Consuming Technologies

Media and Information in Domestic Spaces

Eric Hirsch, Roger Silverstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134817566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Consuming Technologies opens for analysis some crucial but rarely examined areas of social, cultural and economic life. At its core is a concern with the complex set of relationships that mark and define the place of the domestic in the modern world, and an explanation of the relationship between the domestic and public spheres as they are mediated by consumption and technology.

Part I
Conceptual and thematic issues

Chapter 1
Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household ¹

Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch and David Morley

In this chapter we sketch out the framework of a model aimed towards understanding the nature of the relationship between private households and public worlds and the role of communication and information technologies in that relationship. ²

‘No general model of how people use objects can ignore household practices and relations’ suggests James Carrier in a recent (1990:3) paper. The reverse is also true. No general model of household practices and relations can ignore how people use objects. But when those objects are communication and information technologies: televisions, telephones, videos and computers, the problems of modelling become extremely complex.

Why? Why do communication and information technologies pose especial problems? One simple answer is, of course, that these technologies are not just objects: they are media. And it is their status as media which distinguishes them relatively, if not absolutely, from other objects such as plants or pictures, and other technologies such as refrigerators or hair dryers or hammers. That difference is relative and not absolute because information and communication technologies are also objects (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981), bought for their aesthetics as well as their function, and valued (or not) in the same way as other possessions are. They are also technologies, and like other technologies they have had and will continue to have, an impact on the social and economic order of the household (Cowan 1989). But communication and information technologies have a functional significance, as media; they provide, actively, interactively or passively, links between households, and individual members of households, with the world beyond their front door, and they do this (or fail to do this) in complex and often contradictory ways. Information and communication technologies are, as we have argued in previous papers, doubly articulated into public and private cultures.

In other papers (especially Silverstone et al. 1989; Silverstone 1990b) we have discussed the significance of information and communication technologies in the home from a number of different perspectives, including the following: the significance of family system and structure and the particular culture and patterns of behaviour within the family/household as a basis for understanding the appropriation of technologies into the domestic sphere; the problem of the ‘embedding’ of the family/household in the wider environment of work and leisure; the relationship between the public and the private and of the role of information and communication technologies and services in creating a basis for the construction of personal and national identity; the media’s involvement in the construction of domestic time and space; ways of approaching technology as culture in such a way as to open its meaning and its uses to construction and negotiation within the household; the issue of the gendering of technology, not as intrinsic to technologies, but as an aspect of its construction through gender relations within households and their marketing; finally, the problem of consumption as a way of identifying the overarching mechanisms through which both objects and meanings, technologies and texts, are appropriated by individuals and households, and in that appropriation define a position (or series of positions) for themselves both in public and in their private spheres.

What we have not yet done is to provide an integrative frame for the consideration of household practices and relations and the consumption and use of information and communication technologies, as objects and as media. This is the task of the present chapter.

THE MORAL ECONOMY OF THE HOUSEHOLD

In pursuit of this notion of the household as a moral economy we draw on a literature, principally in anthropology (Appadurai 1986; Cheal 1988; Parry and Bloch 1989) and, albeit on a broader canvas, in historical research (Thompson 1971), in which households are conceived as part of a transactional system of economic and social relations within the formal or more objective economy and society of the public sphere. Within this framework households are seen as being actively engaged with the products and meanings of this formal, commodity- and individual-based economy. This engagement involves the appropriation of these commodities into domestic culture—they are domesticated—and through that appropriation they are incorporated and redefined in different terms, in accordance with the household’s own values and interests.

Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (1989) are concerned, in their discussions, with the meanings of money. These meanings are, they argue, subject to transformation as they cross the boundaries between the public world of individual- and commodity-based transactions and the private world of domestic reproduction, where a different set of values associated with the longer-term interests of the social or cosmic order is dominant. The meanings of money are negotiable in the same way that others have argued that the meanings of media and information are negotiable: vulnerable to the active or reactive work of individuals and households as they transform and translate the public and alienating offerings of the formal economy into accessible and acceptable terms.

