Internet Information and Communication Behavior during a Political Moment: The Iraq War, March 2003

This article explores the Internet as a resource for political information and communication in March 2003, when American troops were first sent to Iraq, offering us a unique setting of political context, information use, and technology. Employing a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project. We examine the political information behavior of the Internet respondents through an exploratory factor analysis; analyze the effects of personal demographic attributes and political attitudes, traditional and new media use, and technology on online behavior through multiple regression analysis; and assess the online political information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War. The factor analysis suggests four factors: activism, support, information seeking, and communication. The regression analysis indicates that gender, political attitudes and beliefs, motivation, traditional media consumption, perceptions of bias in the media, and computer experience and use predict online political information behavior, although the effects of these variables differ for the four factors. The information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War differed significantly. We conclude with a brief discussion of the value of "interdisciplinary poaching" for advancing the study of Internet information practices

Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family, Gender and Gaming

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds

Análisis de la domesticación y estudio sobre el uso que hace la población infantile de los smartphones y las tablets

The article provides a sense of how the field of domestication analysis has developed over the last 25 years, showing the range of ways in which has been deployed, and how it can address social issues relating to technologies. Understanding cross-cultural differences has not been a strong feature of this framework to date, but examples are provided to indicate how this dimension could be included and developed. Finally, a case study of children’s experience of smartphones and tablets is provided to illustrate how the framework can be used and be useful

Domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life

The article first introduces the domestication approach, its origins, its key elements, and its general contributions and limitations. It then examines ways in which the domestication analysis could be developed. One issue concerns contemporary objects of study and research questions given developments in information and communication technologies since the earliest domestication studies. Other issues include developing the analysis of the centrality of ICTs in our lives. Where appropriate, these issues are illustrated by considering examples of the computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. To illustrate how the domestication framework can inform wider academic and policy fields, the final section considers its contribution to debates about the digital divide

Consuming Digital Technologies and Enacting Identities: Mothers in Mundane Daily Life

This manuscript examines mothers’ consumption of digital technologies to enact their individual, relational, and familial identities. Using phemenological interviews it finds mothers purposefully consume digital technologies to negotiate, construct, and enact identities. Specifically, mothers use a repertoire of four appropriation strategies: mastering, partnering, domesticating, and avoiding. Mastery is a multi-year project in which mothers enroll in digital educational programs, qualify, and create new professional identities. In domestication, mothers assert themselves on technology managing their inclusion/exclusion in the time and spaces of family life, thereby enacting parental identities. In contrast, partnering is collaborative; mothers consume those functionalities of technologies that help them enact their identities. In the strategy of avoidance, mothers enact their identities of being fiscally responsible, by refusing to engage with budget busting technologies. The implications of these findings for marketing new Internet of Things technologies in the smart home are discussed

Interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions - a study using mobile phone data

In this study we analyze one year of anonymized telecommunications data for over one million customers from a large European cellphone operator, and we investigate the relationship between people's calls and their physical location. We discover that more than 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart. Moreover, we find that close to 70% of users who call each other frequently (at least once per month on average) have shared the same space at the same time - an instance that we call co-location. Co-locations appear indicative of coordination calls, which occur just before face-to-face meetings. Their number is highly predictable based on the amount of calls between two users and the distance between their home locations - suggesting a new way to quantify the interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions