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The COVID digital home assemblage: Transforming the home into a work space during the crisis
Abstract
Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw on case studies from an ethnographic project that explored how people living in Sydney use digital technologies in the home setting. Our fieldwork commenced in early 2020, just prior to the national COVID lockdown period in Australia, and continued throughout the lockdown and the months following. As a result, we were able to document people’s experiences of transitioning to working from home during the first year of the pandemic. In this article, we adopt a sociomaterial approach together with domestication theory to analyse the complexities of the changed COVID home in the context of digitised working arrangements. We surface and theorise the tensions and leaky boundaries between workplaces and family/domestic life that are brought about by, through and beyond the digital. By addressing the sociomaterial choreographies and modalities of presence involved, we attempt to capture the processes through which the COVID digital home assemblage is continuously configured and the more or less simultaneous presence and absence of people in both domestic and work domains.
... The lockdown management and travel restrictions in the post-pandemic context have underpinned and even accelerated such play-work/educationtechnology configurations. Globally, virtual and remote mobilities have become normal and regular in many social interactions that used to be dominantly face-to-face (Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). The uncertainty that the viral mobilities brought makes many companies and institutions choose to embed online learning and working in their regular working or education environment, accelerating the smartification of home or socio-material choreographies of home-technology assemblage (see more details in chapter 4) as well as bringing new challenges to living or doing with technologies Maalsen and Dowling 2020;Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). ...
... Globally, virtual and remote mobilities have become normal and regular in many social interactions that used to be dominantly face-to-face (Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). The uncertainty that the viral mobilities brought makes many companies and institutions choose to embed online learning and working in their regular working or education environment, accelerating the smartification of home or socio-material choreographies of home-technology assemblage (see more details in chapter 4) as well as bringing new challenges to living or doing with technologies Maalsen and Dowling 2020;Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). People are now forced to abandon the distinct boundaries between public and private spaces, appropriate domestic spaces for work and education while negotiating child care and dress code, dealing with unexpected interference that unstable internet services produce, the quality of video cameras, pets, children, and other household members (Taber, Dominguez, and Whittaker 2022), and spending more time to check the reliability of technologies. ...
... According to the survey result, working and learning online have become regular practices for most participants: only around 16 percent of the participants 5 had never used digital devices for remote working and learning. The domestication of online working and conferencing platforms, virtual classroom applications, and other digital tools have brought new meanings to home and defamiliarized domestic spaces (Watson, Lupton, and Michael 2021). For example, They [children] don't have teachers to supervise them, so they're not so focused, are they? ...
Using empirical cases that show the entanglement of material and immaterial aspects of digital technologies within the dynamic spatiotemporalities of everyday practices, this book argues for a more sophisticated and local understanding of how the interactions between digital platforms and urban lives are implicated in the making/remaking geographies of consumption from a non-Western perspective.
... Specifically, their study highlights the role of material elements, such as technology used, in shaping experiences toward online teaching . Similarly, Watson et al. (2021) adopt the framework of sociomateriality to address the transition to digitalized work arrangements. They document people's experiences during the first year of the pandemic, highlighting experiences associated with the transition to online work, and the tension and blurring of boundaries accompanied by this transition (Watson et al., 2021). ...
... Similarly, Watson et al. (2021) adopt the framework of sociomateriality to address the transition to digitalized work arrangements. They document people's experiences during the first year of the pandemic, highlighting experiences associated with the transition to online work, and the tension and blurring of boundaries accompanied by this transition (Watson et al., 2021). Their study captures the continuous reconfiguration of work processes as they are carried out through digital means, as well as the fluctuation in social presence within such an arrangement. ...
Current organizational studies addressing external environmental changes predominantly adopt a human-centric perspective, focusing on the unforeseen implications and social responses to such changes. This paper argues for a shift from viewing external environmental changes purely as social phenomena to recognizing the intertwined roles of both social and material elements. The methodology involved a literature review of organizational studies, specifically focusing on studies during and after the pandemic (2020–2024), using search terms like “COVID-19”, “pandemic”, “organizations”, “implication”, and “work”. The analysis employed a thematic approach to identify patterns within the literature. This paper concludes that a sociomaterial perspective can provide a robust framework for enhancing our understanding of environmental dynamics, advocating for its broader application in organizational research. This paper contributes to organizational studies in two ways. First, it brings the material into the foreground to amend deficiencies in our understanding of the organizational external environment within which organizational practices are formed and framed. Second, the paper synthesizes the literature on sociomateriality to eliminate the ambiguity often associated with this framework, facilitating its adoption in empirical research.
... Arguably, within a Western cultural context, interview-based studies can be considered culturally appropriate and, in some instances, may be the most effective way to undertake an ethnography (Hockey and Forsey 2012: 74). Further, conducting telephone and online interviews can also be considered an acceptable and reasonable methodological alternative to document lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (Rahman et al. 2021;Serekoane et al. 2021;Watson et al. 2021). This factor rang true in my circumstances. ...
... Lack of access, world changes due to COVID-19 and personal issues made the prospect of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in-person and long-term virtually impossible, as is increasingly becoming the experience of many anthropologists (Blum 2020;Fine and Abramson 2020;Góralska 2020;Johnson 2022;Podjed 2021;Serekoane et al. 2021;Watson et al. 2021;Watson and Lupton 2022). Through patchwork ethnography, we were able to take a peek behind the patchwork curtain, exploring death and the body in Adelaide. ...
Patchwork ethnography is a viable methodological and theoretical approach. Fieldwork can be accessible, achievable and accommodating of both personal and professional circumstances and responsibilities of the researcher, and external factors such as living within a COVID-19 world. In this article, we explain patchwork ethnography and showcase how the methodology was implemented during the first author's PhD fieldwork conducted in 2020–2021 relating to peeking behind the physical and metaphorical curtains of the death industry to understand the handling, management and conceptualisation of the dead human body in Adelaide, South Australia. We demonstrate how field sites were constructed and discuss the methodological tools utilised to produce an ethnographic experience. We also question the ongoing viability of notions of ‘traditional’ fieldwork practices.
... La pandemia causada por el SARS-CoV-2 y las políticas de confinamiento que los distintos gobiernos implementaron como respuesta inicial, al generalizar el teletrabajo y la teleducación, profundizaron y visibilizaron lo que estas investigaciones habían señalado. Watson et al. (2021) habían iniciado su trabajo de campo en una investigación sobre tecnologías inteligentes unas semanas antes de que iniciara el confinamiento en Australia, y pudieron documentar la transición forzada al teletrabajo. En algunos casos, esta situación provocó, según aducen, procesos de desdomesticación y desfamiliarización de espacios domésticos y tecnologías, que quedaban asociados de manera central a las rutinas laborales. ...
