`You are the greatest, Peter! No one can be like you, but I will do my best.' Hearing these words coming out of the mouth of my youngest son and addressed to his brother certainly warms my heart and almost draws tears into my eyes. The reaction on the part of the older brother is no less emotional. He smiles and stretches out his arms in an impulse to hug the little boy, but alas, his attempt is doomed. The two brothers are looking at each other via a webcam and are talking over the audio function that we only recently managed to get to work. Following the conversation, the younger one sets out to understand how he can draw cartoon-like pictures in the field of the textual chat just like his older brother had done.
As this episode unfolds, I know for sure that we have domesticated the computer, the ADSL connection to the internet, the webcam and the numerous pieces of software involved in the process. By drawing on these `virtual' technologies our scattered family manages to retain a sense of closeness and realness of its bond. We make an incredibly complex technical system, created by an anonymous army of designers, engineers and others, to serve the simultaneously trivial and essential intimate purposes of our reunion. (In fact, I call the exchange between my boys trivial only to demonstrate analytical detachment. As a mother, I would fight anyone who dares to characterize it that way.) I know that it may be the case that the sense of closeness given to us by the technical system is false. I agree that it would have been much better if Peter could grab his little brother in his arms for real, but the distance between us is an element of the actual situation in which we have half-willingly chosen to put ourselves, pursuing projects of work and study in a mobile and global public world. The technical system has offered us the best possible place to be and act together under these circumstances. It has
become a part of our material geographic home by way of the laptop placed on the kitchen table, the tangled cables running along the floor and the connectivity bills that will arrive at the end of the month. And it creates a virtual home for us to inhabit together when our crazy schedules and conflicting time zones permit. We can remain in what Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann 1973) has called `attainable reach' to each other as `fellowmen' and women sharing overlapping segments of each other's existence. This allows us to create a shared lifeworld, even if only for a limited duration and with curtailed sensual engagement.
The short episode described above and the technological activities and relations that constituted it did not occur spontaneously or unexpectedly. When I was packing for my visit to a foreign university, I purchased a webcam and put it in my suitcase. When my son was preparing to go to university in another city, we gave him a laptop and a new mobile phone. The moral economy of our family unit was issuing an imperative for us to try to overcome, as far as possible, the distance that was about to stretch between us. And the technical devices applicable toward this goal were growing in relevance and significance to the point where we picked them from the shelf of the computer store and put them alongside our most intimate belongings. Once taken out and installed in our new locations, these devices constantly reminded us of the project they were supposed to furnish and thus turned into tokens of our family bond. But how exactly was the connection between the sleek silver webcam and the heart-warming exchange between two brothers supposed to obtain? We had to work hard (some of us harder than others) before we could figure out how to make the programs run, how to position the camera and manipulate the multiple windows, how to indicate our status of availability or absence. This was actually the easy part. Much more difficult to settle on were the rules of mutual engagement, respect for privacy, tolerance for slow typing, rhythm of turn-taking as well as the coordination between the interactions on the screen and those behind it. Then, really, what do you do, when your mother, your friend and your grandfather are simultaneously calling for your attention from different windows and different points on the globe? These latter questions remain largely unresolved to this day and the fate of the webcam, even of the very idea of online gatherings and chats, hinges upon finding workable answers to them. You do not want your friend peeping in and engaging you in a frivolous conversation while you are frantically typing your way toward a deadline, as much as you do not want your son to shoo you away every time you catch him online and decide to ask if he has eaten his vegetables.
The concept of domestication, as I encountered it in the early 1990s (see Silverstone et al. 1992), has been the swing of the theoretical wand
that established the significance of feelings, puzzles, decisions and actions like those recounted above to the dynamic of a technological society. The idea of domestic users having a say, albeit through their mostly silent choices and circumscribed activities, in the shaping of the emergent `information society' was inspiring to me. The stream of literature discussing the impacts of that society and its dominant technologies on individuals and households was so abundant at the time that a glimpse of faith in the mindful, knowledgeable agent represented a welcome change. I had personal reasons to want to believe in the existence of such an agent, of course. Along with millions of fellow East Europeans, I was coming out of the collapse of an authoritarian communist state hopeful that the dictate of a system, be it political or technological, over individuals was not an inevitable state of affairs. Moreover, I had the inside knowledge of someone who had inhabited an authoritarian society and realized that the power of a system could never be so comprehensive as to permeate all aspects of life, to smash all resistance and to cancel all expressions of alternative human creativity. For my own emotional and biographical reasons, I wanted to search for the `power of the powerless' that Havel (Havel and Keane 1985) had brought to light, if not necessarily to triumph. I was aware of the role of the home as a place of resistance, as a crucible of an `alternative rationality' which generated and enacted value systems and projects different from those organizing the public world. I knew intuitively that what we did with objects and ideas in the home mattered with respect to our public affairs. The concept of domestication elevated that intuition to the status of a theoretical tenet.
Seen among a larger family of ideas regarding the relationship between technology and society, the concept of domestication repre- sents a vital extension of social constructivism into the field of technology use. When Pinch and Bijker (1987), along with their colleagues, historians and sociologists, laid out the principles of the SCOT approach and other related perspectives, they were focusing their attention mainly on the practices of those professional groups out of whose efforts new technical artefacts emerge. `Following the actors' was their leading motto and they lived up to it honourably. But the historical cast of actors they were portraying did not include users in any central roles. Users were confined to the background, to the crowd or choir that would appropriately rejoice at the birth of new inventions.2Users' trials
and tribulations, their monologues and dialogues as they struggled to make sense of newly emergent technical devices were missing from these accounts.
The concept of domestication was among the first to direct the analytical lens to the dispersed and often dissonant micro-developments
occurring behind the stage. More than simply pointing that way, it also offered an elaborate map for the explorer to follow as he or she enters the field of domestic life with technologies. Although I, along with others, would later want to revise the original scheme, the subdivision of the process of domestication into appropriation, objectification, incorpora- tion and conversion was really helpful in structuring one's questions and observation plans. The inscription of technical artefacts into domestic values, space and time is indeed definitive to how these artefacts would be perceived and employed in daily practice. Placing, I discovered in the course of my own studies, is equivalent to appraising, and timing to taming. People choose locations for their artefacts strategically depend- ing on the extent to which they would like to encourage or discourage their use by certain inhabitants of the household and/or for certain purposes. They work out elaborate schedules for access and rules of engagement. After a researcher has come across a sufficient number of examples of these embedding decisions, rules and timetables, or in a more technical lingo, use protocols, it becomes hard to see them as something separate from the technical device itself, from its own buttons, voltage, frequencies, and so on. Domestication, thus, produces an additional set of parameters that literally blends with the technical device and determines its nature, purpose and functionality. With this view of technology in mind, users are indisputably actors in the technological world.