ABSTRACT
Recent research has shown that the Internet has become a major transformational force (Joy et al. 2009) and is indispensable to consumers and households in the context of their everyday life (Hoffman et al. 2004; Venkatesh et al. 2011). For many people, the home computer is as essential as other appliances commonly found in the home. That the personal computer has become an integral part of households is apparent. And, as computers have become integrated into the household and their use has spread across family members, this technology is expected to make and, in a number of households, has already made fundamental changes in home life and in the performance of household tasks. Current trends on the home front indicate that we are witnessing the emergence of the networked home (Venkatesh et al. 2003) and a digital culture associated with various daily activities in families. The focus of this research is to empirically examine digitization in the home, particularly as it relates to the impact on family life and activities. Specifically, the main research question posed here is, what is the nature of digital transformation in the home and what key activities of family life are digitized and to what extent?
When PCs first came into the home in the early 1980s, there was much anticipation and excitement about what the future was going to hold (Rogers 1986). By today’s standards, the early home computer was a primitive machine and had limited performance potential. For many, the computer was introduced into the home to do job-related work either for a home-based business or for work outside of the home and to do word processing (Vitalari et al. 1985). Families with children also touted the home computer as useful for educational purposes, but this type of use tended to take a back seat to the more business-oriented uses. Since the home computer of the 1980s was in many households a stand-alone unit, the full potential of its use was not realized until after the arrival of the Internet in the mid-1990s. With the introduction of the Internet,
some 15 years ago, and accompanied later on by various technological advancements such as Google, broadband connectivity, and more recently, social media, home computing has assumed a more central role in household activities. That is to say, recent technological developments have heralded some rapid changes that point to the emergence of a digital world filled with transformational possibilities. To put the current trends in a historical perspective, digital technologies are following a
technological trajectory that we have witnessed in other areas of our social and cultural life. For example, more than a century ago, we witnessed the emergence of the telephone which was a major technological innovation resulting in changes in communication patterns (Fischer 1994). Similarly, in the world of entertainment, the introduction of the cinema initiated an artistic revolution and heralded a new form of audience engagement (Stanley 1978). This prompted Walter Benjamin ([1936] 1972) to write his famous commentary, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In the same fashion, social life has undergone radical change with the introduction of the automobile (Flink 1970). In addition, as part of the technological culture, radio (Hilmes and Laviglio 2002) and television (Fiske 1987), similar to the telephone and the movies, have brought about fundamental changes in the areas of mass communication and entertainment. All these developments have one fundamental characteristic. They introduced new forms of behaviors that did not exist before and at the same time displaced some older forms. In a similar fashion currently, the areas of communication and entertainment are converging now into a new digital medium made possible by the Internet and various digital technologies. Henry Jenkins (2006) describes the contemporary digital culture as “convergence culture,” while Vaidyanathan (2011) refers to it as the Googlization of our social and personal lives. Thanks to the digital technologies, not only do we find that social and physical distances are
shrinking and transactions are becoming instantaneous, but new methods of social interaction are beginning to emerge. As a result, we live in a qualitatively different, digitally constituted world. Terms such as interactivity, connectivity, virtual spaces, digital divide, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, web cultures, social networking and many more are proliferating and are now part of the new digital vocabulary. In the world of communication, face-to-face contacts are being supplanted or reinforced by electronic contacts (RoAne 2008), resulting in the redefining of social distance in the global communication context. In the field of marketing, Hoffman and Novak (1996), Kozinets et al. (2010) and others have drawn our attention to new forms of consumer behaviors and practices. Along the same lines, mobile communication technologies (e.g. smartphones) are dramatically altering communication patterns locally and globally (Shankar et al. 2010). Newspaper readership is gradually being supplanted by electronic news (Paterson and Domingo 2008) altering the information landscape. The rise of social media and online networks is a major development that is changing the digital landscape quite dramatically (Kozinets et al. 2010).