... Sin embargo, la pandemia provocada por el SARS-CoV-2 y las estrategias de confinamiento adoptadas para enfrentarla, especialmente en la fase inicial de su desarrollo, volvieron obvia la importancia del estudio de los procesos de domesticación de tecnologías en los ámbitos domésticos y en el entrelazamiento de actividades laborales, de estudio y familiares. Como observan Lim y Wang (2021), la pandemia dio una especial visibilidad a esta corriente de investigación, bajo la modalidad de las consultas que los medios y los decisores políticos realizaron a los especialistas, al tiempo que forzaba -con ventajas y desventajas-un pasaje hacia la mediatización metodológica (Lim & Wang, 2021;Watson et al., 2021). La acumulación de investigaciones en la perspectiva también permitió enfrentar, no siempre de manera totalmente exitosa, los discursos que pusieron el foco público exclusivamente en los riesgos de la digitalización y el incremento en el uso de dispositivos (Hantrais et al., 2021), desconociendo la capacidad de agencia de los usuarios y las familias. ...
Ya han transcurrido veinticinco años desde que Roger Silverstone y otros investigadores propusieran a la domesticación —es decir, el proceso por el cual una especie animal o vegetal es transformada con el objeto de convivir con el ser humano— como una metáfora apropiada para comprender los modos en que los dispositivos tecnológicos son incorporados a la vida cotidiana de las personas, iniciando así el recorrido del modelo de domesticación de tecnologías. Esta propuesta resultó sumamente productiva en términos teóricos y empíricos, dando lugar a un conjunto de reflexiones e indagaciones que se convirtieron en parte del trasfondo habitual de la investigación acerca de los procesos de apropiación de tecnologías que se realiza desde una perspectiva sociocultural. Esta revisión presenta los principales lineamientos de su enfoque, reseña los resultados de las investigaciones que ha suscitado y discute sus límites y las adaptaciones necesarias para dar cuenta de los fenómenos tecnocomunicativos actuales
... Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the resultant (emotional and physical) workload. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Australia, Watson et al. (2021) articulate this as 'leaky boundaries' between workspaces and family/ domestic life that are brought about by, through, and beyond the digital. This was an immersive but lonely experience for mefor large parts of the study, I was the sole data collector and would increasingly find myself wanting to discuss the stories of participants with colleagues as a way of understanding, processing and debriefing. ...
... In recognition of such complexities, Dickson-Swift (2017) has advocated for a framework of emotional safety. Meanwhile, Coles et al. (2014) and Watson et al. (2021) have identified that researchers employ a number of protective strategies or coping mechanisms including self-care, space creation and communities of coping. However, as highlighted in my methodological reflections, I found it difficult to implement these traditional mechanisms during a crisis (the COVID-19 pandemic) where my workspace became my home space and vice versa. ...
Emotions and the emotional labour of researchers have been increasingly recognised in social science disciplines, with many researchers providing personal and reflexive accounts. Such debates are less well recognised in health-related disciplines, particularly public health, who remain at earlier stages of valuing and understanding qualitative research. Drawing on personal experiences and methodological reflections gathered from a qualitative study, undertaken with young people over the course of 16 months during the COVID-19 pandemic in England, UK, the aim of this article is to offer further insight into the impact of researcher emotion, by specifically focussing on longitudinal, diary-based methods. My reflections are framed as three overlapping and intersecting themes. First, that qualitative longitudinal methods (and diary studies in particular) have enormous potential to curate rich emotional narratives. Second, that despite these positives, there are tensions or conflicting dynamics in using a method which helps to explore young people’s emotions but also involves emotional labour for the researcher. Third, that greater attention should be paid to ensuring ethical care for researchers, particularly those engaging with qualitative longitudinal and/or creative methods. Such strategies should not solely rely on self-care and must be considered at institutional or funding body level. To this end, my personal experiences and reflections, as well as those from previous offerings, are used here to underpin a framework for researchers or research teams embarking upon novel qualitative longitudinal methods: 1. Do not underestimate emotional burden. 2. Ensure meaningful debriefing is available. 3. Establish boundaries. 4. Make space for emotion throughout fieldwork as well as during analysis and writing (‘entering and exiting the field’).
... La pandemia causada por el SARS-CoV-2 y las políticas de confinamiento que los distintos gobiernos implementaron como respuesta inicial, al generalizar el teletrabajo y la teleducación, profundizaron y visibilizaron lo que estas investigaciones habían señalado. Watson et al. (2021) habían iniciado su trabajo de campo en una investigación sobre tecnologías inteligentes unas semanas antes de que iniciara el confinamiento en Australia, y pudieron documentar la transición forzada al teletrabajo. En algunos casos, esta situación provocó, según aducen, procesos de desdomesticación y desfamiliarización de espacios domésticos y tecnologías, que quedaban asociados de manera central a las rutinas laborales. ...
... Sin embargo, la pandemia provocada por el SARS-CoV-2 y las estrategias de confinamiento adoptadas para enfrentarla, especialmente en la fase inicial de su desarrollo, volvieron obvia la importancia del estudio de los procesos de domesticación de tecnologías en los ámbitos domésticos y en el entrelazamiento de actividades laborales, de estudio y familiares. Como observan Lim y Wang (2021), la pandemia dio una especial visibilidad a esta corriente de investigación, bajo la modalidad de las consultas que los medios y los decisores políticos realizaron a los especialistas, al tiempo que forzaba -con ventajas y desventajas-un pasaje hacia la mediatización metodológica (Lim & Wang, 2021;Watson et al., 2021). La acumulación de investigaciones en la perspectiva también permitió enfrentar, no siempre de manera totalmente exitosa, los discursos que pusieron el foco público exclusivamente en los riesgos de la digitalización y el incremento en el uso de dispositivos (Hantrais et al., 2021), desconociendo la capacidad de agencia de los usuarios y las familias. ...
Esta es la versión electrónica de un artículo aceptado para su edición en Contratexto nº 37, el cual estará disponible online en la web oficial en 2022
Resumen. Ya han transcurrido veinticinco años desde que Roger Silverstone y otros investigadores relacionados con él propusieran a la domesticación, es decir el proceso por el cual una especie animal o vegetal es transformada con el objeto de convivir con el ser humano, como una metáfora apropiada para comprender los modos en los cuales los dispositivos tecnológicos son incorporados a la vida cotidiana de las personas, iniciando el recorrido del modelo de domesticación de tecnologías. Esta propuesta resultó sumamente productiva en términos teóricos y empíricos, dando lugar a un conjunto de reflexiones e indagaciones y convirtiéndose de hecho en parte del background habitual de la investigación sobre los procesos de apropiación de tecnologías que se realiza desde una perspectiva sociocultural. En este artículo nos proponemos presentar los principales lineamientos de su enfoque, reseñar los resultados de las investigaciones a que ha dado lugar y discutir sus límites y las adaptaciones necesarias para dar cuenta de los fenómenos tecnocomunicativos actuales.
... We see employee sentiments that ranged from "very excited" to "very hopeless" (Dubey & Tripathi, 2020) and similar opposite ends of the spectrum reactions regarding virtual meetings (Karl et al, 2021) and work-life-balance (Putri & Amran, 2021). The tensions and leaky boundaries between workplaces and family/domestic life that were brought about by WFH were theorized and attempts were made to capture the processes through which the COVID digital home assemblage was continuously configured and the more or less simultaneous presence and absence of people in both domestic and work domains was felt (Watson et al, 2021). ...
