The Networked Household

Abstract

The authors argue that individuals, rather than family solidarities, have become the primary unit of household connectivity. Many households do not operate as traditional densely knit groups but as more sparsely knit social networks where individuals juggle their somewhat separate agendas and schedules. At a time when many people enact multiple, individual roles at home, in the community and at work, the authors ask: how do adult household members communicate with each other? How do adult household members use information and communication technologies (ICTs) to organize, communicate and coordinate their leisure and social behavior both inside and outside the home? Interviews and surveys conducted in 2004–2005 in the Toronto, Canada area of East York show that households remain connected – but as networks rather than solidary groups. The authors describe how networked individuals bridge their relationships and connect with each other inside and outside the home. ICTs have afforded household members the ability to go about on their separate ways while staying more connected – by mobile phone, email and IM – as well as by traditional landlines. In such ways, rather than pulling families apart, ICTs often facilitate communication, kinship and functional integration.

Keywords:

• Households
• media
• networks
• family
• Internet
• children

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to the other principal members of the Connected Lives team: Kristen Berg, Bernie Hogan, Jeffrey Boase, Juan Antonio Carrasco, Rochelle Côté and Jennifer Kayahara, who, together with the authors, developed the survey and interview schedules and did the interviewing. We have also benefited from the advice of Wenhong Chen, Paul DiMaggio, Bonnie Erickson, Inna Romanovska, Irina Shklovski, Beverly Wellman, Sandy Welsh, and East York's Neighbourhood Information Centre. We gratefully appreciate the assistance of our managers, surveyors, data enterers, and transcribers (listed at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/∼wellman). We are grateful for the financial support of Intel Research, Microsoft Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Bell University Labs.

Notes

1 ‘Partners’ are either officially married or living together as common-law spouses: Ontario family law (section 29) makes little distinction and allows same-sex marriage.

2 The study's sample size and geographic specificity limits the generalizability of our research findings, although we believe they represent a broader situation. Our analysis focuses primarily on gender and type of Internet use and does not include such demographics as ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

3 This is in contrast to the experience of both (heavy user) authors of this paper who send emails to their loved ones daily, pointing out interesting things on the web, forwarding messages from third parties, including attachments of photos, etc.

4 ‘I’ refers to Interviewer, and ‘P’ refers to Participant. The number after each quotation is the participant's ID number in the Connected Lives study.

5 See Bianchi et al.'s (2006) discussion of how parents multitask and incorporate children into their leisure activities. They also argue that parents are spending as much, if not more, time with their children than parents in 1965.

6 The percentages are greater than 100 because many homes have two computers, and many people use computers at home and at work.

7 We have found this in our own experiences as well: One of the authors wrote this paper sitting side by side with his wife on dual home computers, while the other author wrote while sitting with her son on dual home computers.