ABSTRACT
Over the course of the last ten years or so, public debate in many of the advanced industrial countries of the West has often focused on questions concerning the impact and role of new information and communication technologies in transforming both society at large and the family in particular. Public discourse, from governmental papers, through business forecasting, to popular journalism, abounds with images of the increasingly privatized family, shut off from public life, turned in on itself, within a culture of DIY home improvement and privatized leisure, connected to the wider world only through the electronic forms of satellite/cable television and tele-shopping; this image has been articulated to both utopian and dystopian visions of various kinds. Moreover, this family itself is seen as increasingly fragmented internally-the ‘multi-active cellular family’ whose home is a ‘multi-purpose activity centre’ for the increasingly separate lifestyles of the individuals within it (cf. Tomlinson 1989). Much of this debate has been conducted in a frame of reference which takes technology as a (more or less) independent variable, which is then seen to have effects both on the family and on society at large. Thus, the new technologies are widely seen as portending the transformation both of relations within the family and of the overall relations between the private and public spheres of society.
