reinforcing, of a culturally distinct version of what
constitutes an extended private space and network. Here a traditional
form of social organization, one that represents a distinctive manifesta
tion of domesticity, rather than being undermined by technological
change, is being both enhanced and changed as information and
communication technologies become increasingly adopted and domes
ticated. We should not forget the enormous importance of cultural
difference in the processes of domestication and innovation. Western
models, contentious though they already are, do not necessarily travel
that well despite what we think of as an increasingly homogenous
globalized world.

Domestication and m orality

Earlier I asked the question, in what ways domestication could be
considered a moral force? It is a question that has begun to be asked at
various points in this book so far, and I guess it is about time that the
nettle was more firmly grasped, hard though it will be to do so, and
inconclusive too.
To put it crudely, morality refers to the ways in which human beings
relate to each other and orient themselves to the world. All commu
nication has then some claims to morality; for all communication
requires that primary engagement. Domestication involves the appro
priation of the new into the familiar, or as we now would wish to see it,
perhaps more accurately, as a process in which that appropriation is
attempted. The challenges that new media pose to the settled and the
familiar, evident in the ways in which new forms of broadcasting, and
new networking and mobile technologies, have made their impression
on everyday life, are in many, if not all respects, also fundamental
challenges precisely to those more or less established and taken-forgranted ways in which individuals and groups position themselves in the
world and in relation to each other.
To take, and to distort, a distinction which the political philosopher,
Michael Walzer (Walzer 1994), uses in a much more sophisticated way,
one can nevertheless in this, our context, speak of morality, as being
either thick or thin. Thin morality is the morality of custom and
convention. It is the morality, by and large, of which Bakardjieva,
Hartmann and S0 rensen speak. It is the morality of behaviour and
practice, a morality of etiquette and convention, of formal and informal
rules - those developed within the confines of domestic spaces, those
developed to articulate a boundary around the personal and the private
in public spaces, and indeed those embodied and systematized in
regulatory frameworks, as constraints on public behaviour, too.
These are the forms of behaviour, modes of expectation, the mores,
that provide for a modicum of sensibility and personal integrity (and
security) as new technologies and technologically inspired practices
disturb the customs and expectations of established forms of commu
nication and the comfort of familiar networks. Perhaps this is the morality
of the double articulation, the articulation of technology, a morality
which depends on, and incorporates, the changing affordances of new
media as they present themselves in the daily round, a morality of
practice, a morality of contact, a morality of management, a morality of
the day to day. Thin morality is a morality inscribed into the minutiae of
the taken for granted, in the following of daily rituals and in the repairing
of those rituals when confronted by threats from outside; and as such this

is the dimension of morality which underpins our quotidian frameworks

for conduct and propriety.
Thick morality, as I intend it here, is the morality of disinterested
responsibility, responsibility that comes with agency, that comes with
choice, that comes with communication. Responsibility that comes with
recognition of, and care for the other. Media, all media, old and new, are
also fundamentally implicated in this dimension of the moral order, for
in the connections they enable or disable, in the mediation of proximity
and distance, in the possibilities they create for defining the boundaries
around the self and in the capacity to position the self in the world of
strangers, they provide an infrastructure for practical and ultimately
non-reciprocal ethics in local, national and global settings. Thick
morality involves an ethics that extends beyond the immediate demands
of the face-to-face, one that engages, or invites engagement, with
otherwise distant humanity. Thick morality is implicated in the
articulation of content and consistencies of communication, for it
depends on judgements of meaning and significance, of value, of
positioning. In so far as the media provide that framework (and many
would argue of course, that they either do not, or indeed undermine
such a possibility) then the processes of domestication have material
significance for the human condition.
But in this context, domestication, as many have pointed out, is
double edged. On the one hand, and in its original under-reflexive
formulation, domestication as a conservative response to the challenge
of technological change, can be seen as a way of absorbing such threats
and denying such opportunities for new kinds of reflexivity into the cosy
familiarity of a private moral space, the family, the household:
comfortable in its own sense of its self, clear about what it values and
what it does not; determined to protect those values from the
disturbances of otherness. In some senses domestication is, by defini
tion, 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.
We know, of course, that this is not how it is, but that it is partly how
it is: this defensiveness is one aspect, one driver of the dialectic of sociotechnological change. The contrary and the critical position, the moral
counter, as it were, comes precisely in the supposed success of this aspect
of domestication, in its neutralization of the potential for real change
and new engagements which new media promise and of course from
time to time succeed in creating.
Both Lorenzo Simpson (Simpson 1995) and Mike Michael (Michael
2000) have pointed to this politically retrogressive dimension of

domestication: that its force is precisely to reject the novel and the
possibility of change. Accepting those challenges inevitably involves
challenging what one already accepts. And this is hard to do, even for the
young who embrace, in every other respect, the liberation of mobile
telephony. From this perspective it would be the failure of complete
domestication, the persistence of a kind of moral itch or irritation, which
changes in communication practice ought consistently to provide, which
would be the key to unlocking the value potentially present in new
information and communication technologies. It is the irresistibility of
this moral itch that underpins Raymond Williams's hopes, and those of
others before and since, for technologically facilitated social change.
So the question we could, and should be asking, one which this
review of the concept of domestication perhaps surprisingly has led to is,
how does such innovation enable a better world, and a more responsible
and more sustainable relationship with the world which it now brings
more and more radically into focus? In so far as domestication fully
succeeds, it could also be said to be failing: for in its attempts at cultural
anaesthesia, in its resistance to the radical possibilities and expectations
at the heart of communication change, it blunts the force of the moral
claims intrinsic to innovation in technology, as in other spheres, and
refuses the claims for a wider sense of responsibility for the world, and
for those who share it with us: a world which those technologies
increasingly construct and command, in their global reach.