Much scholarship has already attended to the ways that social media influencers engage in affective labor to hail audiences and establish familial relationships with their audiences (Garcia-Rapp 2017; Duffy and Hund 2015) We seek to expand on these conversations to address the tensions between influencer culture, fitness culture, and digital culture to explore how fitness influencers on TikTok integrate wearable and health monitoring technology (e.g. Apple watches, fitbits, and health tracking apps) into their content. Building upon Soto-Vásquez’s (2021) notion of “fit subjectivities,” we argue that fitness influencers are engaging in self-disciplinary practices that model working towards achieving the ultimate “fit”/normative body. Further, this labor is highly gendered, aligning with post-feminist ethos of self-discipline and individual choice through consumption (McRobbie 2008). Furthermore, the social components of wearable tech, fitness tracking apps, and affective labor perpetuate the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline, simultaneously encouraging “friendly” competition through gamified fitness challenges (like closing rings on the Apple Watch or the viral “12/3/20” treadmill exercises), body metric tracking, and public leaderboards, further rendering the body subject to public scrutiny on both fitness and social media platforms. These tools are presented as the pathway to achieving a “fit” body, through a community of fitness influencers who use affect to intentionally situate themselves as the leaders of supportive families/communities in which the reward for participating in fitness facilitated by wearable tech is the idealized “fit” body. Through a thematic analysis of fitness influencers who use wearable tech on TikTok, we aim to illuminate how fitness influencers use emotion and familial bonds to maintain followers while also promoting the ideal “fit” body through self-discipline via wearable tech.
In this paper, I draw from two work in progress chapters from my doctoral thesis currently titled ‘making a meal’ and ‘making a routine.’ I demonstrate how food delivery platforms cook for the world by mimicking paid-unpaid, public-private informal food practices and industries. Yet in cooking up the world, platforms have to engage with people and industries’ actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine. This argument is part of my doctoral work on what digital platforms Swiggy, Zomato, Instagram and Twitter) do to the labours and cultures of food or foodwork. In this project, I examine how food delivery platforms built relationships with their users through a digital ethnography of their push notifications and use of social media platforms (2020- 21). My in-person ethnographic fieldwork (2022-23) investigated how users (individual/household and restaurant/industry) engaged with food delivery apps through immersions in households, a co-working space and with the restaurant industry From this, I investigated actually existing use practices of cooking, eating and making a routine of meals. I asked how do people absorb algorithmic flows from food delivery apps or match work and life routines to ordering in? Especially since habits and use seem to be central to platforms’ success, was there a platform habit? What happened to platforms if people were not habituated to using them? By paying attention to data about flows between the home and market through commercial and private cooking and the making of routines, I widen the question of platformization out from the workplace into the household. I engage with and contribute to platform scholarship on infrastructure and social reproduction by going beyond platform-worker relationship.
From baby monitors to fall sensors, from location trackers to gas detectors, the market is awash with devices connected to the internet that purport to assist relatives and carers in providing safety and care for children and elderly people. These IoT or smart devices allow at-a-distance or even automatic monitoring and even intervention in case of danger, freeing parents (or sons and daughters) for other tasks and commitments. But at the same time, these devices raise issues of privacy and autonomy and even risks of hacking, illegal surveillance or interference.
Conversely, children and the elderly may be not just passive recipients of IoT care, but also active and knowledgeable users of devices (“digital natives” and “silver surfers”), enacting new intergenerational family dynamics and engendering empowerment.
In a southern European country (Portugal), often characterized as an “early adopter” of technology but also with still a very traditional outlook on family roles (where “welfare society” still compensates much of the deficiencies of the welfare state, particularly in the care of the young and the elderly and infirm), what is the place of these IoT devices? Which families adopt them? How do they appropriate and use them?
This presentation aims to explore some of these issues, by drawing on a multi-method research approach, combining document analysis (for instance, of advertisement of IoT products, media articles), expert interviews (with regulators, consumer associations and IoT companies) and interviews with families. It is based on the ongoing research project Engage_IoT Social Engagements with the Internet of Things (funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology).
