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MED05 Body, Emotions and Belonging: Changing Private-Public Borderlines
PP 465
The Mediatisation of Home
D. Chambers
1
1
Newcastle University, Media and Cultural Heritage, Newcastel upon Tyne, United Kingdom
The sense of familiarity, belonging and ontological security associated with the use of media in the home now extends to mobile technologies such as
the laptop or mobile phone. This paper explores the relevance and usefulness of the concept of mediatisation for an understanding of the role of mobile
media and communication technologies in the home. Whilst the domestication approach explains the role of media and information technologies in recon‑
figuring the cultural space of the home and the social dynamics of the household, its value has been questioned in relation to studies of mobile technologies
that apparently transform the home into a porous and fluid setting (eg. Vuojarvi, Isomaki and Hynes). This indicates a need to advance the domestication
debate beyond the household to assess the implications of the continuous traversing and reshaping of public and private spheres through mobile media.
At the same time, household tensions generated by the extensive home-based use of these personalised mobile technologies coincide with changing
meanings of the home itself. This suggests that cultures of home remain central to debates about the mediatisation of space and social relationships. By
assessing the interconnections between the concepts of mediatisation and domestication, I shall identify some of the key macro and micro social dynamics
that characterise the mediatised home. The work of key authors on domestication and mediatisation will be drawn on and assessed to address the imag‑
inative work, involving multiple popular discourses, related to the mediatisation of home. How intimacy is mediated, and how householders’ experience
new relations of“public”and“private”will be addressed in relation to the macro-social mediatisation of home through a case study of the global marketing
and patterns of parental adoption of video gaming and computer tablets in the home for use by children. The paper identifies and explores the implications
of a new discourse of ‘media parenting’. It suggests that the media presentation of home and the mediated performance of ‘family’ can be understood
through the concept of ‘domesticated mediatisation’.
PP 466
Fields of Belonging: Mediatization and Connectedness Among Mobile Elites
J. Jansdotter
1
, K. Fast
1
, A. Jansson
1
1
Karlstad University, Geography- Media and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden
What are the roles of personal media technologies for sustaining close relationships and a sense of social belonging under everyday conditions that involve
high levels of mobility and potentially fractured ties with family and friends? The aim of this paper is to illuminate this question with regards to elite groups
within three different social fields. The paper starts out from two premises. Firstly, we argue that the academic fascination with flows and networking that
has long permeated globalization theory must be countered, and complemented, by a deeper scrutiny of the enduring significance of phenomena such as
strong ties, spatial attachments, love, intimacy, and other forms of socio-emotional commitments that saturate seemingly liquidized lifeworlds. Especially,
the manifold significance of digital/networked media is to be further problematized from such a perspective. Secondly, whereas many social groups lead
mobile and increasingly mediatized lives today – e.g. immigrants, au pairs, students, transport workers, etc. – this paper focuses on mobile elite groups.
These groups attain a normalizing significance in relation to mobility aspirations in society at large. The focus on some of the most“free-floating”and“glob‑
al” subjects allows us to challenge the argumentation within certain strands of globalization theory, which tend to ignore material as well as emotional
limitations of “liquidized” lifeworlds. Furthermore, research on elites has been relatively absent over the last three decades, compared to the situation in
the 1970s. By ‘elite’, we here refer to those groups that hold or exercise domination within a particular social field (following Bourdieu). The study thus rests
on a research design that involves 47 qualitative interviews with mainly Scandinavian respondents gathered from the fields of (1) corporate business, (2)
international development/diplomacy, and (3) academia. The first field comprises persons at leading positions within larger companies of an international
reach. In the second field, we focus particularly on elite groups within the United Nations system. In the third field, finally, we are interested in globally
mobile academics of higher rank; i.e., university professors and other academic experts and leaders. Overall, the comparative study unveils how personal
media technologies attain ambivalent social significances at the intersection of professional demands and family life. We identify variations in the material
that are not only field specific but also related to gender and habitus. For example, while the appropriation of new media among UN expatriates (most
of them women) is typically part and parcel of the realization of long-time ambitions to lead a truly global professional life, where also family life is trans‑
nationalized, many respondents within the field of corporate business (most of them men) express more sedentary orientations and use media as a means
for reproducing the stability of the home-place. Ultimately, these results underscore that contemporary mobile lifestyles are heavily reliant on mediated
connectedness, and thus interwoven with mediatization processes. However, the significances of media are socially moulded and can only partly compen‑
sate for the social costs of global mobility. Keywords: elites, mobility, globalization, mediatization, ICT, close relationships, social field
PP 467
The Mediatization of Public Sex Cultures in the Case of the Hook-Up App Grindr
K.M. Jørgensen
1
1
University of Southern Denmark, Institute for the Study of Culture, Odense M, Denmark
Along with the normalisation of geo-locative dating and hook-up practices in mainstream publics – through apps like Tinder, Bumble and Happn – imagi‑
nations of sexual privacy and indeed publicness seem to be changing. This paper focuses on the interplay between media and public sex cultures in the case
of the Grindr app use in gay male intimacy cultures. Though gay men’s sex practices, vis-à-vis cruising, have historically been thoroughly mobile and medi‑
ated, the Internet has brought about newways of accessing and becoming visible in such cultures (Hollister, 2002). Making oneself visible to the right public
(and as importantly invisible to others), now occurs in relation to the affordance structure that apps like Grindr offer.The paper asks to what extend different
gay, public sex cultures are shaped by Grindr’s affordance structure, and conversely how different practices represented within the app use the technology