Indeed we can see these processes at work at both a macro-social and a micro-social level. Whole cultures (if one can talk about such things) faced with a monetary economy (Parry and Bloch 1989), an imposed set of religious beliefs (Bastide 1978) or new media (Ferguson 1990) negotiate with the meanings of the new impositions, and with varying degrees of success forge a specific symbolic reality which stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions either in the exchange of commodities, religious conversion or in the ‘globalization’ of the new world information order. And equally these processes take place in the practices of everyday life (de Certeau 1984): crucially so within the domestic sphere, where the public meanings inscribed by and through commodities, beliefs and media and information consumption are similarly open to negotiation, a negotiation defined by and articulated through what we want in this chapter to call the ‘moral economy of the household’. ³

One way of both exploring and revealing the particular quality of this moral economy is through what Igor Kopytoff (1986) calls the biography of the thing (or object). Things have biographies in the same way as individuals do and their lives are not just a matter of change and transformation but through those changes and transformations they reveal the changing qualities of the shaping environments through which they pass:

The biography of a car in Africa would reveal a wealth of cultural data: the way it was acquired, how and from whom the money was assembled to pay for it, the relationship of the seller to the buyer, the uses to which the car is regularly put, the identity of its most frequent passengers and of those who borrow it, the frequency of borrowing, the garages to which it is taken and the owner’s relation to the mechanics, the movement of the car from hand to hand and over the years, and in the end, when the car collapses, the final disposition of its remains. All of these details would reveal an entirely different biography from that of a middle-class American, or Navajo, or French peasant car.

(Kopytoff 1986:67)

In the context of contemporary society, and in the framework defined by our present study of both domestic life and the place of communication and information technologies within it, this notion has much to recommend it. For information and communication technologies define both some of the main routes along which the biographies of ideas and meanings, information and pleasures, are constructed, but also they themselves, as objects and as things, have their own biographies as they too become domesticated into the distinct cultures of families and households.

Indeed, although it is not possible to develop this here, it must be said that objects in general and information and communication technologies in particular have not one biography but many. These various overlapping and interconnecting biographies are those of the individual object (my computer), the product (the Olivetti M24), the generic technology (computers). Through these various biographical lines, the life of an object can be traced in all its glorious certainty and uncertainty, from invention to production to marketing to use and disuse, and the uniqueness of that life can be used as a tracer of the social and cultural contexts of its continuous creation and recreation. And, from the point of view of their status as media (and therefore their double articulation), the computer software, the television programmes and the telephone conversations also have biographies as they too pass through a succession of phases and stages in their life cycles and as they reveal, in their passage, the containing cultures and environments which help define their particular meanings. ⁴

The moral economy of the household is therefore both an economy of meanings and a meaningful economy; and in both of its two dimensions it stands in a potentially or actually transformative relationship to the public, objective economy of the exchange of goods and meanings. The household is a moral economy because it is both an economic unit, which is involved, through the productive and consumptive activities of its members, in the public economy, and at the same time it is a complex economic unit in its own terms (Pahl 1990). The household is a moral economy because the economic activities of its members within the household and in the wider world of work, leisure and shopping are defined and informed by a set of cognitions, evaluations and aesthetics, which are themselves defined and informed by the histories, biographies and politics of the household and its members. These are expressed in the specific and various cosmologies and rituals that define, or fail to define, the household’s integrity as a social and cultural unit. Within the moral economy of the household the principles of personal valuation and the bases of exchange and reciprocity will be, with varying degrees of intensity, distinguished and distinguishable from those that operate in the market and the public sphere. Different households in contemporary society will share elements of their moral economies according to their positions within the social structure, of course, but equally each household will reveal a particular and unique culture which provides the basis for the security and identity of the household or family as a whole, as well as that of its individual members (see chapter 13).⁵

Objects and meanings, technologies and media, which cross the diffuse and shifting boundary between the public sphere where they are produced and distributed, and the private sphere where they are appropriated into a personal economy of meaning (Miller 1987), mark the site of the crucial work of social reproduction which takes place within the household’s moral economy. Information and communication technologies are, of course, crucially implicated in this work of social reproduction, not just as commodities and appropriated objects, but as mediators of the social knowledges and cultural pleasures which facilitate the activities of consumption as well as being consumables in their own right.

To understand the household as a moral economy, therefore, is to understand the household as part of a transactional system, dynamically involved in the public world of the production and exchange of commodities and meanings. But that involvement is not simply a passive one. At stake is the capacity of the household or the family to create and sustain its autonomy and identity (and for individual members to do the same) as an economic, social and cultural unit. In the continuous work of reproduction—and via the mesh of class position, ethnicity, geography and the rest—the household engages in a process of value creation in its various daily practices: practices that are firmly grounded in, but also constitutive of, its position in space and time and which provide the bases for the achievement of what Anthony Giddens defines as ‘ontological security’—a sense of confidence or trust in the world as it appears to be (Giddens 1989:278).⁶ At stake too— and this is particularly true in an advanced capitalist society—is the family/household’s ability to display, both to itself and to others, through the objectification of those practices, its competence and its status as a participant in a complex public economy (Douglas and Isherwood 1980; Bourdieu 1984; Miller 1987). Different families will draw on different cultural resources, based on religious beliefs, personal biography, or the culture of a network of family and friends, and as a result construct a (more or less permeable, more or less defended) bounded environment—the home. Their success or failure is also, of course, a matter of political and economic resources.