Digital and networked media are extending parents’ ability to care for their children across distances, creating forms of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that manifest as spectral presences (Derrida 1994; Peeren 2014). Commercial products help parents to track their child’s locations, to use a phone’s microphone to listen in to conversations around the child in real-time, and to review the child’s online activity. With apps, it is also possible to control the temperature, check the contents of a fridge, and monitor the media consumption of a home remotely. Researchers explore the phenomenon of mediated family surveillance in terms of how it affects trust between children and parents and poses ethical challenges to privacy. At the same time, the effectiveness of these technologies in keeping children safe is put into question (refs). In this paper, we contribute conceptually to the thinking of mediated family surveillance by relating these practices to ongoing debates about the “spectrality” of media and telepresence, as developed in media and cultural studies (Blackman 2019; Kemper 2022). We propose that current mediated family surveillance is giving way to a new style of intimate spectral media, where both comfortable and uncomfortable (perhaps even haunting) caring and loving presences are sustained by networks and data. What needs do such intimate spectral media fulfill for parent and child, and what impositions are involved in being enabled to provide care at a distance (and sometimes also across time zones)? What forms of care at a distance are deemed nourishing, and what forms are horrifying and alienating, and what negotiations take place around the fine line intimate spectral media draw between care and control? By addressing these questions, this paper shows that the debate about how care at a distance manifests and is experienced is also a conversation about the affordances of media, and how care and media shape each other.
For many young adults, going away to university is the time they will have maintained their own household. The skills required to run a household include decision-making around data and device use which can have longstanding repercussions. Examples include decisions around borrowing and spending (generating credit scores), data sharing (e.g., using free services premised on the sale of data ‘fumes’) and data monitoring (e.g., monitoring of health and fitness metrics). Young adults do not come to these data and device practices cold: as children this generation featured in the digital literacy debates, often cast in the role of the “digital native.” Yet in childhood, their devices and data are monitored and in part controlled by responsibilised adults, regulated through parental controls and age-restriction functions at app-level, and managed by strictures about permitted daily screen-time, for example, at the parental-level. Reaching the age of majority and moving out of home signals the shift of the legal and social responsibility of avoidance of online harms from the shoulders of parents and onto the shoulders of young adults. The practices and worries around harm avoidance, however, must be transformed and transferred within families within wider practices of intimacies and care work.
To explore how this happens, this paper analyses discourses of adulthood, responsibility and ‘predictive time’ (Barassi, 2020) in connection to householding practices of young adults living apart from their parents or guardians for the first time. Within this, how young adults ‘separate’ from their parents or guardians in terms of removal of parental controls, deleting (or altering) of tracker apps, and discussions about online safety and data management within the family are focussed on. A focus on university students is theoretically rich from this perspective because of the ‘extended adolescence’ that university students sometimes feel, still protected from some responsibilities of adulthood.
Digital media targeting young children (0-5) is increasingly subject to the sociotechnical process of “platformization” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Research on this subject has been primarily focused on the role YouTube Kids’ recommendation systems play in the production of video content – often of dubious algorithmic provenance (Bridle, 2017; Burroughs, 2017). Yet there is scant research on the role similar algorithmic systems play in the production of the ever-growing digital market of apps for children. As such, this paper studies how apps for young children are affected by “platformization” and offers a critical analysis of the emerging “algorithmic cultures” (Striphas, 2015) of apps for children.
To understand the relationship between distribution and the production of children’s apps, this paper focuses its attention on a particular app genre that education researchers have critiqued as an unruly “Wild West”: early literacy apps (Guernsey et al., 2012) . From a software studies perspective, I critically scrutinise the platform’s distribution conditions and the “ranking cultures” (Rieder et al., 2018) influencing young children’s educational apps through the empirical analysis of 343 scraped app store search results.
By arguing how the “Wild West” of educational apps is a manifestation of algorithmic cultures, this paper problematizes the role that recommendation systems play in the distribution, access, and production of children’s apps. The discussion reveals several characteristics of the algorithmic cultures of apps for young children, including the perceptible bloating of the genre by generic free-for-download and formulaic app families. Additionally, considering the cultural logic behind this group of apps for children highlights tensions of this double-step mediation process on app stores. First, the centralized role of recommendations as gatekeepers of content for children as a vulnerable population. Second, the challenges platforms pose to digital parenting (Mascheroni et al., 2018) by operationalizing their economic priorities through algorithms.
Discussions of the impact of technological developments often ask questions about the impact of digital innovation on how we act and think. This paper (part of a wider project and programme of work) makes the case for taking seriously how individuals appropriate new technology into their everyday lives.
