Archived seminar
25 February 2015: An exploration of mediated intimacies and engagement with mobile, screen-based media in the home (CISC Seminar Series)
Professor Deborah Chambers from Newcastle University
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
This presentation explores the role of digital and mobile media technologies within intimate relationships in relation to the home. The aim is to examine mediated intimacies associated with today’s mobile media and social patterns of familial and household media engagement. While most studies of mobile, screen-based technologies address interactions away from home, this paper examines personal and social engagement with multiple media devices in the home. Personalised and mobile media devices facilitate new public/private interconnections, evoking notions of the ‘networked household’ and ‘networked individual’. I ask whether mobile devices combined with traditional media are corresponding with new intimacies or reinforcing traditional gendered and generational ties. The two-fold approach involves an exploration of public discourses and changing social practices. First, popular media discourses of the ‘multi-screen home’ networked households and ‘digital families’ are examined by looking at representations of mediated intimacies in the marketing and advertising of digital media in the home. Second, recent data on patterns of engagement with mobile media in households are drawn on to assess how far domestic media technology may be enhancing new intimacies of ‘family togetherness’ or managing gendered and generational separateness in the home. The paper critically engages with domestication theory and with sociological and cultural studies of intimacy, media and family life to understand domestic intimacies in relation to the contemporary mediatised home.Deborah Chambers is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. Intersecting media and cultural studies and sociology, her research areas include media cultures; changing intimate relationship in relation to media technologies, families and households. Her books include Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship, Palgrave Macmillan 2013; A Sociology of Family Life: Change and Diversity in Intimate Relations, Polity 2012; New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society, Palgrave 2006. Deborah is currently researching a book on Media, Homes and Households to explore the changing meanings and uses of media technologies in the home.
This event is open to the general public.