The moral economy of the household is therefore grounded in the creation of the home, ⁷ which may or may not be a family home but which will certainly be gendered, and which itself is multiply structured, both spatially and temporally (Giddens 1984:119). And while mediated and non-mediated meanings, commodities and objects are formed and transformed as they pass across the boundary that separates the private from the public spheres, it is the quality of the achievement of ‘home-ness’—that which turns space into place, that which supports the temporal routines of daily life—which expresses the project which Giddens sees as particular, and particularly problematic, in modern society (cf. Giddens 1984:119; 1990). Objects and meanings, in their objectification and incorporation within the spaces and practices of domestic life, define a particular semantic universe for the household in relation to that offered in the public world of commodities and ephemeral and instrumental relationships. But they do so through an evaluative—a moral—project, which in turn results in the creation of a spatially and temporally bounded sense of security and trust, a sense of security and trust without which domestic (indeed any) life would become impossible.

Information and communication technologies make the project of creating ontological security particularly problematic, for media disengage the location of action and meaning from experience, and at the same time (and through the same displaced spaces) claim action and meaning for the modern world system of capitalist social and economic (and moral) relations. ⁸ Indeed, the media pose a whole set of control problems for the household, problems of regulation and of boundary maintenance. These are expressed generally in the regular cycle of moral panics around new media or new media content, but on an everyday level, in individual households, they are expressed through decisions to include and exclude media content and to regulate within the household who watches what and who listens to and plays with and uses what. Similarly, and in relation to media other than television or the video, for example in relation to the telephone, access to incoming and well as outgoing calls is both constitutive of individual identity (the adolescent constructs her or his identity and social network through it; the mother of the family takes responsibility for the maintenance of the conjugal kin or friendship network through it) and the subject of regulation (the costs of calling, but also anxieties about unwelcome calls).

The computer, too, in its problematic status as games machine, as educator, or as work-facilitator, potentially and actually extends and transforms the boundaries around the home (both homework and the games exchange culture, as well as possible links with school in reality—and the magical potential ascribed to the technology in fantasy) and can threaten to shift or undermine what is taken for granted in the routines of domestic life. In fact, of course, this challenge is often thoroughly dealt with by the technology’s incorporation into the moral economy of the household: it is the computer which is, as often as not, transformed by this incorporation, much more than the routines of the household. But it is worth pointing out that it is in having to face and to manage these various media-instigated (and other) challenges that the moral economy of the household is thrown into relief and visibility, for the members of the household as well as for those, like us, who observe and interpret.

ELEMENTS OF THE TRANSACTIONAL SYSTEM IN WHICH THE MORAL ECONOMY OF THE HOUSEHOLD IS EXPRESSED

We would like to distinguish four non-discrete elements or phases in the dynamics of the household’s moral economy as it is constituted in the transactional system of commodity and media relations:

— appropriation

— objectification

— incorporation

— conversion.

Information and communication technologies are, as we have already suggested, involved in all aspects of these processes. But they are so involved in a particularly intensive and compelling way. This is by virtue of their ‘double articulation’ ⁹ in economy and culture, and by virtue of their status as both objects and media. Both the television and the television programme are objects to be consumed, and to be consumed in ways dependent on the particular cultures of the household (Leal 1990). However, television’s double articulation into domestic culture extends beyond its status simply as object and medium, for in its status as medium and through the provision of services, information and entertainment (each of which is respectively a commodity) television provides the basis for an ‘education’, a competence, in all aspects of contemporary culture (Haralovich 1988). Television is, of course, usually the ‘leading object’ (Lefebvre 1971) in this double articulation, but to a lesser, though still to a significant, extent this argument holds for all information and communication technologies. The VCR, the computer and the telephone, each in their different ways provides (or fails...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword: The mirror of technology
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Conceptual and thematic issues
• Part II: Information and communication technologies in the home
• Part III: Appropriations
• Postscript