The use of commercial smart home devices is growing with the increased availability of a variety of devices and their relatively low cost. These devices are used for a variety of purposes, for example energy consumption and home security, and to support activities of daily living (Soubutts et al. 2022). Here, we develop that understanding to explore how parents and their children appropriate voice assistant devices into family life as a dimension of intimacy and care, given that the landscape of care relies on a relationship infrastructure of emotions and caring practices which are often grounded in intimacy born of shared activities (e.g. Gabb and Fink 2013).
The project (funded as part of the ESRC Centre on Socio-Digital Futures) has recruited c15 households to explore their use and views on voice assistants (Amazon Alexa) in the home. In depth, longitudinal data will be collected via 1) contextual interviews with the household members (both parents and children) at the start and end of the study 2) an ‘out-of-box’ interview shortly after adoption 3) transcripts of Alexa commands 4) co-design skills session with families.
The recourse to social networking apps to share snapshots of different moments in life is a common practice. Among these, Instagram, with a growing number of users, is characterized by a strong visual component. Visual objects are the central part of users’ online identity construction and print management. Those who are part of user’s romantic relationship stages are no exception. How is the couple’s commitment represented on Instagram? To answer this question, this study consulted Instagram through the hashtags #shesidyes and #hesaidyes. A sample of 2000 posts (#shesidyes n = 1000; #hesaidyes n= 1000) was collected and analyzed. A codebook was created and a content analysis, focused on visual objects, was performed. The results portrayed two main dimensions of commitment domains: i) engagement and ii) marriage. Heterosexual couples, posing, smiling, hugging, or kissing were the common denominator. This followed images of friends and alleged family members cheering and celebrating. On engagement domain, traditional marriage proposal scripts were identified (presenting a ring, orchestrating the proposal as a “surprise” or getting down on one knee) as well couples showing the ring as a way to communicate the commitment. On marriage domain, different stages, such as bachelor party, outfit choices, the bride getting ready or the ceremony and the celebration itself were identified. The posts seemed to spread an ideal of what the commitment while raising questions regarding t traditional scripts and roles failing to capture diversity.
Smartphones, apps and a multitude of sensors have facilitated almost every imaginable activity not only being enacted and tracked on mobile media, but simultaneously being aggregated and analysed against existing data and norms to produce a wide array of dashboards and indicators of health, success, achievement and normality. Parenting can involve many highly anxious experiences, amplified even more so for brand new parents. In the months surrounding a newborn entering the world, parents and carers have an increasingly large array of devices and apps available to them, each promising to ease some of the anxieties of parenting by providing indicators the were seemingly indivisible before about the health, development and wellbeing of an infant. Wearables might track everything from heartrate to breathing, apps might provide an array of soothing sounds or initial words customised to specific developmental milestones or personal inputs, and in exchange the parents are almost always provided reassuring dashboards and indicators showing their child is recognisably well. Green indicators lights tracking ‘your child’s progress’ are always available, whether the parents are in the same room, or somewhere else entirely. Increasingly normalised cameras for cribs and caring often mean an infant is available as a streaming video feed to parents whenever they rely on the caring services of others. This chapter seeks to map some of the ways in which infancy has, in effect, been uploaded as part of these new parenting practices, mapping both the new opportunities and reassurances which are available, but also looking at the sometimes unintended exchanges of a child’s data and privacy as app and device makers claim ownership of various forms of infant and child information. To map present and future concerns, this chapter will combine a detailed reading of several popular parenting apps and infant wearables with a reading of the 2017 ‘Arkangel’ episode of the dystopian near-future Black Mirror series to extrapolate the potentially quite negative future impact of such information extraction on both children as they grow, and the relationship between parents and children.
The embeddedness of digital technologies in everyday family life creates endless communication and entertainment opportunities and allows parents to keep track of the educational progress, media use, and whereabouts of their children. Whereas not all families are interconnected to the same degree, many parents and care-takers struggle with issues around screen time, online risks, and digital wellbeing. More specifically, parents who grew up without digital monitoring have a plethora of parental monitoring opportunities at their disposal. While they can engage in surveillance practices to safeguard their children, they also have to balance freedom against control. This study explores how families negotiate the tensions around power, control, and privacy that go hand in hand with interpersonal surveillance. The research focuses on nine families in the Netherlands with different set-ups and cultural backgrounds; interviews were conducted with eleven parents and eleven early adolescents. Parents discuss how they approach screen time restrictions, location tracking, social media monitoring, and student tracking systems. Their children reflect on how they experience such surveillance and describe responses ranging from acceptance to active resistance. Early adolescents use strategies to circumvent the monitoring of their digital and non-digital behavior and to keep an eye on their parents. Drawing on these findings, it becomes clear that interpersonal surveillance is embedded in broader constellations of media and communication practices and sometimes occurs in reciprocal ways. Surveillance in families can therefore best be understood as family surveillance, a lateral process of keeping track of the digital and non-digital activities and associations of family members. Open conversations about technology are advised to foster surveillance awareness, and privacy and cybersecurity resilience.
