Displacements

This chapter considers how media technologies become obsolete, dysfunctional, and dispossessed and examines how households manage older technology devices and eventually move toward displacement, including through replacement and disposal. As new things are placed, older things are displaced. As new things are purposed, others are repurposed. As older things deteriorate and break or become obsolete, they are repositioned within the household ecology, they are moved to the periphery of the ecology (storage), or they are removed from the house altogether to some distant place. Attachments are formed with material things that make disposal difficult, and the lingering functionality and use values of media continue to be exercised, challenging the imperative of consumer electronics to force obsolescence and upgrading. This chapter investigates the steady accumulation of unused media within homes, informed by uncertainties around data stored on hard drives, electronic waste protocols, or even the slim chance of future reuse.

Housekeepings

This chapter focuses on the significant and often invisible forms of “articulation work” (the work to keep things working) needed to maintain digital media in good working order and fit-for-purpose in the domestic media ecology. It considers the labor of investigating options for, making decisions about, and purchasing and setting up new technologies as well as their ongoing maintenance. This chapter examines both the work and who does the work of maintaining and managing digital media. It also examines the relations of power, authority, gender, labor, and expertise that go into decision making, appropriating, maintaining, and using household digital technologies. In doing so, it furthers empirical developments concerning the notion of domestic media ecologies.

Ecologies

This chapter details the authors’ theoretical approach to understanding materiality and media of the home. It presents a framework for considering how technologies do not simply serve social uses or express social values but have a presence and performativity and interact with one another and with householders, and how they are embedded within the infrastructures of the home and daily life. This chapter explicitly builds on prior work in the field of media domestication and extends it through critical analysis of media ecologies. The authors describe their novel fieldwork approaches used to conceptually explore the “thingness” of the things that mediate the physical and spatial aspects of communications technologies in the ecology of the home.

Introduction

The introduction opens by examining the complications associated with the phrases “digital domesticity” and “household media ecologies.” It then provides an overview of the various projects undertaken by the authors that inform the arguments of the book. The introduction situates the fifteen years of research presented in the book on a broader historical canvas of media throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries in the Anglophone world, and it presents a concise introduction to scholarship mapping the relationship between our domestic lives and our technologies. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the general terrain of the book as a whole and summarizes each chapter.

Appropriations

This chapter considers how media landscapes in the home have shifted over this century and examines how devices relate to each other and to householders to create dynamic and evolving media ecologies. At the turn of this century, a typical domestic media ecology comprised a cathode-ray television in the living room, perhaps connected to a videocassette recorder; a desktop computer in a home office, perhaps connected to a dial-up modem; and a landline telephone, often located in a communal area in the home. More recently, the home has become a place for high-definition “smart” televisions, intelligent multifunction set-top boxes, game consoles, digital radio, high-speed broadband, cabled and wireless home networks, mobile computing, cloud connections, online government service provision, gesture-controlled games, and much more. How and why have these technologies been appropriated? How has this ongoing appropriation reconfigured the domestic media ecology and the life that is lived within this ecology?

Conclusion

The conclusion returns to the book’s key concerns and themes: the particular, the contextual, and the messiness of household media ecologies, as demonstrated through the various stages of technology appropriation, maintenance, negotiation, non-use, and displacement that have unfolded and mutated in the early years of the twenty-first century. It considers the broad range of ways in which people embrace digital media in their daily domestic lives; reflects on the ongoing changes in domestic media and communication technologies, platforms, and infrastructures; and addresses the broader implications of digital media materialities for contemporary household relations, economics, and environments.

Non-uses

This chapter explores how, just as domestic media ecologies are clearly shaped by the household denizens who interact with the technologies within these ecologies, they are also, and significantly, shaped by varied modes of not using technologies. This issue of non-use of domestic media technologies has traditionally been treated as a question of inequality and exclusion, measured in terms of a household’s access to a range of resources—financial, technical, social, and human—and has been addressed as a problem of scarcity or deficit to be overcome. There is, however, a growing body of research literature attending to the not inconsiderable volume and variation of disaffected or discriminating “non-use” emerging in places of technology abundance, to which this chapter contributes.

Negotiations

This chapter examines the various ways digital media technologies and devices are embedded and embodied in the everyday activities of parents and children working, playing, educating, socializing, and entertaining in the home. Through this century, we have visited many families and have talked with them about their experiences and their parenting strategies in the face of new technologies. In this chapter, we identify the major strategies and stances and contextualize their nuances and subtleties vis-à-vis the particulars of the family relationships. We also place our findings in the context of the literature on families and technology use, relating the particularities of the vignettes to observations derived from quantitative and larger-scale studies.

Histories

This chapter tracks both the processes of change as they have unfolded in the home and the implications of socio-technical change across a wide range of domestic media technologies, as they flow through the home and ripple out through home life. This chapter situates this longer global history within more recent and local contexts that initiated our research agenda. This historical account presents previous scholarship on the domestication of media technologies, as well as mapping the shifting and accumulating hardware devices, software systems, and infrastructural layers of technology shaping contemporary digital domesticity. The domestic sphere is seen not only as a significant context for technology consumption but as a significant, multifaceted site for making meaning of technologies and for postmarket innovation in technology application.