About the book launch
With their newly released book «The Platformization of the Family», researchers from Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Estonia set out an original agenda for researching the role of digital platforms in family life across generations.
Platforms and apps such as FaceTime, Netflix, Google Nest, baby feeding apps, and physical exercising apps have begun to structure virtually every aspect of our personal and social lives.
This happens within everyday family life, across generations, and it affects the relations between parents, children, and grandparents. This cultural process can be described as «platformization».
At this digital book launch, researchers from three different countries gave short presentations based on the book, followed by invited commentaries.
Presenters
- Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science, the United Kingdom
- Research Fellow Kate Mannell, Deakin University in the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child
- Professor Julian Sefton-Green, Deakin University, Australia
The event was hosted by Professor Ola Erstad from the Department of Education, University of Oslo.
The presenters shared
- Examples of the ways that digital platforms are woven into the practices of «doing» family.
- A research agenda that identifies pressing questions about what it means for family life to be «platformized».
- A proposal for a new theoretical concept of «extended domestication» that explains how platforms become part of the fabric of family life.
Commentaries
- Professor Taina Bucher from the Media and Communications Department, University of Oslo. Author of the book Facebook (Polity Press).
- Policy and Advocacy Officer Beatrijs Gelders, working on Safer Internet & Digital Citizenship at COFACE Families Europe, Brussels, Belgium
- Alexandra Evans, co-founder of the Digital Childhood Agency, UK. Previously working at TikTok.
Practical information
If you have questions concerning the event, please do not hesitate to ask Professor Ola Erstad or Communications Adviser Marit Eline Lervik Christensen.
More about the book
«The Platformization of the Family» is a book edited by Julian Sefton-Green, Kate Mannell and Ola Erstad, with contributions from Sonia Livingstone, Kristinn Hegna, Mariya Stoilova, Luci Pangrazio, Katrin Langton, Andra Siibak, Antonio Membrive, and Raquel Miño-Puigcercós.
It is a result of a collaboration between the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and the European research project Platforming Families: Tracing digital transformations in everyday life across generations (led by the University of Oslo, Norway).
The book is published by Palgrave Macmillan, and the digital publication is free and open to everyone (open access).