Information and communication technologies and everyday life: individual and social dimensions
Year: 2000
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In recent years a body of qualitative and case study research has begun to accumulate showing that users, consumers and citizens are not just passive recipients of technology but actively engage in defining and giving meaning to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).A central theme of this work is that ICTs only become meaningful in use; they are socially shaped. 1 Only through the meanings that are constructed by producers, by those who market or regulate them and by those who consume them do they have any significance.ICTs mean different things to different people; and meanings will change and often they will conflict.For these reasons, a number of underlying themes will inform our analysis:• ICTs are seen as both objects and media: ICTs are doubly articulated into everyday life as machines and media of information, pleasure, communication, • ICTs are seen as material and symbolic objects: ICTs are bought and used not just for what they can do but for what they stand for, aesthetically, in claiming social status, or in claiming membership of a group or sub-culture.• ICTs are embedded in time and space: the consumption and use of ICTs influences, and is influenced by, location in time and space.Globally, they connect and disconnect.Locally, they can raise flexibility and control.• ICTs involve users both actively and passively: users can increasingly interact with ICTs, but even the "passive" use involves choices and discrimination • ICTs shift boundaries between public and private spaces:ICTs provide new opportunities for citizenship and for surveillance, new opportunities for networking but also increased isolation.These relationships are multiple and dynamic, operating both inside and outside the home, and historically, as well as sociologically, economically and culturally.Without a mature and sociologically sensitive understanding of the present we will mistake the future.However, on the basis of the pioneering analyses analyzed below we might finally manage to avoid the traps of the utopian or dystopian thinking that still dominates many business, policy and popular discourses.2The speed and scale of household adoption of ICTs It is important to realize just how long it takes for ICTs to become fundamentally and unproblematically integrated into our lives.Recent research on the current young elderly notes how they were the first phone generation.Many experienced the arrival of the telephone at an early stage in their life, often first encountering it at work, and as a result they became entirely comfortable with it at home (Haddon and Silverstone 1996a).Many of their own parents, those we might call the older elderly, however, are often still not totally at ease with the phone, even though they may have used it much of their adult lives.They have not the relatively developed and relaxed phone manner of their children not do they use it in as many ways.More medium and short term changes can be seen in inelasticities of spending and time use.A recent Belgian study shows how in the medium term there is only a limited re-distribution of the spending of household income across broad categories of goods and services (Punie 1995).3 For example, between 1980 and 1992, spending on clothes and food, alcohol and tobacco was slightly down, while durables, leisure and telecommunication expenditure rose.In the shorter term there is considerable
Authors: Leslie Haddon, Roger Silverstone
Language: English
Subfield: General Social Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2292910485