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.
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.