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
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.