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.