... Even though rapidly growing, only a limited number of studies can be found that research specifically these recent shifts in workspaces and work environments, such as, Watson et al. (2021);Hensher et al. (2023);and Maier et al. (2022). Even fewer studies research these topics in relation to agile software development specifically, such aš Smite et al. (2022b) who explored the office presence of employees during and after the pandemic in two agile software companies with hybrid work policies. ...
The IT industry has undergone a significant transformation over the past years, and many companies and software teams have been experimenting with different policies and work arrangements. In this multiple-case study, we explore the evolution of organizational policies and the work arrangements of 28 agile teams, and report on their effects, based on interviews with seven individuals in leadership and support roles, from six companies. Our findings reveal the emergence of a dynamic and evolving spectrum of work arrangements and organizational policies, reflecting an increased flexibility in accommodating diverse work schedules and locations. We identified complex and interrelated impacts at the organizational, leadership, and team levels. At the organizational level, underutilized office spaces pose new challenges for resource management and strategic planning. At the leadership level, managers and team leaders reported diminished visibility and awareness of team activities under certain arrangements. At the team level, policies reshaped the physical and virtual workspace, influencing creativity, communication patterns, and coordination demands, with some arrangements requiring enhanced mechanisms for coordination. Our findings further substantiate concerns raised by both scholars and managers about the impacts of evolving organizational policies and work arrangements.
... If the impact of the pandemic on mental health has been well-documented, few examine how these effects manifest in various housing contexts, particularly from the perspective of overlapping vulnerabilities and adaptation pathways. Studies report that people developed feelings of crowding (Watson et al. 2021, Fornara et al. 2022, Park et al. 2023, lack of privacy (Katsabian 2022, Mejía-Castillo et al. 2023 including low digital privacy (Malinao and Sotto 2022), and residential insecurity (Bonacini et al. 2021, Bower et al. 2021, Robinson et al. 2021, impacting their mental health. ...
... Cook et al., 2021;Flore et al., 2021;Hastings et al., 2021;Lupton, 2020;Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020). These shifts often involved the increased reliance on technologies of digital intermediation in our lives from digital payment systems to delivery services (Squire, 2022;Starkey et al., 2021;Watson et al., 2021;Qiu, 2022;Teräs et al., 2020). ...
This article draws upon a desk-based review and expert interviews with practitioners in the Global South to understand the diverse forms of data mediation that have become increasingly visible in the wake of the global coronavirus disease-19 pandemic. In contrast to accounts that frame the Global South solely as a site for the extraction of data and cheap, unskilled digital labor, we explore alternative accounts of the ways in which individuals and organizations in the Global South are asserting their role as active mediators of data who carve out spaces for value creation that are meaningful in their local and national contexts. From data collection and “refining” to the analysis of data for local needs and markets, these forms of data mediation demonstrate some of the changing dynamics of data practices globally and reflect the necessity of more nuanced analyses of value and power within and across regions.
... In this article, we draw on a qualitative interview-based project exploring Australians' experiences of COVID, focusing on what it was like for people to live behind closed borders during the first two years of this continuing pandemic. Previous studies investigating the socio-spatialities of lockdown experiences in Australia have drawn attention to aspects such as changes to exercise and work routines in the home setting (Clark & Lupton, 2021;Watson et al., 2021a), loneliness (Franklin & Tranter, 2022) and lack of sexual intimacy (Thorneycroft & Nicholas, 2021), the use of digital devices and media to connect with others (Watson et al., 2021b), the practice of small acts of care (Raynor & Frichot, 2022) and navigating the emptiness of the locked down city (Young, 2021). In what follows, we explore a different dimension of the socio-spatialities of COVID and everyday life in Australia. ...
... Lockdowns, travel limits and the overall shift towards working remotely have reconfigured relations with space, place and others. As kitchen tables were commandeered into desks for makeshift home offices and lounge rooms were rejigged as home gyms and yoga studios Watson, Lupton, & Michael, 2021a), the pandemic rearranged domestic spaces and daily routines. In doing so, newfound familiarities and intimacies were created with seemingly mundane spaces and objects. ...
... The COVID-19 pandemic provided a particularly interesting context for examining methods for studying the digitally connected home. The emerging 'COVID digital home assemblage' that has shaped the socio-material choreographies of everyday domestic life (Watson, Lupton, andMichael 2021, 1207) has underlined the importance of developing methods capable of engaging with people, things, environments, activities, and narratives of the home as they shift, change, and acquire new meanings. We hope the articles in this SI highlight key issues but also break new ground as the task of devising methods for studying digitally connected home increasingly becomes a complicated one. ...
Digital automated and connected technologies are playing a central role shaping how home life is experienced and understood. This emerging digital ecology is also reconstituting the home as a site of research and the methods required to study it. This article introduces a collection of contributions that highlight methodological issues and avenues for researching life in technology-saturated home environments. The contributions make the case for qualitative, creative, collaborative, computational, and quantitative methodological approaches.
... The impetus of organisational transformation process should be to -safeguard physical and mental health, enable safe return to the office, embrace technology for business transformation, while laying importance on enhancing employee listening and enabling human connections, re-emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion and building human-centric leadership culture. Watson et al. (2021) examined the digital renovation of home into a workspace and the predicament faced. The case based survey from an ethnographic sample of professionals in Sydney and the use of the digital knowledge in the home setting and adopting the Socio-material theory along with the help of domestication theory complexities due to the disruption caused was analysed. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has created shockwaves across the globe and impacted businesses and economies. Enormous disruptive transformations have happened in the work models and systems to enable businesses to flexibly operate, sustain, and remain agile in uncertain times. The future of work, which seemed uncertain post-pandemic, has reached normalcy due to the organisational resilience and strategic responses shown by organisational leaders and small businesses. Although small businesses across the world have been impacted negatively leading to closures, financial crunches, and job losses worldwide, many have shown signs of resilience and recovery. The chapter throws light on the work transformations across economies and strategic responses to deal with them. It describes the challenges faced by various small businesses and the way they have been flexible and resilient. The chapter proposes a framework for building an inclusive economy that has been asserted to be the solution to a sustainable and resilient future in times of uncertainties and crises.
... Once the home visit had been completed, Watson wrote extensive field notes, documenting and reflecting on what we had learned from the visit. These field notes, together with our video recordings and the hand-drawn maps constituted the corpus of our research materials for analysis (for initial findings, see Watson et al., 2021aWatson et al., , 2021b. ...
Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researching the social world. In this article, we discuss the changes we made to our ethnographic fieldwork in response to the introduction of a national lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. The ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, based in Sydney, Australia, and designed well before the advent of COVID-19, explores a diverse range of people’s feelings, practices and understandings concerning home-based digital devices and the personal digital data generated with their use. Using a video ethnography ‘home tour’ and an elicitation technique involving hand-drawn maps of people’s homes, digital devices and the personal data generated with and through these devices, this approach was designed to elicit the sensory, affective and relational elements of people’s digital device and personal data use at home. The fieldwork had just commenced when stay-at-home and physical distancing orders were suddenly introduced. Our article builds on and extends a growing body of literature on conducting fieldwork in the difficult conditions of the extended COVID-19 crisis by detailing our experiences of very quickly converting an ethnographic study that was planned to be in-person to a remote approach. We describe the adaptations we made to the project using video-call software and discuss the limits and opportunities presented by this significant modification.
