New book examines the role of digital platforms in family life
Deakin University academics have published a new book that discusses how digital platforms are being increasingly woven into the fabric of family life.
The Platformization of the Family, edited by Deakin University’s Professor Julian Sefton-Green and Dr Kate Mannell, and Professor Ola Erstad from the University of Oslo, is a result of a collaboration between the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and the European research project Platforming Families: Tracing digital transformations in everyday life across generations.
The recent online book launch had over 140 attendees from across 24 countries, with presentations by Professor Sefton-Green, Dr Mannell, and contributor Professor Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics and Political Science).
“We know the platform society is working out for platforms, but how is it working out for families?” asked Dr Livingstone. “Meaningful relations matter to families, but may not fit the business strategies or segmented markets of the platforms, so we have lots of questions – are families finding a workaround, even trying to resist?… Families think of their private life as private. Does it matter to them that it’s not?”
“One of the core challenges of the book [is to] try to consider how we can think about societal level processes of platformization and how these might be reshaping family life,” said Dr Mannell, a Research Fellow within the Digital Child Deakin node. “But to do that without losing sight of how families themselves are taking up, navigating, grappling with, disagreeing over, and sometimes even rejecting platforms as well.”
The book has contributions from researchers from Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Estonia, and Australia (including Deakin University’s Associate Professor Luci Pangrazio and Dr Katrin Langton), and each lend a perspective on researching the role of digital platforms in family life across generations.
“We wanted to look both at the practice of platforms in families – at the messy everydayness,” said Professor Sefton-Green. “But also perhaps reflect in a more ambitious or larger scale way about the significance of what it means to talk about family life in terms of being platformed.”
“We’re very influenced by what has been called the ‘domestication theory’, [which] takes the metaphor of ‘taming the wild’. So it suggests that the technology is introduced from outside the family and then looks at how it’s integrated, adapted, used and changed, as it gets into the everyday domestic space. But also how the act of changing the technology changes us – and changes our uses of it.”
The book is open access and available here.
Watch the launch: