Infant feeding applications (IF apps) are popular mobile applications used in early parenthood, to track infants’ routines and parents’ caregiving practices, such as babies’ feeds, nappy changes, and sleep. These tools have received attention from multiple disciplines – as mobile health technologies, and as socio-cultural artefacts. In the health sciences, most research to-date has focussed on determining app quality, by assessing how well in-app information aligns with public health guidelines of infant feeding, or by evaluating apps’ potential efficacy in promoting public health breastfeeding goals. In the humanities, IF apps are commonly criticised for their role in normalising the datafication of mundane aspects of family life. This normalisation contributes to the production of ever-more complete and continuous data flows about parents and children, often without sufficient transparency to enable users to meaningfully consent or object to the sharing of their personal data. As part of a wider ecology of apps that track reproductive health, IF apps are also criticised for their gendered disciplinary politics that reinforce women’s roles as responsible (digital) reproductive citizens. Yet, little is known about the role of these tools in the wider context of family life, beyond a focus on mothers’ perspectives only. This study combined walkthroughs of Australian-designed IF apps FeedBaby and mum2mum, and interviews with Australian parents from a range of family backgrounds – including fathers, same-sex couples and single parents – to explore the role of IF apps in the context of contemporary Australian parenthood. The findings affirm the importance of critiquing IF apps as tools that can be problematically experienced as quantifying, reductive and disciplining technologies. However, within the context of family life, IF apps and their data also assume qualitative roles and meanings, for example as communication tools within the parenting team, that allow their reconceptualization as tools that can facilitate experiences of empowerment.
Aiming at crime prevention, the Snow Bright and Safe Countryside projects, launched by the Chinese government cooperating with telecommunication operators at the beginning of 2020, have promoted the installation of surveillance cameras in Chinese rural households. Many migrant worker parents who left their children behind installed cameras in rural homes not only for safety but also for family communication. Research on how family surveillance cameras construct parenthood in rural Chinese families is still limited. Therefore, this study aims to explore the construction of parenthood among migrant parents through discourse analysis of Chinese advertisements and news on surveillance camera technology use in rural households. Through the lens of (re)constructing time and space by surveillance capitalism, we look at the hidden discourses and power relations in the distant monitoring of family life.
After analysing advertisements and news about home surveillance cameras on Chinese platforms such as Baidu, Douyin, Taobao, Bilibili, we found that surveillance advertisements build demand for real-time video intercom and playback sharing, ideally not missing a single moment of child development, amplifying middle-class parents’ controlling philosophy and family position. In the surveillance news, left-behind children in lower-class families are seen and guarded, compensating for children’s loneliness and isolation. Privacy is hidden or conceded in these advertisements and news. In a mobile society, many people’s work and home are separated in time and space. The commodification of time and space is crucial to understand everyday life driven by capitalism. We argue that surveillance technology in the familial sphere gives contemporary parents a sense of control over time and space. It functions both as a commodity or communication tool and as a field of parenting practices. Digital contents generated through surveillance cameras about parent-child interactions are in turn used as news narratives of social interaction, furthering surveillance capitalism.
Keywords: left-behind children, family surveillance camera, surveillance capitalism
This study analyzes how fatherhood is performed on Instagram by examining the domains of involvement. Parental roles and behaviors have changed in the last years and are currently a relevant social and scientific topic. The way how fatherhood is performed is also a frequent subject on social media, spreading the ideal of a new fatherhood and portraying the father as committed to childcare duties. The hashtag “fatherhood” was used to identify posts on Instagram representing father involvement. A final sample of 121 posts was identified. Results depicted three main domains in fatherhood’s online representations of involvement: (1) child caregiving; (2) fathers as a source of the child’s affection; and (3) fathers involved in play, committed to the child’s interests and offering new opportunities of stimulation. The display of fatherhood as a role requiring dedication and effort also emerged, but to a lesser extent. Nevertheless, only positive emotions were shared, depicting pleasure in the performed role, and communicating an ideal and self-enhancing profile. Moreover, posts seemed to disseminate an ideal of fatherhood rather than raise questions or discuss the challenges related to it. Findings uncover how media social representations of fatherhood are still an unfinished process, failing to capture diversity and challenges in contemporary families.
