The Gendering of Internet-Based ICTs in Everyday Life

Dealing with the implications of ICTs for social inequality requires taking the everyday processes and actual situations into account in which ICTs are used and where participation is negotiated and constituted.

Relating to Cultural Studies the domestication approach argues that everyday life especially in the domestic sphere can be seen as a microcosm of society, where institutional and discursive inequalities are reflected as well as being reproduced. Within the domestication process ICTs are actively integrated into daily routines, social interactions and spatiotemporal structures of the households revealing processes of inclusion and exclusion.

The present paper presents findings from the ethnographic-orientated, interview-based long-term study “The Mediatized Home” analyzing the integration of the different internet-based ICTs into the everyday lives of 25 (heterosexual) couples over a period of over 5 years. The findings show that due to a technological framing, inequalities in internet use and skills are especially tied to gender roles and practices. Although the technological framing and thereby these inequalities diminish during the process of integrating the internet into everyday life, they do not dissolve entirely, but prove to be resilient to its changing surroundings. Causes for the persistence of these inequalities can be identified on an institutional and discursive level as well as within the interaction of the couples. Various aspects on these different levels lead to a gendered division of labor within the relationships of the couples, which is evidently affecting the use of internet-based ICTs.

In order to understand the ways in which internet-based ICTs interact with questions of social inequality, it is crucial to ask for its latent implications. Our study shows that looking at everyday life from a domestication perspective allows us to not only identify latent implications of internet-based ICTs, but also to understand how they unfold their effects on social inequality.