I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with creative methods over the past few years, drawing on arts- and design-based approaches. I’ve put together a booklet that showcases 13 of these methods. Each page features one method, providing a brief overview and an example from studies and public research engagement and translation activities I’ve conducted with my collaborators.
The methods are:
creative writing prompts, collages, story completion, zines, poetic inquiry, AI generated images, storyboards, exhibitions, dioramas, films, walking methods, participatory mapping, speculative design.
Emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision‐making (ADM) promise to advance many industries. Healthcare is a key locus for new developments, where operational improvements are magnified by the bigger‐picture promise of improved care and outcomes for patients. Forming the zeitgeist of contemporary sociotechnical innovation in healthcare, media portrayals of these technologies can shape how they are implemented, experienced and understood across healthcare systems. This article identifies current applications of AI and ADM within Australian healthcare contexts and analyses how these technologies are being portrayed within news and industry media. It offers a categorisation of leading applications of AI and ADM: monitoring and tracking, data management and analysis, cloud computing, and robotics. Discussing how AI and ADM are depicted in relation to health and care practices, it examines the sense of promise that is enlivened in these representations. The article concludes by considering the implications of promissory discourses for how technologies are understood and integrated into practices and sites of healthcare.
Living with technology often entails work related to management and repair of it. The emerging literature on the work that goes into managing home networks and digital technologies has described it as ‘digital housekeeping’. Within this literature, a single person is often identified as being responsible for the domestic tech work and this is the same person who initiated bringing the technology into the home. However, remaining household members and persons who have been gifted with such technologies are under-researched, despite studies showing them to be vulnerable to skewed power dynamics and technical malfunctions when the responsible person is not around. Applying digital housekeeping as a theoretical lens, this article explores how people identified as ‘non-initiators’, that is, those living with smart home technologies but who did not initiate bringing the technology into their home, deal with malfunctioning devices. Drawing upon interviews with five identified non, this study provides an in-depth exploration of their troubleshooting routines conceptualized as diagnosing, performing, and delegating. Findings suggest that non-initiators also engage in digital housekeeping through troubleshooting, although this work is largely unacknowledged by themselves and others. Moreover, the image of non-initiators as vulnerable is nuanced by highlighting their active participation in the connected home. Non-initiators use smart home devices for daily activities, and they have the knowledge, skills, and resources to draw upon when encountering malfunctions. Furthermore, the non-initiators’ troubleshooting routines are affected by the devices’ materiality, the household’s social dynamics, and to some degree by societal perceptions of technology, age, and gender. This paper contributes to the existing literature on smart homes and digital housekeeping by emphasizing non-initiators’ contribution to digital housekeeping and by highlighting how their agency is asserted in line with their interests and needs.
While both the progressivist and the nostalgic responses to technological change have been shown to represent coping strategies that, in their own ways, merely reaffirm ‘business as usual’ (anthropocentrism as the default model), this chapter seeks alternative strategies to deal with the matter. Instead of opting for either of the extremes, a posthumanism-inspired solution focusing on interactivity and co-constitution of humans and their environment (including technology) is proposed. Such a horizontal model is claimed to avoid binary and hierarchical thinking characteristic of the mainstream anthropocentric thought. In this way, the aforementioned perspective is postulated as not only offering a viable explanatory apparatus but also being ethically preferable to the more established modes of thought.
This research focuses on ICT adoption and digital use by teleworkers operating from their homes during the pandemic in India. A two-phase mixed-method approach is used: Phase 1 involved in-depth interviews with three individuals during the pandemic, the findings which were used along with the Factors Affecting Digital Inclusion (FDI) model (Thompson and Paul, Libr Q 90:173–188, 2020) to develop the survey instrument for Phase 2. This survey was distributed to professionals via listservs, and the FDI model was subsequently utilized to analyze the survey responses. The study’s findings highlighted multiple factors related to digital inclusion among teleworkers that could impact work productivity. Among these factors, the key ones included digital literacy, time, physical access, and everyday life. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic allowed us to identify and incorporate two additional factors, namely, device sharing and considerations related to health and lifestyle, into the FDI model. These factors assumed significance when assessing the elements of physical access and daily life, aspects that might have otherwise remained unexplored. Though digital technologies are going to play an important role in the new normal, there must be careful consideration of their impact on the teleworker’s life based on the results of our study. The teleworker’s characteristics, family circumstances, and living conditions are important considerations in supporting and maintaining productivity when enforcing teleworking policies. It is imperative that businesses adopt a forward-looking perspective, considering the latest technological developments redefining workers’ way of life.
This paper applies a posthumanist lens, informed by the work of Hollett and Ehret and of Ingold, to consider children’s playful affective entanglements with the human and the more-than-human during fluctuating periods of social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this refracting theoretical lens, I (re)examine a selection of play and leisure experiences of an emergent subject – the pandemic child – during the national U.K. lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Via a national online, qualitative survey, children and families were invited to share examples of their play and leisure experiences during the pandemic to the Play Observatory, a U.K. research project that ran from 2020 to 2022. These survey contributions provide portals through which to (re)consider children’s connection, participation and emergent becomings, attuning analytical attention towards children’s affective place-event entanglements during pandemic times. A posthumanist (re)telling of children’s Play Observatory contributions demonstrates how children were imbricated in constantly emergent affects, meanings, becomings and potentialities, that waxed and waned, intensified and dissipated, transcending the physical locus of lockdown. This paper contributes to the field by unsettling discourses of rupture, loss and deficit that have tended to dominate public and policy discussions of children’s experience of lockdowns. It contributes to ongoing, collective attempts to interrupt policy responses to the pandemic that centre individualising practices of curriculum ‘catch-up’ and fail to invite into the debate consideration of the potential richness of experiences and events encountered by the pandemic child outside of the strictures of normal schooling and curriculum.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts.
This chapter examines the diverse professional expertise and knowledge present in the operating room. It explores how actors hold distinct professional visions and logics, which can lead to disagreements in actions, patient positioning, and room setup. Fieldnotes’ interpretation reveals the various professional visions that shape the evaluations and decisions of organizational actors. Additionally, it emphasizes the role of objects and technologies in constructing and performing professional knowledge. In particular, the chapter highlights the symbiotic materialism and material awareness a professional vision implies, together with the sensemaking processes it is intertwined with. Finally, the discussion concentrates on how power materializes in the relationships between different professionals, giving rise to peculiar sociomaterial choreographies.
Building upon and extending a growing strand of research engaging feminist new materialisms to understand women's moving bodies as more-than-human phenomena, this paper considers the pandemic as an event that initiated new expressions and contents for the fitness assemblage. Engaging a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on becoming, we examine women's physical activity practices during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing upon object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask: How do women's pandemic relations with spaces (home, neighborhood), others (family, pets) and matter (objects of fitness) prompt new ways of knowing their own moving bodies and the importance of physical activity in their lives? Through our affective, material, and embodied analysis, we explain how the pandemic event surfaced new lines of flight away from the dominant gendered fitness assemblage. Women's affective relations and movement encounters prompted the emergence of new forms of bodily autonomy and fitness for pleasure and connection, offering glimpses of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing physical activity as becoming.