The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus both in Poland and around the world has caused anxiety, social tensions and fear. The “new normality” became a fact overnight, and with it the uncertainty of tomorrow and difficulties in everyday functioning. The restrictions related to the pandemic have brought huge changes to almost every area of life. One of them is education. Since the introduction of the epidemiological state, many modifications have been introduced in Polish schools. It is worth taking a closer look at the assessments and feelings that remote education and educational practices used today arouse. The subject of the speech is the search for an answer to the question about the evaluation of educational applications currently used in educational processes in Poland. In addition, the subject of research was the issue of adequacy and functionality of the adopted solutions. The considerations end with proposals of recommendations, which, if taken into account in the process of planning and implementing e-learning in the future, can bring measurable benefits, both for teachers, parents and guardians, as well as for students themselves.
Hochschild (2003) argued that individuals face a commodity frontier – the expansion of the market into intimate life as care is privatized. Amazon continues to pursue this frontier with “Alexa Together,” an eldercare system facilitated by the world’s most popular voice assistant. Unlike nursing or companion robots often referenced in discussions of care AI, Amazon does not purport to replace human caregivers; rather it allows individuals to “check in on loved ones with help from Alexa.” Feminist STS critiques of Alexa have focused on the VA as secretary (Lingel & Crawford, 2020), “smart wife” (Strengers & Kennedy, 2020), and domestic servant (Phan, 2019), but this new program evokes the home care worker, a heavily surveilled workforce comprised largely of low-wage women of color. Eldercare monitoring systems like Alexa Together create multiple layers of surveillance – intimate, workplace, and corporate – and they are an excellent case study for exploring the blurry boundaries between public and private. In this study, I explore Alexa Together’s relationship to both care and surveillance through a qualitative content analysis of its public-facing materials, including video advertisements, blog posts, FAQs, how-to videos, and customer support guides, with attention to the visions, of care, home, family, and data collection presented. I observe three key themes emerging throughout the materials. First, monitoring via Alexa Together is portrayed as a form of mediated intimacy between “loved ones,” across distance. Secondly, there is a focus on privacy, but only at the intimate level. While “intimate surveillance” (Levy, 2014) is seen as a threat, data collection by Amazon is minimized. Finally, Alexa Together presents a shaky corporate care infrastructure based on the technology’s “imagined affordances” (Nagy & Neff, 2015) rather than its actual capabilities. These factors are cause for concern, as monitoring technologies are increasingly proposed as market solutions to the growing eldercare crisis worldwide.
In the digital age, parents are grappling with the demands of intensive motherhood and involved fatherhood, they are also trying to find ways to manage their children’s emergence into the wider world. Monitoring children is by no means a new practice, but it is increasingly becoming technologised through the use of family surveillance products (FSPs). These products, whereby parents can monitor their children’s geolocation, their spending, their connected device usage, as well as their ‘screen time’, promise much in the way of allaying risks. This paper seeks to propose that FSPs are the means through which intimate surveillance (Leaver 2015, 2017) is enacted in everyday life.
This paper, comprised of data from the author’s PhD thesis, provides an original contribution to the field by taking into account the perspectives of both parents and children in the same work. Diverse members of sixteen different families were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews, with the resulting data analysed through the precepts of grounded theory. In addition to this, 1026 media clips and 2162 app store reviews for FSPs used by families were also gathered and analysed, in order to situate families’ reasons for using these products in a wider social context. Insights into surveillance, gender, risk, consumption, contemporary parenting, and contemporary childhood will be offered.
The ‘platform family’ (Goulden 2020) is an engineered simulacra of domestic life, serving to pacify it such that it might be stabilised and circulated through tech platforms’ markets as a commodity. The platform family marks the ongoing, concerted effort to capture domestic life in tech companies’ ecosystems, via a multitude of devices and software infrastructures. I position this as a second ‘industrial revolution of the home’ (cf Schwartz Cowan 1976), the first being the impact of electrification and white goods and the associated industry advertising campaigns, which whilst largely overlooked, profoundly remade both the doings and imaginaries of domestic life. My talk focuses on one specific dimension of this second industrial revolution of the home – relationship breakup and post-breakup life – which is to be the subject of a planned research project. Having set out the concept of the platform family, I will move on to discuss the tensions and outright contradictions between it and the nexus of human relations it seeks to render, reading these renderings through Scott’s (1999) notion of the ‘bureaucratic imagination’, in which platform developers’ mapping and would-be optimisation of domestic life serves to transform it in ways both absurd and harmful. I end with a set of research questions which these developments pose for separating and separated families.
