Domestication of Media and Technology

This text provides an overview of a key concept in media and technology studies, that is domestication. It includes theories around domestication, that shed light upon the process, in which a technology changes its status, from outrageous novelty to an aspect of everyday life, which is taken for granted.

Maren Hartmann currently works at the University of Erfurt. Her latest research project was on young adults and new media and was based at the Free University of Brussels. Her PhD work -- published as Technologies and Utopias (Reinhard Fischer Verlag, 2004) -- analysed metaphoric user vocabularies in and around cyberspace. She has worked at several UK universities in the past, both in teaching and research positions. Thomas Berker is research fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of a book on the history of the Internet in the early 1990s. More recently he has published on the everyday life of transnational knowledge work and domestic energy consumption. Yves Punie is Research Fellow at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Seville. He has worked on several research projects in the area of foresight exercises and socio-economic impact studies in the field of IST. In his PhD work, he concentrated on social studies of new technologies, especially in relation to the domestic environment. Katie J. Ward is a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests include the consumption of media, identity construction, and the relationship between the media and health-care.