Smartphones and the Shifting Boundaries of Gendered Use

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Larissa Hjorth, whose focus is on how smartphones are shaping and shaped by women's roles and labour. They highlight the unbounded nature of the domestic, and the struggles of boundary making: smartphones are both empowering and exploiting gendered labour: they empower and constrain women's experiences.

Larissa interviewed some 40 smartphone users in their post-honeymoon phase (when the device was no longer new), finding that smartphones highlight how notions of home, domesticity, and everyday life are changing. Smartphones contain users as much as they are contained by them, they embody work as well as home – they increase freedom as much as they weigh users down. Smartphones remediate older media practices, and highlight the erosion between work and leisure. The analogy here is that of the caravan: not quite home, not quite car.

The smartphone as miniature caravan emphasises working from home, wherever 'home' might be; it is a space in which old gendered relationships to technology persist and are continued. That's despite the excitement of first using smartphones; after this initial period, new tacit boundaries of uses are soon negotiated.

Smartphones thus add to the paradoxes around gendered labor, generating gendered mobile publics. They afford women and older generations new avenues to participation in social media; they add to the paradoxes around gendered mobilities, labour, and the home; they serve as vehicles for remediation and convergence that blur the public and private, work and leisure, and online and offline boundaries; and they are indicative of mobile publics, which form around the new temporalities and spacialities of mobile communication.

There is a need to rethink the network theories around this. For more and more people, the introduction to being online is through the mobile phone - and work is increasingly internalised. Familiar and domestic practices are becoming both mobile and more entangled with shifting boundaries through this process.