Previous studies have shown that digital parenting (using digital technologies in parental practices) may increase parental pressure and alter the distribution of labour between family members and among the family and other institutions such as daycares (Lim, 2019; Beckman & Mazmanian, 2020). Here, we examine how this argument holds up in the Danish context, where gender parity in parenting, female employment and daycare provision are considered pillars of the welfare state. To understand how digital media shape family dynamics, this study integrates theories of social reproduction, digital labour, and intersectionality. Empirically, this research uses a longitudinal approach and consists of more than 40 in-depth interviews with parents of children aged 0-12 living in Denmark. The study finds that various types of labour are involved in digital parenting in Denmark, using both state and commercial platforms. These include subsistence activities, such as online grocery shopping, but also forms of immaterial labour such as performing digital kin work or teaching emotional and communication management to children who are starting to interact with digital media. While digital media can help with some aspects of parenting, this study finds that much of the immaterial labour cannot be delegated to them. Moreover, digital tools intensify some types of pre-existing labour (e.g., relational communication) and create novel types of work for parents, including user labour (Jarrett, 2022). Finally, through the use of an interactive and visual tool inspired by Doucet’s household portrait (2001), the interviews reveal that different types of labour are unevenly distributed within households and among members of different social groups. Following Lai (2021), this paper argues that differences in the distribution of digitally mediated reproductive labour are likely to exacerbate inequalities, adding a “digital shift” and subjecting parents’ practices to extensive datafication and commodification.
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The parkrun events have expanded exponentially over the past decade since it was ‘a time trial’ (parkrun.org.uk). Every Saturday 9 am sharp (in England and Wales, start time may vary in other countries) hundreds of runners gather in local parks to join a 5k running event organised by local volunteers (and 2k run on Sunday 9am for children aged 4-15). Through running, volunteering, organising the events, participants have been generating a vast amount of data. The organisation parkrun has become a data institution.
This paper discusses the parkrun data practices (core and peripheral) and data cultures and how that shapes a family’s routines and relationship. Based on autoethnography and content analysis of social media data on Facebook and Twitter, this paper shows that parkrun, the weekly 5k run on a Saturday morning and the weekly 2k junior run on a Sunday morning across the UK, has had impacts on shaping a family’s routines and subsequently changed the relationships between family members (parents and children, between partners). This paper identifies the visible and invisible data practices and different types of labour. Through examining the data practices and labour, this paper observes positive changes in a family as well as some discontinuities or frictions (for example, which parent can afford to do the running in a family with young children). Sociological concepts such as temporality, (in)visibility, and labour (emotional labour, unpaid labour) will be employed to critically examine the parkrun phenomenon and its impacts on families in the UK.
This paper examines how 1970s feminist demands around social reproduction are revisited in the contemporary promotional mediascape. It uses the brand ‘Fairplay’ as a case study; Fairplay is a book, podcast, website, social media presence, documentary, deck of cards, facilitator training – owned by the microcelebrity Eve Rodsky. I contextualise this with the resurgence of contemporary media addressing the gendered division of labour in the home, such as books like Equal Partners by Kate Mangino.
This paper looks at these mediated debates alongside household task apps, in particular the software applications Tody and Done. I argue that these digital products and branded materials are driven by ‘technosolutionism’ (Morozov) where ’Silicon Valley sets time’ (Wajcman 2018). They offer the solution to the circulating social anxieties around burnout, life hacks and achieving work-life balance – all of which are classed, gendered and racialised.
Methodologically I approach these materials in two ways. One is through the lens of branding, asking how questions of social reproduction are marketed. I also use ‘the walk-through method’ (Light et al 2018), which involves exploring the apps’ vision, operating model, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, systems around data collection and/or subscription.
This paper investigates what gendered, classed and racialised imaginings of the household are baked into their design. And to what extent are these reproducing traditional hierarchies of the home? How are second wave campaigns around social reproduction revisited, reimagined and branded?
Datafication of family life makes “the problematic relation between the home and the outside” (to use David Morley’s words) complex, multi-faceted and contradictory as never before. My paper seeks to address these challenges by focusing on mediatization of households by empirical investigation (IDIs and FGIs with “family members”) of mundane media practices, shared notions of space, and internal and external household social relations. In this regard, media are embedded in domestic routines and may foster new ones: boundaries of mediated domesticities differ for each family member, while being unstable, incoherent, and sometimes even contradictory.
The goal of the paper is thus to learn how family members negotiate home privacies by media-oriented practices. In particular, I seek to reconstruct both symbolic and material acts of privacy negotiations that altogether establish (and sometimes disrupt) boundaries between home and the outside world. Thus, I analyze family privacies as (a) always complex, context-bound and constantly reconsidered, (b) shaped by imaginaries (understandings, expectations, and evaluations) and practices that mutually reinforce each other, and (c) subjects of ongoing negotiations.
