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E-book Digital Media Practices in Households : Kinship through Data
rom social media like LINE, WhatsApp and WeChat and self-tracking health apps on smartphones to wearables like Apple watches, this book ex-plores the multiple ways in which intergenerational practices play out around mobile media for care at a distance. This can involve locative and non-locative possibilities. We recognize that quotidian forms of locative media are often embedded in social and mobile media practices. As Rowan Wilken notes in The Cultural Economies of Locative Media (2019), within the all-pervasiveness of everyday mobile media, we can f ind multiple and contesting forms, textures, and gradations of location that inform our contemporary ways of being in place (2019, 5). Thus, understanding locative media needs to be done in the context of the embedded mobile media practices.Entwined within our exploration of mobile media in households and familial contexts is the integral role of care within contemporary media practices. Care, as we argue, isn’t just a practice for feminist or social services but rather crucial to an ethics of media practice (Mol 2009; Bellacasa 2018). As the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica debacle still resonates around notions of trust, bringing care (ethically, theoretically, conceptually and methodologically) to media practices is key (Gold and Klein 2019). We redeploy Jeanette Pols’ notion of care at a distance (2012)—originally used in telecare settings to explore the role of technology to enhance relationships when used in unison, not replacing, people—to consider the tacit, informal and mundane ways in which mobile media does often invisible care work in everyday intimate relations.Given the above ambitions, Digital Media Practices in Households is not a conventional academic book. In it we seek to bring readers into the mobile and digital family lives and everyday worlds of participants, across three different cultural and national contexts. This means leading our discussion by example, rather than by theory. In particular, through the practices of our participants we ref lect on the quotidian and often-invisible forms of care at a distance constitute contemporar y Digital Kinship.Through cross-cultural examples, we seek to explore the ways in which place and context inform particular rituals of belonging. We believe this helps to bring to the fore the socially active micro-moments that matter to our participants, and our analysis. In doing so, we invite readers into an interpretive process that is based on ethnographic encounters with participants in the places where mobile media practices are meaningful to them. Through this process, we seek to explore the everyday intimate and mundane meanings of caring and relationality that, in turn, has methodo-logical consequences and makes a substantive contribution to the study of intergenerational mobile media practices across cultures.
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