Families are characterised by individualised routines, including routines of technology (non)use and physical activity. In the study the relationships between both activities were analysed. The informants were members of Polish families meeting two conditions: carrying out regular and sustained physical activity that involves all family members living together; and implementing (common and/or differentiated) media technology regulation practices that also involve all family members.
The following research questions were posed: Why do families opt for digital regulation? What are the characteristics of their regulation practices and what role does regular physical activity play in them?
In order to get answers to those questions, a study was conducted with 30 Polish families diverse in terms of demographics, including type (full and single-parent families), number, age, gender of children, age and education of adults, type of work, place of residence, economic situation etc. Data was collected using in-depth diadic and individual semi-structured interviews, supplemented by the completion of a questionnaire about each family member. The data obtained was analysed thematically.
Results indicate that the main motivations for the introduction of technology regulation was a strong sense of loss of time to digital technology, entailing weakening family relationships and individual losses. Some of the regulation practices were tailored to adults and children, and some applied to all – the latter mainly based on physical activity as a substitute for technology use. The source of practices’ origin varies, but they were united by a belief in the naturalness of regulation, arising from deep needs. According to families, while physical activity can successfully replace digital activity to build family well-being, the reverse process is counter-productive. This is because it does not give family members that level of health, satisfaction and, above all, a sense of connection. Being physically active together allows families to regulate technology use and build close relationships and strong bond that are intended to be present now as well as future-oriented.
Despite media changes, family as a communicative figuration “remained quite stable” (Hepp, 2014, p. 156) over time. Through the past seven years of doing research with families (e.g., Ponte, Simões, Batista, Castro & Jorge, 2017; Castro, 2021), I have been witnessing how digital artefacts and the social web became increasingly infiltrated and mutually affecting and affected by families’ (e.g., communication, mediation and interaction practices, construction and displaying of memories, emotions and ties). Thus, my lens is in tune with families in their pluralistic sense – “fluid and subject to change, depending on cultural, social, and historical contexts” (Lemish, 2016, p1). Bearing in mind the latest worldwide socio-technical events and building from the concept of “doing family” (Morgan, 1996) in unpredictable late modernity (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990), I will discuss aspects of family life clearly intersected by digital media in the past three years regarding i) competencies; ii) relationships; iii) mediation.
Data were collected – respecting sanitarian guidelines (Castro, 2022) – within a longitudinal project (iTec Families) involving families (n=18) living together or apart in Portugal, UK, Africa, Brazil. Their diversity crosses cultural and socio-economic aspects, composition and structure, children’s age, and gender. Contextual factors, like children’s growing up, the enlargement of the family, COVID-19, datafication of life (Mascheroni & Siiback, 2021) (re)shaped (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) the domestication and appropriation (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) of family’s digital media ecologies in their everyday life. This is the focus of longitudinal research: to understand how parents’ decisions are taken and change across time paying attention to the active role of children following or neutralising those decisions. Analysis of results using thematic and narrative analysis point to changes in the mediatization of families’ daily lives, despite socio-economic or mediation cleavages. As a result, not even one remained untouched by the power of digitalization.
In recent years schools have embraced the use of social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram as a means to connect with children’s families and the broader community (Rosenberg, et al., 2022). The use of such platforms by schools typically involves the curation and sharing of daily school activity in the form of digital images, videos, organisational information and records. This curation and sharing practice, undertaken by schools on behalf of children and their families, contributes to the datafication of children. This occurs through outward flows of data shared with school communities, inward flows of data shared with the social media platform, and onward flows in digital data economies. Thus, the utilisation of such platforms in school contexts raises critical questions about the datafication of children, the agency of children and their families in this practice and the role of the school in protecting children’s digital rights. Research exploring this phenomenon is limited. A small number of studies have examined school leader’s uptake of digital platforms documenting the benefits and challenges (Cox & Mcleod, 2014; Bowman, Giles, Orange & Wiles. 2018). However, there is a paucity of research that employs a critical lens to understand school’s social media practice including the impacts on home and school relations and the rights of children and their families within this complex entanglement. The study described in this paper aims to understand the datafication of children through schools’ practice of sharing on official school social media sites together with parents understanding and engagement with their school social media practices. We share findings that present a detailed depiction of the data types generated through school social media practice along with parents perceptions of school social media use including the coercive nature of the practice, increased digital labour and impacts on familial agency.