In particular, I discuss:
– horizontal acts of privacy violations performed by colleagues, friends and, not least, family members;
– changing limits of the private – being challenged, flexible, prone to violation, and subject of mutual negotiations;
– platformization of education/work environments escalating power-related tensions affecting family members: class-related pressures (shortage of resources including hardware, space & time), growing excess of power within particular relations during the pandemic (distant learning, tracking and desktime apps, parental/supervisor control software);
– new norms as response to platformization: by drawing upon the Raymond Williams idea of culture as a whole way of life, the concept of self-exposure as a whole way of life (when mediated visibility is ongoingly negotiated and compromised) is introduced and discussed how it affects family life.
Risky sharenting occurs when parents and guardians regularly share sensitive and identifying information about children on social media platforms. The practice fuels the datafication of children’s lives, exposing them to risks of cyberharms whilst potentially contaminating their online and digital identities.
This paper unravels the infrastructural and structural barriers impeding ongoing efforts to disrupt legal but harmful digital cultures of parenting of which risky sharenting represents an example. To achieve its objectives, the paper draws on insights from zemiology (the study of social harms) to analyse the policies instituted by social media platforms and the data from a digital passive ethnography of a Facebook group of parents practising sharenting.
With insights from the documentary analysis and ethnography which form part of an interdisciplinary study of sharenting funded by the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC), the paper reveals that whilst the infrastructural barriers to harm prevention are posed by the design logics and rationalities of social media platforms, structural obstacles stem from regulatory gaps in contemporary AI governance. Together, these empower and enable the designers of the main social media platforms to embed in their technologies, visible and invisible affordances capable of inviting and facilitating harmful forms of use.
This paper draws on the findings of the discourse analysis and digital ethnography to develop a remedial framework that outlines the harm causation process enabled by regulatory gaps and technology affordances, and the points at which preventative policies should be introduced to disrupt the process. Through its analysis of the nexus of regulatory gaps, technology affordances, and harms, the paper advances the interdisciplinary scholarship on AI ethics and governance. More specifically, by providing the empirical example of risky sharenting, the paper expands the nascent literature on the harms of emerging cultures of digital parenting facilitated by AI technologies.
The ConnecteDNA research project explores the impact of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT) on gamete (egg and sperm) donor conception. One of the implications of the increased popularity of DTCGT is that donors, donor-conceived people and parents through donor conception can share their (or their child’s) DNA data on DTCGT databases and, using the ‘matching’ function these sites offer, in combination with social media platforms and ‘official’ sources of information, sometimes very easily, and sometimes completely unexpectedly, identify unknown genetic relatives.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with donors, donor-conceived people and parents through donor conception, we explore the power of the DTCGT companies, in combination with social media platforms, over bodily material re-incarnated into the internet. In that environment, DNA data is no longer an embodied blueprint, unknowable until it plays out in the space-time of someone’s life. Rather, DNA information in electronic form has, for donors, donor-conceived people, and their families, the power to interrupt, to radically (re)shape, or transform families. DTCGT, often marketed as harmless fun, is sometimes just that. However, DNA shared through DTCGT sites has relational consequences that can also shock, traumatise and cause deep rifts within family landscapes. Our research explores (whether and) how donors, donor-conceived people, and their families make sense of life after finding or uncovering information from DTCGT, and how they think the regulatory environment needs to change to offer protection for future families through donor conception.
Family intervention is a long-established mechanism of state control, but recent technological developments are facilitating new regulatory capacities and objectives. This paper will explore how contemporary policy interventions in the UK are converging around a technological solutionist ideology that centres family relationships as core instruments of social management. The last decade has seen a marked techno-administrative turn, with family state relationships increasingly mediated through online portals and dashboards. Over the last few years this data centric model has accelerated towards an algorithmic approach to governance through the incorporation of big data surveillance, predictive analytics and behavioural interventions to monitor and regulate populations. We trace the embedding of data collection frameworks into apparently conventional family intervention programs and show how this ‘datification’ was made into a core delivery tool. We also highlight how secrecy, or at the very least strategic silence, has restricted public knowledge of how and why data is being collected and used in the UK. We show how parents and children are being quantified and translated into data points to support new logics of choice manipulation, ceding unprecedented power to financiers, data analytic companies, platform developers and big tech companies. We argue that public and private data extraction and its furthering of behaviourist agendas have serious implications for families and as such deserve critical scrutiny.
