NET TIME NEGOTIATIONS WITHIN THE FAMILY

Abstract

Drawing on data from one-on-one and focus group interviews with high school students from schools in agricultural California, this research examines how American families negotiate what we call net time. The article explores intra-familial bargaining over time spent on the internet. Analysis pays special attention to families that prioritize capital-enhancing activities such as schoolwork and college applications. In these families, access to resources is guided by implicit social contracts between parents and children, as well as between siblings. The findings illuminate how these social contracts imply particular rights and responsibilities depending on the families' level of wiredness: highly wired, partially wired, and unwired families. Comparing the experiences of students from these three groups reveals that members of each kind of family experience a different form of net time. While youths from highly wired families enjoy individualized net time, members of partially wired families divvy up household net time. The most disadvantaged youth come from unwired families in which family members must make sacrifices for youth to obtain net time outside of the household. The examination illuminates the logics that underpin the familial negotiations over each kind of net time. Ultimately, familial social contracts over net time have the power to encourage or hinder use of net time for capital-enhancing activities.

Keywords:

• computer-mediated communication
• digital divide
• family
• domestication of ICTs
• young people
• information habitus
• net time
• digital inclusion

Notes

Huang and Russell (2006) find a positive association between increased test scores and computer accessibility. Lee and Chae (2007) find that active parental involvement leads to their children using the internet for educational purposes. They argue that when parents go online with their children and direct their children's website visits, children are more likely to use the internet for capital-enhancing activities. By contrast, children with parents who merely implement rules such as time limits do not engage in greater educational web use.

While we are particularly interested in digital inequalities, the majority of literature on networked families has not examined the full spectrum of wiredness. While valuable, much of this growing body of literature seeks to ascertain the positive and negative impacts of ICTs on highly wired families in terms of family connectedness, family time, and familial well-being. Many middle-class families report that digital technologies are enabling increased family connectedness via the internet and cell phone (Kennedy et al. 2008). While this study shows that family time together may decrease, there is a corresponding surge in connectedness between parents and children on a daily basis via cellphone (Christensen 2009). One reason for the increased connectedness is the increased need to use digital media to organize family activities (Lanigan et al. 2009) and for familial coordination (Rainie & Wellman 2012). ‘Netting together’ (Rainie & Wellman 2012) bonds families through mutual interests or shared activities (Lanigan et al. 2009; Flanagin & Metzger 2010). From this angle, while families are increasingly spatially separated, they are increasingly digitally connected both when physically apart and when netting together.

The handful of students who own these devices themselves have secured the money to purchase them in one of two ways: either they save money they earn from part-time jobs or they save money they receive from birthdays and other celebrations. Interestingly, the students who have bought their devices with money earned from work feel entitled to use the equipment as they wish and report less interference from their parents when it comes to using the devices than students who saved up money from gifts. Nevertheless, even the students who bought the computer with money they earned themselves did experience some parental oversight: as one student recalled, ‘There was one term where I got bad grades and my mom thought it was because I was spending too much time on Facebook. It was really bad – she confiscated my computer for a couple of weeks, even though I bought it with my own money. She said, “So are you eighteen yet? Didn't think so. My house, my rules”’.