Green, A.-M.; Davenport, E.: Putting new media in its place : the Edinburgh experience (1999)
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- Abstract
- The Household Information Systems (HIS) project in Queen Margaret College was funded to explore the use of new media in a group of Edinburgh households (Davenport & Higgins, 1995). One of the motivations of the HIS 'programme' was to find a suitable theoretical and/or exploratory framework, which takes account of multiple aspects of behaviour surrounding technologies, and thus avoids assumptions about their role in information-seeking or other isolated activities. A focus on single activities would occlude knowledge of other motivations: bonding, killing time, defining boundaries. In Phase One, `information management' rather than `information seeking' was used as a conceptual framework, embracing work on the `life cycle' of ICTs as illustrated by Kopytoffs `biography of things' approach (1986), Johnson's cultural circuit (1986), research on households as micro-organisations by McCrone and his colleagues (1994), and work by Silverstone and others on ICTs in the home as tools for internal and external adaptation (Silverstone, 1994, Silverstone et al 1994). The `management' framework has been productive - Phase One allowed us to identify patterns of ICT acquisition and deployment in the home, and, more interestingly, structures of appropriation which reflect rules, roles and responsibilities in individual households. These constitute what may be called a `reproduction lattice' (adapting terminology used by Kling (1987) in his analysis of the `web of computing' in organisations), a structure which captures the political and cultural economy of a household. Phase One's findings are consistent with those of other researchers working in the area of domestic consumption of ICTs but a major limitation of the work is the homogeneous nature of the respondents. Among our Edinburgh 'household managers', internal culture was a more compelling explanation for use than technical functionality.
