Family Struggles for the Central Entertainment Hub in the Home

Gothenburg.
The next session at AoIR 2010 starts with Rachel McLean, whose interest is how technology configures the home, especially in relationship to the placement of shared entertainment technology. How is the family living room set up, and who controls the technology there, for example? This was examined for families in the northwest of England.

Social practices around the television have changed over the decades. Once, families would gather around the television in the corner of the living room like they did around the hearth; with digital technology, this gradually fragmented, though something of a digital hearth perhaps still exists in some cases. The UK family room in the year 2010 now accesses a wide variety of channels – where children’s TV was once shut down at 7 p.m., for example, some children’s channel will now be available at any time, as is a large number of other channels, as well as video games and other entertainment on demand.

Indeed, TV as we know it may be becoming extinct; we no longer follow the TV schedule but access personalised TV streams on demand or via downloads, CDs, and DVDs; mobile media access is also becoming more prevalent. TVs are now used in a communal situation especially for gaming. This technology decentres the place of children within domestic spaces and gives them more autonomy, as they now have PCs in their bedrooms, mobile phones, etc. Part of this is also driven by the miniaturisation of technology, which makes it easier to have multiple devices in different spaces in the house – but it also raises a greater awareness of the risks associated with such fragmentation.

The present study examined these trends – starting from the older model of the television as the family hearth, though the more recent metaphor of the digital hearth, and towards a new reconfiguration of the hearth especially as mobile technology continues to reconfigure the family space. There is a domestic family hearth mashup now, Rachel suggests, and this was examined in a field study involving a diverse range of eight families.

One aspect of this concerns old-fashioned struggles over who controls the remote control, and what devices are plugged into the TV; while there are arguments for having the playstation in the living room, for example, shifting it to the kids’ bedroom also means that the TV is more often available for watching movies. These conflicts are nothing new, but are also affected by the availability of multiple devices, which reduce the struggle over access somewhat, at the risk of family fragmentation. There also are patterns that show families coming together, both for unified uses and while using their personal devices in the same physical space.

Family entertainment is now centred again around the same central living space, but preferred activities remain fragmented, then; children taking control of the entertainment hub often drives the parents to their alternative spaces now. There’s a need for further, more detailed studies here.