Over the last two centuries, media technologies have played a central role in shaping ideas about the nature of living in a modern home. Written during a period of far-reaching social and technological changes, this book explores the complex relationship between home, householders and media technologies by charting key developments in domestic media technologies from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces the key socio-cultural trends involved, from the entrance of early radio and television (TV) in the living room to today's digitally networked homes. The diverse processes of adoption and integration of digital media technologies into the domestic sphere are examined, including the ways in which mobile technologies are changing household dynamics. From analogue TV to video gaming, and from tablet computers to futuristic imaginaries of ‘smart homes’ and home automation systems comprising ‘connected homes’, the following chapters address the various ways in which domestic technologies are publicly imagined, designed and promoted, and then privately perceived, adopted and integrated into everyday home lives. The book assesses the ways that today's digital technologies undermine, complicate or reinforce relations of gender, generation and social class; how media technologies contribute to changing relationships between home and the outside world; and how the domestic uses of personalised mobile media devices, such as tablet computers, contribute to today's networked household.
The acceleration of globalised networks has prompted a primary focus in media studies on global flows, digital connectivity and media mobility. However, this book confirms the importance of home, households and domestic space for an understanding of the changing uses and meanings of media within today's global context. Although internet access is branching out from the home via handheld mobile devices, mediated interactions continue to be conducted mainly from home. The acceleration in global and digitalised mobile media coincides with dramatic transformations in the cultural significance and experiences of ‘home’. The home has transformed into a complex media environment with mobile gadgets such as laptops, smartphones and tablet computers now common features of home life. Today's households are, then, organising domestic settings as ‘home’ and managing their mediated relationships between home and the outside world through local and global processes of mediatisation. Technological convergence is enabling communication between digital devices including internet TV, online interactive media and streaming media, with far-reaching consequences which affect the micro-social dynamics of home life. The book addresses some of the key ways in which media uses in the home correspond with broader changes in the organisation of intimate and work relationships beyond the home, which in turn alter the relationship between work, leisure and home.
The media facility of continuous connectivity has prompted several changes in our ideas and experiences of the relationship between home and the ‘outside world’. The ability to bring work-related activities into the home and to extend personal communications beyond the home through information and communication technologies (ICTs) generates perceptions of a public sphere encroaching on the home life and of ‘domestic’ values and practices moving beyond the confines of the household (Hollows 2008). As Roger Silverstone states, ‘Home, then, is no longer singular, no longer static, no longer, in an increasingly mobile and disrupted world, capable of being taken for granted’ (Silverstone 2006: 242). Mobile media technologies make a central contribution to these new experiences, imaginings and configurations of home, families and personal life. Operating within shifting local and global media networks, these new mediated processes involve changing discourses of nation, family and belonging (Morley 2002; Hollows 2008).
As well as its tendency to focus on global networks, media studies has been characterised by an emphasis on media content. Until the 1990s, mainstream media studies focused on the production, interpretation and effects of media texts as well as features of the media system. The physical manifestation and material form of the media that carried the content – from TV sets to personal computers (PCs) – tended to be of secondary interest. This resulted in a neglect of the ‘material presence’ of media equipment in the home in terms of the processes of its incorporation into the everyday routines of family and household lives and how, in turn, those domestic routines are adapted to the technology's affordances. As Matthew Geller (1990: 7) says of TV, too often we simply ‘look through’ the object of TV to the images it provides while the set itself remains, as it were, ‘invisible’ to us and we ignore its role as a totemic object of enormous symbolic importance in the household. Similarly, David Morley (1995) reminds us of the importance of analysing the ‘physics of TV as a material and symbolic object in the home’.
This book provides a particular focus on the physical materiality of media and their symbolic importance for home life. The following chapters approach the home as a site of media technology to understand the roles played by media and communication technologies in reproducing and transforming cultural values associated with that space. The aim is to explain how personal, domestic and household relations are shaped and facilitated by the materiality of media equipment and by mediated social interactions that comprise home, households and families. The multiple forms and technological affordances of home-based media equipment and the shifting dynamics of domestic life have led to dramatic changes in the very nature and meanings of ‘home’. With digital media technologies now firmly embedded in personal, family and home life, important questions arise about how households communicate with the outside world, manage the shifting boundaries between work and home-based leisure, use digital media to foster household and family cohesion, and connect families across geographical distances.
Media households
Media technologies are adapted to and transform the home in differing ways, depending on the types of households. The household is therefore a central concept in media studies in relation to the role of domestic media. The term ‘household’ is used in the following chapters to indicate the significance of differing living arrangements in relation to media's use in the home. Treated as a social, economic and political unit, the household is not only a unit of socialisation of the next generation, which facilitates the production, transmission and sustaining of family values (Chapman 2004). In terms of its material reality, and at the institutional level of the state, the household is also defined in wider societies as the source of taxes and receipt of social welfare benefits. However, the dominant nuclear family household, idealised in the early twentieth century, has been overtaken by today's increasingly diverse living arrangements (Chambers 2012).
