Managing everyday digital life in the mediatized home: On the Interplay of old and new media within the domestic sphere
Corinna Peil, Jutta Röser
For a few years now, the Internet is said to radically change the media landscape as well as people’s media usage patterns. In our paper, we want to challenge this perception of online technologies as undisputed promoters of cultural change and offer a sophisticated view on the implications of the increased pervasiveness of digital media. Asking about the changes of domestic communication cultures that can be linked to the current mediatization of the home we call for the consideration of everyday life as meaning giving sphere of media consumption. As no medium works completely independently nor establishes its own separate space of cultural meaning it is crucial to understand how the users attribute functions to the media and create their specific media menu. Their interplay of media is mainly managed within the home since the home is the place where media use and other domestic activities and interactions are set in relation to each other. Drawing on mediatization theory and on the domestication concept we are researching the mediatized home based on a qualitative panel study with two stages of data collection in 2008 and 2011. In 25 ethnographically oriented household studies with heterosexual couples in Germany (quoted by age and educational background) we examined the impact of digital life from the perspective of the users and analyzed the changes over time. Theoretically grounded in cultural media studies our research is not technology driven but based on the assumption that the situations, social constellations and contexts of media use have to be considered when new media technologies enter the field. Overall questions of the research project aim at the emergence of participation, the negotiation of fragmentation and community and at changing gender constellations in the context of domestic media use. By presenting selected results of our study the paper will give insights into the present state of the digital mediatization process unfolding within the home. Rather than a predominance of online media the findings suggest a dynamic co-existence of older and newer media that is deliberately managed by the household members. This is reflected in our typology of domestic media usage patterns. We distinguish between three different types of households that are characterized according to the role the Internet plays within their media menu: Internet as (1) marginal, (2) integrated and (3) convergent medium. At this level, the data hints at a persistence of everyday life contexts within the home; convergent uses of the Internet still apply to only a minority of households. More obvious changes are related to a process that we call the ‘domestic mobilization of media’: Due to the popularity of portable media for home uses (e.g. the laptop computer and the smartphone) media increasingly lose their designated place within the domestic sphere. This makes room for a complex situation and relationship management, which is deeply connected to the use of media. The paper will elaborate more closely on these facets of the mediatized home and will discuss their consequences for domestic communication cultures.