ABSTRACT
A central part of domestication theory is the assumption that the process of domesticating media technologies by definition is something that the users in the household and the household as an institution control. Through complex negotiations, the practices of media use are creating a “shield of values” enabling the household users in their own time to negotiate and experiment to find their own take on or grasp of media technologies. But at present, even scholars and researchers outside clinical psychology acknowledge that domestication theory may have a blind spot, not necessarily connected to any notion of a new form of hypodermic needle or mesmerizing ideology. The blind spot may be that the concrete uses of say social media coupled with a mode of hyper-reflexivity may be contributing to the emergence of a dark side of domestication. It is how we use social media technologies combined with our “moral economy of the household” that creates this problem. This state in the history of media technology domestication is not quite the same as the observations of toxicity. It is something different, something echoing the “dialectics of Enlightenment,” or something similar to the unnerving reflexivity of the risk society. It is not the end of domestication, but maybe a significant transformation of the process of making media technology our own.
