Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Research Publications

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    Families courting the Web: the Internet in the everyday life of household families
    Waller, Vivienne ( 2000)
    Popular reactions to having the Internet at home include exaggerated fears that families will split up as a result of secret on-line romances and fears that children will learn how to build bombs at home. The Preliminary Stanford Institute Report Internet and Society (2000) which looks at the social consequences of the Internet similarly seems to presume that people are passive consumers of the technology. At the other extreme are studies which suppose that consumers have complete control over the effects of the technology. For example, Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) tend towards a notion of complete agency of the consumer with their model of the appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion of information and communication technologies into the household. In this paper, I present findings from a series of in-depth interviews with different types of Australian household families to reveal the diversity of responses to the Internet. Conceiving of the family as a process of continual renegotiation, I theorise the way in which the Internet intersects with the daily life of household families as both an effect of the way in which individuals enact their understanding of family, while simultaneously, use of the Internet enables new performances of the family. Both the technology and the individual members are actors and the performance of family at any time is always an achievement rather than the predictable result of the interaction of the technology with a coherent household.