Domestication of Media and Technology

Maren Hartmann currently works at the University of Erfurt. Her latest research project was on young adults and new media and was based at the Free University of Brussels. Her PhD work -- published as Technologies and Utopias (Reinhard Fischer Verlag, 2004) -- analysed metaphoric user vocabularies in and around cyberspace. She has worked at several UK universities in the past, both in teaching and research positions. Thomas Berker is research fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of a book on the history of the Internet in the early 1990s. More recently he has published on the everyday life of transnational knowledge work and domestic energy consumption. Yves Punie is Research Fellow at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Seville. He has worked on several research projects in the area of foresight exercises and socio-economic impact studies in the field of IST. In his PhD work, he concentrated on social studies of new technologies, especially in relation to the domestic environment. Katie J. Ward is a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests include the consumption of media, identity construction, and the relationship between the media and health-care.

• 1. IntroductionPart I. Updating domestication: Theory and its history2. What’s ‘home’ got to do with it? Contradictory dynamics in the domestication of technology and the dislocation of domesticity 3. Domestication: the enactment of technology 4. Domestication running wild. From the moral economy of the household to the mores of a culture 5. The triple articulation of ICTs. Media as technological objects, symbolic environments and individual texts 6. Empirical studies using the domestication framework II. Applying domestication: Empirical work <7. “Fitting the internet into our lives” IT courses for disadvantaged users 8. The bald guy just ate an orange. Domestication, work and home 9. Making a ‘home’. The domestication of Information and Communication Technologies in single parents’ households 10. From cultural to information revolution. ICT domestication by middle-class Chinese families 11. Domestication at work in small businesses III. Outlook 12. Domesticating domestication. Reflections on the life of a concept