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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