Kate Mannell

• Deakin University

This open access book outlines how the digital platforms that mediate so many aspects of commercial and personal life have begun to transform everyday family existence. It presents theory and research methods to enable students and scholars to investigate the changes that platformization has brought to the routines and interactions of family life i...

Chapter 3 investigates how processes of platformization play out in relation to the spaces and spatial arrangements of family life, focusing in particular on the idea of the home. Given that family life, including the meaning of the home, are constructed through relational practices and that these practices are increasingly platformized (that is, o...

The final chapter of the book brings together key ideas, theories, and questions raised across the book to propose an agenda for progressing research on the platformization of the family. It summarises the key dimensions of platforms and families and proposes a theory of extended-domestication that bridges the micro and macro elements of these dime...

Digital technologies are a common part of everyday life for families with young children (aged 0–8). Despite public anxiety around this reality, much of the current guidance for families and practitioners is conflicting and lacks sufficient evidence. This article maps recent research to gauge the extent to which it is providing nuanced understandin...

This chapter discusses findings from the Connected Students program, a digital inclusion initiative delivered by Telstra (Australia’s largest telecommunications provider) and evaluated by researchers based at RMIT University. The program specifically aimed to address the affordability barriers to digital inclusion experienced by low-income househol...

Within digital media scholarship, there are significant bodies of literature investigating forced disconnection (‘digital exclusion’) and voluntary disconnection (‘digital disconnection’) but there is little research addressing entanglements between them. This article explores how bringing together these bodies of literature through an empirical st...

This panel combines four papers which focus in different ways on the question of children’s data and privacy in the Australian context. All four are framed with children’s right to privacy as a core concern, consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as updated via the General Comment 25 on Child Rights in the Digital Environment....

This paper describes a workshop process that aimed to explore transdisciplinary approaches to digital childhoods and produces recommendations drawn from these experiences. It emphasises the importance of recognising not only the differences between academic disciplines, and between academic and non-academic disciplines, but also the more foundatio...

It is useful to think about the digital products, services, and content that children experience online as the Children’s Internet. There are numerous things we can do to create a better Children’s Internet for the future. As a society, we will benefit from an ongoing public conversation about how to create better children’s internet experiences....

Recent research has highlighted the emergence of “alternative social media” platforms. Developed by open source communities with non-commercial goals, these platforms can offer more expansive participatory cultures than corporate platforms. However, such platforms also involve new kinds of participatory challenges, such as requiring high technologi...

This paper argues that the proposal for a ‘Hippocratic oath for data science’ is a severely limited form of data ethics for automated culture. Drawing on the oath used within medical professionalism, proponents as diverse as Wired and the European Data Protection Supervisor have argued for a Hippocratic oath for data science as a way of introducing...

As Australia imposed some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, governments and mental health organisations released advice for preserving mental wellbeing throughout the pandemic. One common suggestion was to avoid excessive news consumption. This article reports findings from a study that explored why, how, and with what outcomes people en...

This chapter analyzes sleep technology products designed to mediate and modulate patterns of sleep. Products analyzed include sleep-tracking applications and wearable devices for customizing personal phases of sleep architecture, and “smart” bedroom systems that use sensors and Internet connectivity to monitor and automate sensory environments to o...

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias tow...

In the nascent literature on mobile messaging groups—commonly referred to as “group chats”—there is a tendency to see them as clearly bounded units of interaction with highly-defined borders. While valuable at times, this approach does not fully reflect how group chat boundaries are experienced by the people who encounter them. Accordingly, this ar...

When people distrust media systems, one response is to disconnect. This emergent theme within internet research encompasses technologies, practices, discourses, and politics of disconnection. Furthering these discussions, this panel draws together four investigations into technologies and practices of digital disconnection. Each paper interrogates...

Mobile messaging is typically understood as a medium that connects people. This article argues that to better understand mobile messaging we must also attend to its disconnective affordances—the opportunities for disconnection facilitated by the material properties of messaging platforms and mobile devices. Drawing on interview research into the mo...

Previous research has identified the "butler lie"-a lie told through text message to explain why someone is, was, or will be unavailable for interaction (Hancock et al., 2009). The concept of butler lying was established by Hancock et al. (2009, p. 519) who coined the term in allusion "to the social buffering function that butlers provided for thei...