This paper examines the relationships between trust, privacy, children, and parents in the context of technologically mediated interactions. I defend a trust-based conception of children’s privacy from their parents and apply it to issues within digital parenting.
With digital parenting, tensions such as parental control and child self-regulation (Wisniewski, et al. 2017) come to the fore. Parents are presented with a panoply of apps to monitor their child’s device use (Livingstone and Byrne 2018; Willson 2018). While it is widely accepted that digital parenting implicates trust in the parent-child relationship, the connections between trust, privacy, children, and parents remain under-explored. Scholars moot the idea that trust in the parent-child relationship requires privacy, but do not examine the exact boundaries of what a trust-based conception of privacy requires (e.g., Rooney 2010; Shmueli & Blecher-Prigat 2011; Mathiesen 2013; Taylor & Rooney 2016; Siibak 2019).
I fill this gap by looking to the literature on philosophy of trust (e.g., Horsburgh 1960; Baier 1986; Mullin 2005; Jones 2012; Baier 1986). I argue that a trust-based conception of privacy has two privacy rules, which are each informed by separate aspects of trust. I argue that the relationship between the parent’s vulnerability and the child’s privacy grounds “content rules”. Content rules govern the actual information that the parent can obtain that are related to their vulnerability to risk while still exhibiting trust. I then argue that the relationship between the parent’s motivational set and the child’s privacy ground “acquisitive rules”. Acquisitive rules govern the ways in which information can be acquired.
I conclude by looking at how trust-focused privacy should influence the design of parental monitoring applications and parental decision-making.
This paper focuses on the adoption of online learning platforms by schools in the UK, the increasing use of digitised forms of school-home communications, and the impacts these have on mothers with primary school aged children. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of families living in the West Midlands, this paper explores the ways in which educational technologies and digitised communications blur the spaces of home and school and impacts on mother-child relationships. Some mothers emphasised the importance of placing boundaries around ‘home time’ and ‘school time’ as a way to manage the demands from schools to engage with digitised homework. Other participants spoke about the emotion work they did to help their children to manage these early years of formal education and online homework. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the way in which the contemporary digitisation of education increases the labour of mothers and can be understood as part of the contemporary configuration of intensive motherhood. I also reflect on the ways in which mothers’ understandings of their children’s wellbeing are being shaped in relation to an increasingly datafied system of primary schooling where there is an emphasis on meeting targets.
This paper looks at the complexities of people’s engagement with and disengagement from digital media, by focusing on micro-environments of everyday situations in the scope of family life in the Portuguese context. In 2022, 88% of Portuguese households had access to the internet, with broadband or slower connection (Pordata, 2023). However, and as a response to the role of technology as a “backbone” (Lomborg & Ytre-Arne, 2021) in the daily life, some forms of disconnection have been prioritized in specific domains, such as the family. Our guiding question is: how are online and offline realms articulated in everyday parenting? We approach people’s dis/engagement with media as “embodied and affectively experienced” (Coleman & Paasonen, 2020, p. 1); and conceptualize everyday encounters with digital media in the home as atmospheres (Sumartojo & Pink, 2018), i.e., ephemeral elements of our everyday experiences and environments, that encompass the sensorial modes of engagement – including movement – as well as affective modes – including memories and imagination that are evoked and created experientially. We thus consider the materiality of devices as well as their dynamic role in particular situations of relations between people in space and time – in this case, in the home / among the family.
The paper draws on an ongoing study on the use of digital media in the context of family life, deploying ethnography (observation and interviews) with 5 diverse families with children up to 12 years-old, in Portugal. Family negotiations can be exhausting and demoralizing, especially with children and teenagers. We aim to understand how different families negotiate digital dis/connection in everyday life, and to gather more knowledge about how digital and social media culture permeates families’ lives (in care, play, information, etc), but also about how decisions occur in the family to keep parts of their everyday private, while making others public.
Genealogical platforms (such as Ancestry or MyHeritage) provide their users with the opportunity to research their family histories on their computers and smartphones. These platforms transform the ways in which individuals can research their families’ pasts and do family memory work. They offer a) vast amounts of digitized historical documents, b) DNA testing and an evaluation of users’ ancestry, as well as c) a forum for connection and collaboration among users. In my current project I analyze how genealogical platforms shape and transform media practices related to family memory – one area of datafication that affects families.