A significant rise in family households with adult children aged 20 to 34 results from the extension of the life phase of youth dependence, known as ‘extended youth’ (Livingstone and Das 2010; and see Mortimer 2012). This trend is likely to have occurred in response to economic austerity measures in western countries relating to a decline in job prospects for young people, high housing costs and a rise in the cost of funding tertiary education. Economic austerity has also triggered a return of young people to the family home, known as the ‘boomerang generation’ (Berngruber 2015; Kaplan 2009; Mitchell 2006; Stone et al. 2014). For example, in the UK, households with adult children have increased by 25 per cent in between 1996 and 2013 (ONS 2014). These are likely to be media-rich households with adult children's bedrooms packed with media gadgets. While unable to afford to set up homes of their own, these young adults tend to have bedrooms filled with media equipment as a way of managing personal space and media-related home entertainment. Single person and gay and lesbian households have also increased as a feature of more flexible living arrangements and the weakening of traditional nuclear family values (Chambers 2012).
Single-parent families with dependent children now form a significant category of households. In the UK, this household type comprises 25 per cent of all families with dependent children, with 91 per cent headed by women (ONS 2014). Single-parent households tend to suffer from limited financial resources and are therefore likely to struggle to furnish their children's media wishes (Russo Lemor 2005). Moreover, children whose parents are divorced or separated tend to move regularly between the households of both parents. They are therefore likely to experience different types of media homes and distinctive, sometimes contradictory, forms of parental restrictions on their access to media equipment. These differences in parental media monitoring can lead to tensions between ex-partners. Busy dual-career family households with concomitant demands of work and family often operate in a world of ‘virtual parenting’ and childcare. Dual-career families tend to experience challenges concerning connectivity with other family members, which are often resolved through varying levels of dependence on communication technologies such as mobile phones (Clark 2013). These issues are addressed in Chapter 4 on mediatised childhoods and the rise of a new kind of media parenting. Shifting patterns of migration involve transnational family ties and the negotiation of intimate modes of communication across great distances, generating new ideas about home. The uses of ICTs among migrants and diasporic communities highlight the issues of mediated family connectivity over distance. Digital communication such as Skyping and social media are increasingly employed to facilitate transnational family ties by supporting intimate connections between family members across distances among those separated by migration (Madianou and Miller 2012).
The following chapters indicate, then, that differing household and family arrangements affect the ways in which media and communication technologies are used in the home whether in terms of modes of adoption, integration and routines of use; communicating with household members while away from home; or keeping in touch with families ‘back home’ in other parts of the world. However, it is difficult to separate the idea of ‘family’ from that of home privatisation and domesticity, as Morley (2002) observes. Despite the existence of diverse household types, governments of western countries have actively promoted the conflation of house, home and family as part of a broader ideological agenda relating to the decline of the welfare state. These state agendas correspond with powerful public and popular discourses that advance and idealise a particular nuclear version of the ‘family’, and a particular vision of domesticity for which media technologies are to be designed to sustain. The nuclear family ideal underpins national ideas about a stable and reproducing society. In turn, this ideal family type places particular symbolic significance on ideas of ‘home’ (Blunt and Dowling 2006).
Ideologies that influence notions of ‘normal’ or appropriate family and household types also have a bearing on the fluid, inclusive – or hegemonic – manner in which ‘family’ tends to be used to refer to non-nuclear and non-heteronormative types of intimacy (Roseneil and Budgeon 2004; Chambers 2012). Within contemporary sociological debates, the term ‘family’ is now used to include single-parent, blended and reconstituted families, ‘friends as family’ (Spencer and Pahl 2006) and same-sex households (Cook 2014; Gorman-Murray 2006, 2008) in recognition of fluctuating and diverse intimacies and meanings of home. The concept of ‘domestic media imaginaries’ is addressed in the final chapter to identify some of the complex cultural processes, including processes of regulation, through which media technologies are promoted for home use by drawing on, reinforcing and contesting dominant ideas about households, families and home. This concept enables an interrogation of the various ways that media engagement and discourses can both undermine and validate traditional ideas of ‘home’ and ‘family’ at particular junctures of media-related social changes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Types of media engagement in the home
With media technology now at the heart of home-making and the privatisation process, many homes have evolved into highly complex communication hubs by facilitating personal and shared engagement in a wide range of media-based activities. For all household types, the share of household budgets spent on media appliances, media services and leisure media is rising (Livingstone and Das 2010; Johnsson-Smaragdi 2002). However, the dynamics and arrangements of households and family composition have a major influence on the appropriation of media technologies in the home. For example, research confirms that the presence of children in a household is a key indicator of whether or not it is likely to have internet connection and broadband service compared to households in general (US Department of Commerce 2002; Gora 2009; Clark 2013).
The domestic environment continues to be the most likely setting for internet use, particularly among children and adolescents, with 87 per cent accessing social digital media from home (Livingstone et al. 2011). A key motive for creating a media-rich home is the parental purchase of digital devices for children to improve ...