Το βιβλίο μελετά τα μιμίδια (memes), ένα πολύ γνωστό και διαδεδομένο είδος πολυμεσικού ψηφιακού λαϊκού λόγου που χαρακτηρίζεται από το χιουμοριστικό και δηκτικό του ύφος. Η έρευνα εντάσσεται στο πεδίο της Ψηφιακής Λαογραφίας, ενός ραγδαία αναπτυσσόμενου κλάδου των διεθνών λαογραφικών σπουδών. Κεντρικό θέμα αποτελεί το λαϊκό χιούμορ και ο τρόπος που αυτό εκφράστηκε μέσα από μιμίδια κατά την περίοδο της πανδημίας COVID-19 στα δυο πιο δημοφιλή μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης στη χώρα, το Facebook και το Instagram. Το χιούμορ των μιμιδίων λειτούργησε ως μέσο κριτικής του ηγεμονικού λόγου, στάσεων και συμπεριφορών, αλλά και ως μέσο έκφρασης και εκτόνωσης φόβων και ανησυχιών που ήταν ιδιαίτερα έντονες λόγω του πρωτόγνωρου βιώματος της πανδημίας. Τα θέματα των μιμιδίων σχετικά με την πανδημία αφορούν όλο το φάσμα του βιώματος που περιλαμβάνει εμπειρίες, αντιλήψεις, πρακτικές και πολιτικές που εφαρμόστηκαν κατά τη διάρκειά της. Η λειτουργία τους στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης ανέδειξε την πολύπλευρη δυνατότητα ερμηνείας τους, αφού οι χρήστες/τριες τείνουν να αντιλαμβάνονται ποικιλοτρόπως το περιεχόμενό τους. Ως διακριτό χαρακτηριστικό μελετήθηκαν και τα μορφολογικά χαρακτηριστικά του είδους των μιμιδίων. Παρότι αξιοποιείται ο πολυμεσικός τους χαρακτήρας, εντοπίζονται δηλαδή μιμίδια που πλαισιώνονται και από εικόνες και βιντεάκια, φαίνεται ότι το κείμενο τελικά επικρατεί. Τα περισσότερα μιμίδια αποτελούνται τελικά κυρίως από ένα σύντομο κείμενο που προάγει το επιθυμητό μήνυμα. Μέσα από τη μελέτη αυτού του είδους λαϊκού λόγου φάνηκε ότι το χιούμορ και η σάτιρα συνεχίζουν να αποτελούν έναν δημιουργικό τρόπο διαχείρισης δυσχερών καταστάσεων, συνιστώντας ταυτόχρονα ένα ζωντανό τρόπο λαϊκής έκφρασης και επικοινωνίας.
This article proposes a mobilities-informed approach to social science research on healthcare and migration. It engages with evidence gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic that suggests that when confronted with a public health emergency, health systems can be responsive to the needs of mobile populations. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, health resources shifted routine services online, spurring an acceleration of telemedicine. The roll-out of these practices intersected with the phenomenon of digital exclusion, making healthcare partly or completely out of reach for those who could not connect. We argue that these efforts could have been more successful if they grew out of a recognition of healthcare's ‘sedentary bias’. National health systems are configured to serve settled populations. They are not designed for people on the move, with uncertain residential and immigration status. Yet this bias can be alleviated when health interventions are rethought from the point of view of the mobile patient.
Ως είδος πολυμεσικού ψηφιακού λαϊκού λόγου τα μιμίδια (memes) τείνουν να ανακύπτουν στα διαδικτυακά περιβάλλοντα θίγοντας δηκτικά καθημερινές στάσεις και συμπεριφορές αλλά και θέματα της επικαιρότητας συνιστώντας έτσι ένα από τα πιο ενδιαφέροντα θέματα μελέτης της ψηφιακής λαογραφίας. Ασφαλώς η έξαρση της πανδημίας του ιού COVID-19 δε θα μπορούσε να μην προκαλέσει διάδοση μιμιδίων, αφού επηρέασε καθοριστικά την καθημερινότητα των ανθρώπων. Φαίνεται λοιπόν ότι στην προκειμένη περίπτωση το χιούμορ αποτελεί τρόπο διαχείρισης προβληματικών καταστάσεων, αλλά και μέσο έμμεσης κριτικής. Το χιούμορ αυτό, μέσω της αποδοχής των χρηστών του Διαδικτύου και της αναπαραγωγής του στο ψηφιακό περιβάλλον, αποτελεί μια άτυπη μορφή επικοινωνίας η οποία μετατρέπεται στο λαϊκό (popular) είδος που εξετάζεται στην παρούσα έρευνα. Από την αρχή λοιπόν της έξαρσης της πανδημίας του ιού COVID-19 στη χώρα μας, αλλά και καθ’ όλη τη διάρκειά της, εντοπίστηκαν και συγκεντρώθηκαν μιμίδια στα διαδικτυακά περιβάλλοντα στα οποία διαδίδονται. Τα περιβάλλοντα αυτά είναι πρωτίστως τα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης και πιο συγκεκριμένα το Facebook και το Instagram. Ποια είναι όμως τα θέματα που προκάλεσαν την ανάγκη διακωμώδησής τους κατά την περίοδο της πανδημίας; Ποια κοινωνικά και πολιτισμικά ζητήματα αυτής της ‘νέας πραγματικότητας’ αναδείχθηκαν μέσα από τον χιουμοριστικό σχολιασμό τους; Ερωτήματα όμως τίθενται και σε σχέση με τα μορφολογικά χαρακτηριστικά του είδους: ποια είναι τα μορφολογικά χαρακτηριστικά του είδους σήμερα; Κυριαρχεί άραγε η εικόνα σε σχέση με το γραπτό κείμενο ως ο καθοριστικός τρόπος απόδοσης ποικίλων ιδεών και στάσεων στο Διαδίκτυο;
As a kind of multimedia digital popular lore, memes tend to emerge in online environments, sharply commenting on daily attitudes and behaviours, as well as current issues, thus constituting one of the most interesting topics of digital folklore. The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus pandemic causes the spread of memes on the mater, as it had a decisive effect on people's lives. So, it seems that in this case humour is a way of managing problematic situations, but also a means of indirect criticism. This kind of humour that spreads through the digital environment is the genre of popular digital lore that is being examined in this research.Nevertheless, from the beginning of the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus pandemic in Greece, memes on the pandemic were located and collected in the Greek internet, primarily on Facebookand Instagram.But what are the themes that caused the need to be imitated during the pandemic period? What social and cultural issues of this ‘new reality’ emerged through humorous commentary? However, questions are also raised in relation to the morphological characteristics of the genre. Is the image dominant in relation to the written text as the decisive way of delivering various ideas and attitudes on the internet?