The project combines a mapping of the platforms and an analysis of the platforms’ affordances with research into the lived experiences of the platforms’ users (by means of qualitative interviews). In doing so, it zooms in on a range of problematic issues: Firstly, issues of data protection and digital traces regarding potentially sensitive information (such as DNA test results) and the use of this information by the platforms. Relatedly, it scrutinizes users’ perceptions and reflections upon these issues. Moreover, the project considers the role of algorithms and artificial intelligence in structuring the supply and consequently the interpretation of historical information by way of the selection of available historical records. Finally, it contributes knowledge on the impact of media platforms, technology and artificial intelligence on everyday life and media practices related to (family) memory.
In my presentation, I want to focus on first insights from my fieldwork and discuss how these platforms facilitate constructions of individual and collective identity and “doing family” (see also Lohmeier & Böhling, 2017), especially with regard to categories such as nationality and ethnicity.
References
Lohmeier, Christine, and Rieke Böhling. 2017. “Communicating Family Memory: Remembering in a Changing Media Environment.” Communications 42 (3): 277–92.
Children and youth socialize, interact and engage both in offline as well as online environments. These interactions are mediated by technology, are marked by the production of large amounts of (meta)data and have intensified children’s and youth’s experiences of/with the digital giving ways to what researchers have described as datafied childhoods (Mascheroni, 2020). A big part of datafied childhood is dataveillance (Van Dijck, 2014), that is the surveillance of people based on their online data; however, notwithstanding calls for a more critical examination of children’s and youth’s lived experience with digital surveillance and its implications for children’s rights as data subjects (Lupton & Williamson, 2017), little is known on how children and youth make meaning of and engage as watchers and watched in acts of dataveillance and self-surveillance. This paper presents preliminary findings of a small-scale qualitative study on youth’s practices and experiences of digital surveillance. Using personal interviews, focus group interviews and a speculative design component with 15-19 year-old participants, we sought to explore how children and youth in Cyprus understand and practice acts of digital surveillance as part of a broader question on the reconstitution of childhood as a result of digital surveillance technologies (Marx & Steeves, 2010; Steeves & Jones, 2010).
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.
As against the normalization of self-tracking technologies (Crawford et al., 2015), pregnancy apps introduce the unborn into social networking and data commodification. Through interviews with women who use, partially use and do not use such apps, the proposed presentation explores how women discuss the tension between the information gained and submitted, and how they embrace as well as resist the features that these apps afford them.
Adding to research based on interviews (Connor et al., 2018) or focus groups (Lupton, 2016) with women, and interpretive readings of the apps themselves (e.g. Lupton & Thomas, 2015), we shed light on women’s hesitations and negotiations as they “walkthrough” (Dieter et al., 2019) the app with the interviewer. In turn, this methodological move allows us to consider the extent to which users are coerced into use and are unable to opt out (Barassi, 2017), heading Wyatt’s (2014) call to incorporate non-use – and non-uses – into the study of use.
Preliminary interviews suggest that non-use is predicated on familiarity with the apps; and that the interviewees discuss pregnancy apps as residing within an ecosystem of fertility/reproductive apps, some of which (e.g. menstruation and breastfeeding) are acceptable. At this point, the commodification of the datafied body – a major cause for scholarly concern – does not come up in the interviews as the reluctance to transition from an authoritative source of information into an informal one (“I preferred to avoid that part… it was intended to create a community of pregnant women… I understand, but in practice it was stressful”); and resistance – albeit rudimentary – to potential use of personal information for political purposes (“I became pregnant when Roe v. Wade was turned… And my decision to delete the app came totally from not wanting information about when I became pregnant, or when was my last period, be part of some database.”).
Barassi, V. (2017). BabyVeillance? SM+S, 3(2).
Connor, K. et al. (2018). Descriptive, qualitative study of women who use mobile health applications. JoOG&NN, 47(6).
Crawford, K. et al. (2015). Our metrics, ourselves. EurJoCS, 18(4-5).
Dieter, M. et al. (2019). Multi-situated app studies. SM+S, 5(2).
Lupton, D. (2016). The use and value of digital media for information about pregnancy and early motherhood. BMCP&C, 16(1).
Lupton, D., & Thomas, G. (2015). Playing pregnancy. M/CJ, 18(5).
Wyatt, S. (2014), Bringing users and non-users