Abstract

Sue Turnbull. Getting Connected: Gender and the future of online services in the home.

This paper explores the future of new media technologies in the home by looking both backwards and forwards in order to ask what the history of technology, its design and usage, can tell us about the future. The paper discusses how such futures are already imagined in the popular culture and media to which people already have access, and what such representations might reveal about commonly felt hopes, anxieties and fears. The question of moral panics and the subsequent moral crusades which they provoke is addressed. The case study of one family living in outer Melbourne is then presented as a way of contextualising theories about the possible role of new technologies in the home, and in order to demonstrate how one particular family negotiates the use of the technology to which they have access, including a fax and computer. What is revealed is the importance of boundary maintenance to the family in the home; the collapse of the distinction between public and private spaces related to work and home; and the ways in which technology usage is affected by all sorts of social, moral and aesthetic dimensions. Central to the argument is the role of gender in the design and implementation of technology, and as a key factor determining access and usage. Even so, the essentialising tendencies of both masculinist and feminist claims about technology are resisted in favour of a more radically contextualist understanding of how people might use technology for all manner of purposes, regardless of the gender specific design or imagined functions of the technology in question. The study reveals that the precise nature of anxiety about new media technology in the home may be quite hard to express and define; and suggests that further research is required in order to determine the basis and validity of such anxieties and resistance.