The home is a crucial site of young children's early encounters with digitally connected technologies. It is here that their emerging digital footprints are being formed and where digital data about them is being produced then collected, analysed and commodified in varying ways. While much is speculated about the rise of intelligent assistants, baby monitors, connected toys and goods, there is little quantitative information available about what sorts of devices households with children actually contain. This article reports on findings from an online survey of 504 Australian households with children aged 0–8 years. The survey was designed to capture a snapshot of internet connected devices and goods in households as a way of contextualising current discussions around the datafication of childhood. Results indicate that Australian households with young children are indeed highly connected, and this is primarily via devices already well domesticated into everyday family life such as TVs, computers and smartphones. We discuss several key points emerging from our findings, including: the safety and security of the household as a primary motivator for using smart home devices; the different rates of acceptance of the datafying objects in the home; and the Googlization of family life. We conclude the paper by outlining a research agenda that more accurately reflects the digital realities of Australian family life.
Introduction
The COVID-19 crisis has wrought major changes to people's lives across the globe since the beginning of the outbreak in early 2020. The "Australians' Experiences of COVID-19” qualitative descriptive study was established to explore how Australians from different geographical areas and social groups experienced the COVID-19 crisis.
Methods
Three sets of semi-structured interviews, each with a diverse group of 40 adults across Australia, were completed between 2020 and 2022. This article reports findings from the first set of interviews, conducted by telephone in mid-2020.
Results
The participants discussed their experiences of living through this period, which was characterized by strong public health measures to contain the spread of COVID, including a national lockdown and border closures. Interview fieldnotes and verbatim transcripts were used to conduct an interpretive thematic analysis. The analysis is structured around the following five themes covering the quotidian and affective aspects of participants' lives in the early months of the COVID crisis: “disruption to routines;” “habituating to preventive measures;” “social isolation and loneliness;” “changes to work and education;” and “little change to life.” A sixth theme concerns how participants responded to our question about what they imagined their lives would be like after the pandemic: “imagining post-COVID life.”
Discussion
The crisis affected participants' experience of daily life variously according to such factors as their social circumstances and obligations as well as their histories of illness, making visible some of the unequal social and economic effects of the pandemic across different genders, ages, localities and socioeconomic groups. Our participants fell into three roughly equal groups: (i) those who found the lockdown and associated restrictions very difficult; (ii) those who reported feeling barely affected by these conditions; and (iii) those who found benefits to the “slowing down” of life during this period.
This article draws on an ethnographic study of employees working from home in 13 Australian households in Sydney, New South Wales and Melbourne, Victoria during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Conducting interviews and household walk throughs via video conferencing software, supplemented by diaries and pictures from householders, we were initially interested in how people managed working from home via digital technology. As the project evolved however, we were struck by the reconfigured role of home life more broadly. During this time, many people found themselves not only restricted to their homes but having to experiment with new modes of living as households became hubs for economic, social, and infrastructural flows and the circulation of goods and services. The households in our study engaged in an array of practices related to self-managing employment from home. What we might think of as the ‘work of working from home’ practices included everything from managing workspaces, utilities and energy use, to the emotional atmosphere of the home. This reconfiguration of the home as a central hub of social, cultural, and economic life can be productively understood via two complementary approaches: what feminist planners Gilroy and Booth ([1999]. Building an infrastructure for everyday lives. European planning studies, 7 (3), 307–324) have termed ‘the infrastructure of everyday life’, and Gibson and Graham's ([2008] Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds’. Progress in human geography, 32 (5), 613–632) work on alternative economies. While the practices we studied could be seen as representing a privileged (in terms of class and race) pandemic response, following Gibson-Graham we frame our findings in terms of (re)imagining future social realities. We identify 3 categories: new domesticities; the ‘living infrastructures’ of work–home life; and everyday economies. In doing so we highlight the hidden and often feminized elements of civic and domestic life – the ‘foundational economy’ (Barbera, F., Negri, N., and Salento, A., 2018. From individual choice to collective voice. Foundational economy, local commons and citizenship. Rassegna Italiana di sociologia, 2, 371–398.) of care and service provision and beyond – to emphasize just how central this foundational economy has become to our post-vaccination futures.
This article makes the case for considering conversational AI devices a critical urban challenge, particularly as the home gains importance in everyday life. Drawing on excerpts from conversations with Alexa – the market-leading digital voice assistant designed and manufactured by Amazon – the article illustrates how this device’s friendly feminine personality masks significant environmental and gender effects. Building on the author’s ongoing research on the smart home, the article considers how the “feminist reboot” proposed by Strengers & Kennedy in The Smart Wife could provide promising routes for urban scholars seeking to disrupt and intervene in the troubling trajectories of feminised AI.
Recent interest in futures anthropology has argued that the discipline should play a more active role in shaping futures. However, this raises methodological problems for accessing futures and recreating the co-presence that is central to ethnography. Studying automated futures is particularly challenging because of the strong visions of technology-led futures, which rely on solutionist narratives and fail to account for everyday life. This article discusses a methodological innovation for studying automated futures through ethnographic visits, home tours, and comic strips that enable imaginative potential while drawing in the realities of everyday life and the maintenance of contingency into the future.
This article outlines and demonstrates the practice of troubleshooting as a method. We argue that as an interdisciplinary, collaborative, digital-hybridized and adaptable approach, troubleshooting provides an ethical opportunity to explore the experiences and outcomes of (older) people living with connected home technologies in ways that deliver novel and meaningful research insights. Our discussion draws on the experience of a project that worked with ageing people (70+) to tailor and explore their experiences with smart home devices to support their independence and wellbeing. A personalized suite of digital voice assistants (DVAs), robotic vacuum cleaners, smart lights, kettles and switches were installed into the domestic spaces and routines of 23 households and 33 participants living in rural Australia. The project team developed a methodological framework, which took an unplanned and innovative turn in response to the physical distancing challenges brought by COVID-19 lockdowns, with the social connectivity offered by the devices trialled, and the creative digital living skills between the project team and its participants. We conclude by identifying future areas of research at the intersection of smart technologies, aged care services and the home as a site of research and of ongoing methodological design.
Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home-based digital device use and the personal data generated with and through engagements with these technologies. As well as engaging in a video-recorded home tour, we asked participants to hand draw maps of the digital devices located within their homes and the flows of digital data emitting from the devices. These maps mark the presence, interconnections and mobilities of digital technologies and the digitised details generated by their sociomaterial entanglements. The maps were also used to spark further discussion with the participants about their devices and data, seeking to understand their sense-making practices. Working with our concept of ‘digital scaffolding’, we explore what these participant-generated maps can reveal and make visible about digital technologies and data in relation to the domestic environment as well as the world outside the home. We consider what the maps themselves show in terms of digital presence, and what the mapping activity made perceptible within the research encounter.
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the
capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
This paper is available for free from Wiley https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ntwe.12173
The outbreak of COVID‐19 is having a drastic impact on work and employment. This review piece outlines the relevance of existing research into new technology, work and employment in the era of COVID‐19. It is important to be retrospective and undertake both a historically and theoretically informed position on the impact of new technologies in the current crisis and beyond. Issues of control, surveillance and resistance have been central to work on the impact of technology on work and employment and these themes have been identified as central to the experience of work in the current crisis.
