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.