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Families currently use a range of technologies to locate, track, and inform each other of their physical location and activities. These include GPS-enabled devices and dedicated location-based software applications such as Life360. To date, Whilst research has focused on perceptions and uses of these tracking technologies within private family contexts. To date, however, there is no research into how these technologies are received in the wider public imagination. This paper contributes to knowledge about family location tracking technologies by investigating public representation and debate around their uses, meanings, and impacts. The study offers a topic-based and thematic content analysis of public conversations about Life360 and family tracking apps on three key social media platforms – Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. The study offers both a platform-specific and cross-platform analysis to understand how these technologies are publicly perceived and contested. The themes identified across the three platforms align with their varied cultures of use and platform vernaculars, with Twitter emphasizing newsworthy topics and events, YouTube focusing on commercial product reviews and tutorials, and TikTok posts using humor and memes to express everyday experiences and political expressions. Finally, the cross-platform analysis highlights the power of an antagonist and ambivalent platform vernacular found within the younger user community on TikTok to influence wider public topics of discussion across other social and mainstream media.
Families are increasingly using apps and devices that provide detailed information about the location and activities of children and other family members. While typically performed for benevolent reasons such as maintaining child safety, tracking technologies like Life360 and Find My Phone raise concerns about snooping and surveillance. This paper examines parental behaviours and attitudes towards this controversial practice via an online survey which collected responses from Australian parents of children aged 5-18. A significant number of parents reported using tracking tools. Parents’ views about the practice were sometimes ambivalent and in disagreement. Perspectives variously included: defending geo-tracking as conducive to child wellbeing and family management and logistics, attacking the language of surveillance used to describe it, and opposing the use of these technologies as antithetical to child independence and choice. After exploring such themes, the paper builds on literature associated with child and family location tracking by identifying and critically discussing the socio-ethical issues of changing family norms associated with powerful child monitoring technology, child autonomy and consent, and the normalisation of geo-tracking and surveillance. The discussion employs Helen Nissenbaum’s concept of contextual integrity to evaluate family and child privacy and to illuminate the socio-ethical complexity of this evolving technological practice.
This paper presents one chapter from my PhD thesis, which uses feminist and queer approaches to consider the human rights impact of the collection and sharing of data in children’s services in England. My thesis draws on critical data studies to examine how the collection and use of data interact with systems of power: they shape who can know what about the world, and to what uses this knowledge can be put. This chapter examines one specific case study in existing programming in children’s social care: the ‘Troubled Families Programme.’ This programme, as I show, has as a key objective the increasing use of data by the local authorities. I will argue that the concept of ‘family’ in this data does not correspond with how the concept is defined in law, policy or practice.
I situate the collection and sharing of data within the history of information-gathering and decision-making in children’s services and with the political choices which have shaped service delivery and datafication. Classification and categorisation are used to define the ‘family’ as a unit of analysis, which enables the identification of the ‘problem family,’ and further its definition as implicitly outside of the norm. Through examining the ways in which data systems classify, categorise and stereotype individuals who are known to social services, I show how the expectation that individual and family lives are legible to computers is used to normalise certain forms of families, and stereotype those who do not comply as ‘troubled.’ I argue that the use of data in this programme encourages and naturalises simplistic, Aristotelian classification: both to categorise people into families, and in order to classify families into ‘troubled’ and (implicitly) ‘normal.’
Data collection and sharing is portrayed as actively beneficial for child welfare provision in the UK: however, in this paper, I argue that it promotes a simplistic view of what makes a good family. In place of families that work together, and state support that works to support them, the ‘Troubled Families Programme’ and its associated datafication project support an antiquated idea of what makes a good family, and promote work as the solution to all ills.
The paper discusses and explains the reasons that disparities and discrepancies prevail between Global North and Global South with regard to datafied family and society in general. The main question is to identify why the Global South is reluctant, dubitative even hermetically closed to reveal family secrets and facts.
Algeria as part of the South is a case study in this paper. Thus, in this country, characteristics of opacity and conservatism values and principles appear to prevail without challenges. Also, fields of culture, education, ethics, religion and politics constitute the main obstacles and hurdles to build up a datafied family that lead to family dynamics. More than that, social inequality, gap trust, injustice, lack of transparency , lack of law and order, freedom of the press contributed to adopt secretive and discreet attitudes.
It is assumed that the democratisation of the society is intimately linked to the level of political awareness, openness, commitment, civil society, citizenship engagement and in this case, Algeria is still striving to achieve such democratic goals, values and practices.
Yet, the conception and perception and implementation of datafied society are far from being well explained and understood. Algeria has inherited a socialist regime with unique party system and one way of thinking and subsequently rejecting opposite views. Citizens are trying very hard to catch up with a new political, economic and cultural environment based on principles on plurality and diversity of opinions and ideas.
So, if my paper is accepted I will provide some answers on the problematic difficulties and constraints of setting up datafied family in the Global South and Algeria in particular.