ABSTRACT
Domestication is a productive concept for analyzing the sense-making processes behind the integration of media technologies into everyday life. However, researchers have yet to take advantage of the full heuristic potential of this metaphor. So far, most studies have focused on single devices and employed qualitative methods, mainly case studies, to generate insights into the process of domestication. The authors suggest broadening of perspective to the overall domestic ecology within which media cohabitate and compete. Toward this goal, they conducted a large-scale multimethod study involving observations and interviews in 100 households, thereby analyzing not only the “birth” of individual media devices into households, but also examined how these devices reside in certain “mediatopes” (media environments), how they compete as different media “species,” and how they change their social and spatial positions during their lifecycle. More generally, the study demonstrates how to apply domestication research to the topography of a domestic media environment that is complementary to the ethnographical descriptions that have dominated the literature thus far.
