This study reports how university students domesticate their personal laptops at the beginning of studies on a wireless campus. The aim was to examine how students integrate the laptop into their personal education experience, what sort of processes were experienced to render the laptop useful and meaningful, and how gender and IT proficiency influenced this process. Qualitative interview data with twenty students (identified and selected by quantitative survey) was analysed using the grounded theory approach during which a multi-aspect domestication process was identified. Results highlight the importance of a structured way of organising laptop initiatives in universities. It is important that students have the kind of support available that best suits their needs. Pedagogically, successful domestication enables students to integrate the computer into their learning experience. However, we argue that successful domestication allows the artefact to become more than just a tool for learning, but also an integral part of an individual's existing media environment. In effect, comfort of use and IT capability is regarded as only one way of expressing successful domestication. This article adds to the growing number of studies using domestication as an analytical and theoretical framework and considers the phenomenon in an under-researched area.

This paper presents a study of Irish households, the internet and everyday life. Social studies of technology draw heavily from anthropology, not only in ethnographic methodologies but also in the ways in which such data can be understood and interpreted within the contexts of everyday life. To achieve this, the concept of the domestication of (media) technologies has been developed to describe and analyse the processes of technology's acceptance, rejection and use. Domestication is employed as a structural and analytical framework to achieve an empirical understanding of the domestic user. Based on a critical analysis from an anthropological perspective, the paper will revise the original domestication of the concept of technology. The notion of technological black boxes and I-methodology strategies are critiqued. This paper calls for users to be conceptualised as active agents in the overall design process and not as just end users who become active once the artefact has become commodified.

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine the social adoption of the mobile phone by Irish teenagers in city, town and rural settings. It aims to investigate two key areas that have influenced the teenagers' social adoption of the mobile phone: first, the influence of locational and socio-economic factors on mobile phone usage; second, how the teenagers' adoption of recently emergent Web 2.0 applications (social-networking web sites and instant messaging services) tends to bring about a re-positioning of the mobile phone's role as a communications channel. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on a social shaping and domestication of media technologies approach, using original empirical data from a survey of teenage respondents and six focus groups. Findings -The findings suggest that the teenagers' relationship to the mobile phone is evolving as newer communications applications emerge. In particular, the technical competencies and media literacies necessary for multi-model communication are evolving fastest where locational and socio-economic conditions are most favourable. Originality/value -Although access to the mobile phone cuts across the strata of society, people's capacity to benefit from it -and from other forms of multi-modal communication -is not evenly distributed. The paper argues that, despite universal ownership of the technological device among the sample of teenagers, the mobile phone is caught up in wider digital and socio-economic divides.

This chapter introduces and discusses domestication theory—essentially about giving technology a place in everyday life—and its relevance and importance to information systems (IS) research. The authors discuss domestication within the context of the social shaping of technology and critique use and adoption theories more widely found in IS studies. The authors illustrate how domestication theory underpins studies of how Irish households find ways of using computers (or not) in their everyday life and research into the use of ICTs in UK gendered households. In conclusion they outline how developments in domestication theory can contribute to future IS research.