Home, digital technologies and data are intersecting in new ways as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic emerge. We consider the data practices associated with COVID-19 responses and their implications for housing and home through two overarching themes: the notion of home as a private space, and digital technology and surveillance in the home. We show that although home has never been private, the rapid adoption and acceptance of technologies in the home for quarantine, work and study, enabled by the pandemic, is rescripting privacy. The acceleration of technology adoption and surveillance in the home has implications for privacy and potential discrimination, and should be approached with a critical lens.
From an analysis of everyday practices of flexible working captured in video diaries, a form of pervasive but invisible support work is identified and presented. Labelled ‘digi-housekeeping’, this is work that is required to maintain the digital tools that enable flexible working, and incorporates the tasks of clearing, sorting, preparing, provisioning and troubleshooting. Through the sociocultural processes of responsibilization, personalization and work extension, interpreted here as emblematic of wider neoliberal contemporary work arrangements, digi-housekeeping is devalued and made invisible, characterizing these tasks as not ‘real’ work. Classifying these tasks as not ‘real’ work is a new kind of boundary work that supports the continuing displacement of work activities onto individual workers. It is argued that such tasks need to be made visible in order to address feelings of work intensification.
This article is a short narrative on how feminism helped me find a balance in my life and how this balance has been disrupted with the COVID‐19 crisis. I reflect on how this crisis is showing our vulnerabilities as human beings. This crisis reflects how our bodies depend on each other, moving away from the dominant patriarchal ontology that perceives bodies as being independent. This crisis is letting the most vulnerable in situations of survival because the infrastructures that support their bodies are not functioning. At the same time, this crisis is providing visibility to certain occupations that are dominated by issues of race, class and gender. These occupations are being at least temporarily rehabilitated to their central position in society. We are living a time where we could show, through our teaching, possible resistance to the neoliberal ontology that captured humanity.
Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, we explore our identities as single and co‐parents thrust into the new reality of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown. As two PhD students, we present shared reflections on our intersectional and divergent experiences of parenting and our attempts to protect our work and families during a pandemic. We reflect on the social constructions of ‘masculinities’ and ‘emphasized femininities’ as complicated influence on our roles as parents. Finally, we highlight the importance of time and self‐care as ways of managing our shared realities during this uncertain period. Through sharing reflections, we became closer friends in mutual appreciation and solidarity as we learned about each other’s struggles and vulnerabilities.
This article offers a feminist reflection written as a nocturnal stream of consciousness exposing the embodied, emotional and professional experience of living and working during a pandemic outbreak. Framed within a feminist approach, this personal narrative provides an example of the effects of such unexpected and unprecedented circumstances on personal and professional academic lives. Developed during the first stage of the (inter)national coronavirus pandemic, my reflections address issues of privilege; emotional labour; the virtual invasion of the home space within the current increasingly ambiguous space of ‘the workplace'; workload; and wellbeing. Further, I consider how the newly enforced flexible work measures based on online tools have turned current work–life dynamics into a ‘Never‐ending Shift'.
A new method is proposed here aimed at eliciting the mechanisms which maintain the relational positioning of people and places within social space. This 'mapping tool' is inherently relational by design and involves participants creating visual representations of their geographic imaginaries, encompassing their perceptions and preferences of different localities. This is followed by an interviewing approach wherein participants 'speak to' their map, producing 'thick' narratives detailing the ties that bind people and places. The method was developed and used as part of a 3-year study into the geographic imaginaries of young people in the UK, involving the collection of 1,000 maps, together with over 200 interviews, across 20 diverse localities. We draw on empirical examples of using the method from this study, including processes of differentiation within the middle classes and the place-based identities of towns, cities and localities.
This article critically assesses the assumption that more and more work is being detached from place and that this is a ‘win-win’ for both employers and employees. Based on an analysis of official labour market data, it finds that only one-third of the increase in remote working can be explained by compositional factors such as movement to the knowledge economy, the growth in flexible employment and organisational responses to the changing demographic make-up of the employed labour force. This suggests that the detachment of work from place is a growing trend. This article also shows that while remote working is associated with higher organisational commitment, job satisfaction and job-related well-being, these benefits come at the cost of work intensification and a greater inability to switch off.
In this article, we advance current discussions by bringing together debates about digital play and digital labour. We consider everyday life entanglements of mobile media and digital work and play at home. To develop this argument, we analyse the embodied and affective dimensions of mundane everyday life at home with digital media through the concepts of atmosphere and ambient play. We argue that attention to how digital play is implicated in the constitution of texture and feeling of the everyday needs to underpin our understanding of how mobile media are participating in shifts in everyday experiences of work and home. In doing so, we draw on ethnographic research undertaken with middle-class families in Melbourne, Australia.
Smart homes promise to significantly enhance domestic comfort, convenience, security and leisure whilst simultaneously reducing energy use through optimized home energy management. Their ability to achieve these multiple aims rests fundamentally on how they are used by householders, yet very little is currently known about this topic. The few studies that have explored the use of smart homes have tended to focus on special-interest groups and be quite short-term. This paper reports on new in-depth qualitative data that explore the domestication of a range of smart home technologies in 10 households participating in a nine-month field trial. Four core themes emerge: (1) smart home technologies are both technically and socially disruptive; (2) smart homes require forms of adaptation and familiarization from householders that can limit their use; (3) learning to use smart home technologies is a demanding and time-consuming task for which there is currently very little support available; and (4) there is little evidence that smart home technologies will generate substantial energy savings and, indeed, there is a risk that they may generate forms of energy intensification. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for policy, design and further research.
This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
Local governments' websites are important gateways for residents wishing to interact with public institutions online, and the establishment and development of such websites stand out among governmental initiatives to improve their performance. Drawing on domestication theory to apply a change-oriented perspective, the paper analyses how Norwegian local governments domesticate website technology to make websites and configure their users, based upon three empirical sources: a survey among information and communication technology managers in local governments, a quantitative mapping of the content of the websites of all 430 Norwegian local governments, and a qualitative in-depth content analysis of 10 websites. The findings show that domestication efforts vary a lot across local governments. However, all local governments engage in domestication. Further, we identify as potential domestication outcomes three ideal types of website assemblages: information, client, and citizen assemblages. They point towards three respective user configurations: information consumers, clients, and citizens. The information assemblage is the only one found in all websites. Finally, linking qualitative and quantitative methods is suggested as a way of advancing domestication studies.
The purpose of this study was to focus on the subjective construction of the meaning people give to technologies and their uses within the family. The adoption and use of new communication technologies are interpreted as series of social actions undertaken by its members, under precise conditions, for specific motives. For this reason this research took us inside the homes of nine families (with and without children and teenagers), in a natural, everyday-life context of uses of communication technologies. We looked closely at the cumulating effects of household technologies in a contextualist-interactionist theoretical perspective and concentrated on analysing the synergy between three families of technology: telephone, television and the computer-internet.
Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiserʼs grand vision of ʻinvisibleʼ computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper we wish to complement the communityʼs growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on ʻdigital plumbingʼ - i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies with respect to existing technological arrangements in the home and to develop methods and tools that support the digital plumber in planning and preparing for change, in managing the contingencies that inevitably occur in realizing change, and in coordinating digital plumbing and maintaining awareness of change.
This book, Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life , is concerned with the home, but it is not bounded by the home. While the home provides a necessary anchor point for our empirical and theoretical work, we are well aware that the home is not self-contained but is a node in multiple commercial, cultural, and technical networks, all of which interact, and all of which have local implications and global reach. The home’s socio-technical ecology operates in recursive relations with these much larger ecologies, none of which can be ignored if the home is to be understood. This book unearths this digital domesticity through accounts of evolving socio-technical relations as they unfold in processes of adopting and adapting to innovations; using, maintaining, and neglecting the complex of technologies in the home; and confronting the obsolescence of particular technologies and failure of systems of consumer technologies.
This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects that participate in the internet of things, everyday spaces of the smart home, banal landscapes of data and digital infrastructures, and quotidian quantifications/datafications of the self. The proliferation of these methods also informs feminist scholarly praxes of digital iteration.
Although aspirations for the ‘smart home’ have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that drive social and spatial change, suggests we need to revise the smart home. From increased leisure time to increased energy efficiency – the smart home has promised, and frequently failed to deliver its utopian promises. First, this paper argues the smart home can be conceptualized as an assemblage of social, economic, political and technological apparatuses. Thinking about the smart home as assemblage allows us to see the network of relationships which constitute it, the work they do in the world, and the subsequent possibilities of becoming. Second, the paper offers innovative methodologies for researching the smart home that draws on the agentive capacities of ‘smart’ technologies. Such unpacking is critical to understand the work and possibilities of the smart home. The methodologies are productive for thinking about the future of housing research.
Interest and uptake of smart home technologies has been lower than anticipated, particularly among women. Reporting on an academic-industry partnership, we present findings from an ethnographic study with 31 Australian smart home early adopters. The paper analyses these households' experiences in relation to three concepts central to Intel's ambient computing vision for the home: protection, productivity and pleasure, or 'the 3Ps'. We find that protection is a form of caregiving; productivity provides 'small conveniences', energy savings and multi-tasking possibilities; and pleasure is derived from ambient and aesthetic features, and the joy of 'playing around' with tech. Our analysis identifies three design challenges and opportunities for the smart home: internal threats to household protection; feminine desires for the smart home; and increased 'digital housekeeping'. We conclude by suggesting how HCI designers can and should respond to these gendered challenges.
The ‘digital revolution’ of household life is underway, with technologies such as robotic vacuum cleaners (robovacs) increasingly common. Various other automated appliances are emerging and being adopted in pursuit of the ‘smart home’. Current discourses include assumptions and explicit claims that smart homes will be energy efficient and therefore more environmentally sustainable. However, smart home technologies are also presented as affording lifestyle enhancements in the areas of comfort, cleanliness, convenience, entertainment and security. Focusing specifically on one smart device – the robovac – this paper aims to demonstrate how visions of cleanliness in the smart home could be counterproductive to energy reductions and household wellbeing. We draw on a content analysis of smart home marketing and articles, and conversational interviews (involving home tours) with early adopters of robovacs and smart home technologies in Australia. We find that these devices may escalate conventions of cleanliness in the home and invite supplementary energy consumption. The paper concludes by providing suggestions for how energy stakeholders can respond.
This article analyses visions of everyday life embedded in the 21st-century smart home, specifically the promoted aspiration to generate escalated aesthetic pleasures or ‘pleasance’, attained through automated and connected devices. We explore the likely outcomes and effects of this vision, drawing on our international content analysis of magazine and online articles and semi-structured interview and tours with households who live in smart homes or use automated technologies. Like the industrial revolution of the home, which arguably created ‘more work for mother’ by increasing cleanliness expectations, we show how the smart home is generating new forms of household work and play. These include researching, upgrading, updating, maintaining and integrating smart home technologies and programming pleasance ‘scenes’ for lighting, security and entertainment. We find that most of this household labour (and leisure) is being performed by men, possibly leading to more work for father.
It is commonly claimed that ubiquitous connectivity erodes the boundaries that once separated work from other aspects of life. Mobile devices in particular enable people to perform work-related activities anytime anywhere. Surprisingly, however, we know little about how people nationwide organise their daily working time over a period that has witnessed rapid technological change. Using the United Kingdom Time Use Surveys 2000 and 2015, covering this period of technological change, we studied work extension practices, and the links between work extension, total work hours and subjective time pressure. We found a significant, though small, increase in work extension, and evidence that it was significantly associated with time pressure in 2015, but not in 2000. Additionally, work extension increased total work hours, which was concentrated entirely in time working with a mobile device. We discuss our results in light of some taken-for-granted narratives about mobile devices allowing work to colonise life.
Contributors: Ien Ang, Colin Campbell, Cynthia Cockburn, Jonathan Gershuny, Sonia Livingstone, Ian Miles, Daniel Miller, David Morley, Grahame Murdock, Tim Putnam, Marilyn Strathern, Diane Zimmerman Umble, Jane Wheelock
This article synthesizes Spigel’s research on the introduction of television and new technologies into the home. It looks at changing conceptions of ‘media households’ over the course of the last 50 years. The ‘home theater’ represents the media house of the 1950s; the ‘mobile home’ corresponds to the introduction of portable television in the 1960s; and the ‘smart home’ is the contemporary model of digital domesticity. The article considers how these changing models of home incorporate reigning middle class ideologies about family life for their respective times.
This article examines the hybrid ontologies that typify networked and mobile location-based games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of ‘mixed reality’ game-play. In particular, it focuses on the potential cultural and corporeal effects of mobile gaming since the introduction of the iPhone and subsequent touchscreens, and the specific technosomatic arrangements such devices demand in everyday life. Mobile media and game-play in both urban and domestic places evoke particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of the interface. Location-based mobile games and applications also modify our experience and perception of ‘being online’, and effectively disassemble the actual/virtual dichotomy of internet ‘being’ into a complex and dynamic range of modalities of presence. Finally, this article suggests that the kind of ontological and ‘containment’ metaphors we use to describe the space of screen-based game-play — in particular, the magic circle, and tropologies of the screen as a fixed window or frame — are ill-suited as descriptors for the complex layering of material and virtual contexts specific to mobile location-based and mixed reality gaming.
Mapping the relational construction of people and places
- M Donnelly
- S Gamsu
- S Whewall
Donnelly M, Gamsu S and Whewall S (2020) Mapping the relational construction of people and places.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 23(1): 91-108.
Ignorance and the epistemic choreography of method
- M Michael
Michael M (2015) Ignorance and the epistemic choreography of method. In: Routledge International
Handbook of Ignorance Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 84-91.
Being at home with privacy: privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices
- L Hjorth
- S Pink
- H Horst
Hjorth L, Pink S and Horst H (2018) Being at home with privacy: privacy and mundane intimacy through
same-sex locative media practices. International Journal of Communication 12: 1209-1227.
Work's Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity
- M Gregg
Gregg M (2011) Work's Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity.