Domesticating smartphones

Domesticating WhatsApp: Family, friends, work, and study in everyday communication

“…Traditional domestication approaches, partly developed from inquiries about artifacts such as computers and television sets (Aune, 1996), emphasized the presumably fixed location of media technologies within the household. Indeed, the name of the framework originally refers to the related notions of taming the wild (Bertel, 2018) and embedding media within the domestic environment (Morley, 2006). The spatial and social demarcation of the household has been at the center of different critiques of domestication (Bakardjieva, 2005).…”

Domestication Analyses and the Smartphone

“…For example, it has been argued there could be more research on people's different perceptions of content conveyed through ICTs that was of interest to some of those formulating the original domestication concept (e.g. Hartmann, 2006;Bertel, 2018; this aspect was later followed up in Sørensen's (2014) examination of the domestication of Disney products). Or we might ask more about the consequences of domesticating ICTs, for example, exploring the ways in which users might be empowered by these technologies (Bakardjieva, 2006) or how the adoption of ICTs might result in users changing their behavior (Haddon, 2011;Blank and Dutton, 2015).…”

“…That does not rule out examining the smartphone as an equivalent technology, as will be demonstrated in the case studies below. But the focus could equally well be narrowed to specific elements of the smartphone, such as Bertel's (2016Bertel's ( , 2018 studies of geolocation appsgiven that geolocation was a topic in its own right just as before the smartphone there was a sub-literature on the camera phone within mobile phone studies. In the first of these studies (Bertel, 2016), school students where positive about the smartphone in general, but rejected the 'check-in' app.…”

“…In the first of these studies (Bertel, 2016), school students where positive about the smartphone in general, but rejected the 'check-in' app. In the second study (Bertel, 2018), one girl who used to regularly get lost on the way to meetings with peers and who had had to phone them up asking for directions was delighted with the map app on her phone because it avoided that embarrassment. This particular example illustrates not only little ways in which ICT use can be empowering, but highlights the importance of interaction with social networks outside the home.…”