Affecting relations: domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town

McDonald, Tom

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2014.924981

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…WhatsApp has become domesticated and mobilised in ways that serve to discipline socio‐political relations in everyday life and draw boundaries around who is included and excluded (see McDonald 2015; Silverstone 2006). In this section we illustrate how the “digital living room” and related affordances, such as status updates and display pictures, constituted places of encounter that were interwoven into everyday digital‐physical realities.…”

Section: Disciplining the “Digital Living Room” In An Ethnic Democracy: Socio‐technical Fixes And Digital‐physical Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also critically analyses the work of Silicon Valley spatiotechno imaginaries, where the domestic spatial ideal—the living room—is evoked to facilitate the “domestication” of digital technology, whilst simultaneously eliding the lived politics of dwelling and the home. We use “domestication” and its critiques to examine how digital technologies are “tamed” or appropriated in culturally specific contexts of the home (see McDonald 2015; Silverstone 2006) and everyday life more broadly. But we also want to emphasise how the imaginary of “the domestic” has been mobilised by WhatsApp to translate, or vernacularise the abstract concept of digital private space, within everyday life.…”

Section: Introduction: Digital Private Spaces and “Political Talk”mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2019). Here we are concerned with not only how WhatsApp is becoming embedded in everyday political life in India, but also how its “affordances” and digital spaces are being used to discipline or act on certain bodies and behaviours to reconfigure relations and relationships (see McDonald 2015). Our research builds on non‐digital centric approaches to understand how digital technology is experienced within everyday life (see Ash et al.…”

Section: Introduction: Digital Private Spaces and “Political Talk”mentioning

confidence: 99%

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No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

et al. 2021

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WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right to digitise new party‐political intimacies. This has implications for how people at the margins of Hindu nationalist politics dwell in the “digital living room”. Framed as a home like space, we problematise Facebook’s “spatiotechnical” utopia by making visible how kinship and (domestic) politics are newly entangled in digital private spaces. Finally, we document how WhatsApp is deployed as a technology of discipline to determine modes of appropriate sociality and reconfigure spaces of digital‐physical inclusion/exclusion in the making of India’s “ethnic democracy”.

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Section: Disciplining the “Digital Living Room” In An Ethnic Democracy: Socio‐technical Fixes And Digital‐physical Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: Digital Private Spaces and “Political Talk”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: Digital Private Spaces and “Political Talk”mentioning

confidence: 99%

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No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

et al. 2021

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“…Its impact in society is large and sometimes it brings the generational and digital divide that led to the change in family dynamics (McGrath, 2012). McDonald (2015) said that whenever new technology arrives at the home, the process of integration transforms in multiple ways. Television has become more personalized in the home today.…”

Section: Ict and Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

ICT Use and Its Influence in Family Functioning With Reference to Process and Structure of Families

Kumar

Arulchelvan

2021

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education

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ICT use in family functioning is an important area to study as the impact changes when technology grows over years. This research analyzed the role of ICT use in process & structure of families using the factors present in Hertlein multitheoretical model. The additional factor ‘family communication pattern’ was introduced and tested along with the process factor to know its importance. The study has taken 756 samples (both parents & children) in Chennai and tested two hypothesis. Structural Equation Model (SEM) was used to analyze the data. The result shows that ICT has influenced the process changes of the families. The structural changes in families are slowly started occurring and that is not as significant as process changes. The added new factor has loaded positively with existing factors shows that family communication is important for family process and thus contributed for theoretical development.

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“…The use of such technologies is also contingent on the tactile landscape of family life in the home, its social, sensory and material context, and parents’ wider multisensorial caring and bonding activities of which touch is a part. This study engages with the way in which digital objects, such as Owlet, can become central to people’s social relationships, and the diverse ways in which their introduction into the home can disrupt everyday domestic practices (McDonald, 2015:18). We explore parent–baby touch practices in the context of encounters between parents and babies, and the digitally-mediated experiences provided by Owlet, with attention to how these intersect to disrupt, reduce, ‘replace’, re-orientate or reconfigure touch.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digitally-mediated parent–baby touch and the formation of subjectivities

Jewitt

Mackley

Price

2021

Visual Communication

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This article examines how the use of emergent smart baby monitors re-mediates parent–baby touch, notions of connection, parental sensing and the interpretation of babies’ bodies, and contributes to the formation of subjectivities. Domestic baby monitors are a mid 20th-century phenomenon which normalizes parental anxieties. While baby monitoring is not new, the ‘next generation’ of wearable bio-sensing baby monitors offers a different relationship to the body via the physiological tracking of babies, and the sending of information or alerts to parents’ via connected mobile apps. These devices have been associated with creating unnecessary parental anxiety and the digital ‘replacement’ of parental touch, although little research exists on their use in the context of parent–infant interaction or touch. The authors present a qualitative case study of one such technology, Owlet, to explore how parents experienced, understood and negotiated the discourses of parent–infant touch that circulate around and through Owlet, with particular attention to the relationship between visual and tactile resources. The study focuses on both its multimodal design and take-up by parents through analysis of interviews with the Owlet designer, Owlet as a product, focus groups with parents and families’ home experiences of Owlet. Data is analysed through a tri-part lens, which first combines multimodal social semiotic and sensory ethnographic approaches, and then the analytical concept of governmentality. The findings are discussed in relation to four analytical themes: (1) creating a desire for digitally mediated touch; (2) spatiality of digitally mediated connection; (3) formulating the ‘right kind’ of touch; and (4) reconfiguring ‘knowing touch’. The authors discuss multimodal discourses pertinent to the shaping of parent–baby touch practices including: rationality and efficiency; individualism, autonomy and freedom; and self-improvement and empowerment. They conclude that the discourses that coalesce around Owlet contribute to the reconfiguration of parent–baby touch and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities.

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Affecting relations: domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town

Cited by 14 publications

References 26 publications

No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

ICT Use and Its Influence in Family Functioning With Reference to Process and Structure of Families

Digitally-mediated parent–baby touch and the formation of subjectivities

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