ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the journey of the concept of domestication from the celebration of human agency it originally implied to the questions and doubts that have grown around it in the past three decades. The enquiry is driven by the suspicion that there is such a thing as bad domestication and it is urgent to understand what it looks like and where it comes from. In a technological and corporate environment characterized by increasing surveillance, customer profiling and manipulation, the domestication of communication media is losing its anchor in users’ sovereign value systems and becomes a double-edged endeavour driven by commercial interests. Users’ own preferences and choices are alienated from them and are put in service of purposes they cannot control. This brings the risk of narrowing individuals’ social and symbolic horizons and fragmenting of the polis with potentially perilous cultural and political consequences. In this context, this chapter argues that preserving the agentic potential of domestication requires from users acute moral and political responsibility with reference points in the public world beyond the household.
