The Different Types of Media Domestication - Essay Example

Explore the Different Types of Media Domestication Using Roger Silverstones Media Domestication Theory By Presented to Institution: Date: Initially, technologies seek to integrate into daily life through adapting to various day-to-day activities. The feedback on the adaptations sends final to the innovation processes across industry through shaping the subsequent generation for various services and technologies. This theory helps in attaching meaning to adopting and using of new media technologies in different households. It has since expanded into recognition of the final levels of innovation as a significant tool in understanding technologies and innovations that enter various consuming units. It allows for analysis in its economic, social, and sociological concerns. The approach to media domestication is a consideration of the practical as well as the symbolic dimensions for the adoption while using the necessary technologies. It shows how the elements of meanings of different things coupled with their respective materiality, have equal importance in the understanding of how technologies form part of daily life. It remains a consideration of the social theory through highlighting the various negotiations, control and power challenges, rule breaking, and making accompanying any introduction for technologies for different social settings (Silverstone, 2005). Such a domestication approach endures roots within the social studies of media use even though this is well informed through gender studies of household technology, everyday life sociology, innovation and consumption studies, which are widely considered the study components of the mass adoption in mobile phones, internet, and computers. As part of the technological approach towards an understanding of how media technologies come to be, domestication theory highlights the importance of innovation users with the works done through individuals and communities through making technology do practical work outside the standard intentions within the community. This work strand links to the responsibility end and lead users (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). In innovation processes, the domestication studies create a general institution through the use qualitative methods while the ethnography and long interviews explore the importance emerging technologies meanings and changing routines that are usually not accessible to quantitative techniques. The domestication approach applies different concepts in distinguishing different prospects for the process. For instance, the appropriations process includes bringing technologies into households and local social contexts. However, the lead domestication criticism is the heavy reliance of many case studies as well as a descriptive approach that is hard to generate prescriptive lessons for the different types needed in policy makers and business. This rich-descriptive technique details its strength through enabling processes and interplay of social values and artifacts under exploration in depth as compared to individualistic and quantitative methods. Dimensions of media domestication Appropriation, the first dimension, refers to the possession or ownership process for a given media artifact. This point proves a dimension in which media artifacts move from the commodity world to the owner’s possession. It gives it more significance and importance to the subject. Through appropriation, both potential and actual consumers have a tied engagement in developing imaginative work through which they hear about or view the media artifacts as well as artifacts reconstructed through objects of desire while fulfilling certain functions for construction of desire for social meaning and difference (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). In such a case, the dimension ultimately has an involvement of all transactions required through the media artifacts passage across the market onto users’ lives whiles the motives in approaching such products remain. Through objectification, the media consumers ascribe the aesthetics and cognitive values towards certain forms of technology. It means that the technology attaches more meaning as well as set of attachment through the users’ lives. The element of objectification has an expression of usage even though it also focuses on the physical dispositions for objects within spatial environments. For example, after the purchase of a media technology, the user settles on the kinds of roles that such technology needs to play in their lives while ensuring continuity in placing and displaying the domestic arrangements (Silverstone, 2005). The incorporation of the process across the artifacts as used within the daily life attaches meaning to the ultimate levels of functionality depending on how the levels of incorporation are to everyday life. The technologies selected with certain features within thought should continue serving in ways that the users make intentions. On the other hand, different technologies do not comply with the intentions of the users even as they do not fit in the various routines for the lives of the users. In such regard, the overall incorporation dimension makes an involvement of the wide scope of usability issues through the experience of user research developments. There are different conversion processes that the media products pass through in the status ‘taken-for-granted’ to be a congressional part of user’s lives. Media technologies bring in an aspect of several features from the users’ minds even though they do turn into functional derivatives in some ways different from the marketers or designers’ intentions. They have a whole range of functions even though some of them gradually disappear or change (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). For example, most home computers acquired for the purposes of furthering education turn into game machines. In turn, the dimension becomes relevant for the unintended applications of the technology, adaptations induced by the user and the features in which users desire to have in the future. Irrespective of having the technology domestication theory originating from social sciences, it investigates the social consequences for technology use while demonstrating that domestication concepts together with the dimensions provide useful theoretical focus in addressing user experiences. It also broadens the UX concept to a range of functional use and technology adoption while detailing aspects in user interface design as usability problems, as well as the learning process. The theory of media technology domestication by Roger Silverstone outlays a number of interesting dimensions. Through the theory, he fronts that the domestication is practice involving human agency and requires culture and energy. Through the integration, it leaves everything altered. This point is intriguing as it portrays domestication as an extremely subtle process that requires minimal conscious effort. After the purchase of a new technology piece, while the initial excitement wears down, and instruction manuals are read, it is hard to notice the incorporation of the technology into personal life and habits (Silverstone, 2005). One reason for the feeling is that people are used to the adverse rate of media technologies change in their lives and worlds. Silverstone observes that it is the nature to people to solicit for next great inventions. Therefore, it is because the technologies being domesticated into the lives and social patterns also incorporate high levels of change and development in the surroundings of these technologies. The users accustom to the new products revealed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The other major theme is the recognition of the relationship between ICTs and individuals becoming a fundamental interest while developing considerable attention paid to individuals and prospects in the context. The recognition also dwells on the elements beyond ‘end users’ while others engage more contribution to the experience of media technologies. Non-users might not be termed as ‘gatekeepers’ as they impact the overall process of adoption. The media technologies are communal resources across households (including main TV sets and the fixed phone lines) even though they include ‘personal’ media forms subject to the overall regulation. In general, the personal strategies and use of control continue taking place in the contexts those various household members with commitments and routines as well as general demands on conditions, concerns, hopes, space, and time, which interact to shape consumption (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). It means that the writings regarding domestication are particularly forming emphasis on questions of domestic politics and power. The importance cuts across terms of gender and age relations for both adults and children. For the mobile telephony, the observation of individual’s consumption faces much power from others while there is an implicit dimension of examples as cited. The other theme for this is that the responsibilities of ICTs engage focus on their meaning for the users with shaping of the lives of the consumers while sharing their results. In simpler words, the manner in which the consumers experience these media forms is predetermined through the public representations or technological functionality as well as the structures imposed by social lives. This point becomes clearer enough through the developments and applicability of the above components. In the end, the routing of media technologies leads to different ways of doing things while encouraging interaction between different ways with consumers as well as having different perceptions. It is not necessarily labored towards noting that the telephony advent itself engages various results (Silverstone, 2005). In principle, this led to the emergence of detailed mobile telephony. In this case, the challenge is characterizing the consequences while defining their levels of salience. It includes how the substantiated differences take place as well as the sense and looking past households and individuals for wider social significance. This way, changes, are not necessarily resulting from household members’ initiatives while other people report on how the acquisition of cordless phone or second phone handsets made difference to particular experiences in terms of privacy in making phone calls. The experience is an anticipation of the kinds of detail later denoting the mobile phones applicability. Beyond the home and the expertise engaged in their use, the focus goes to influencing people’s relationships with others (including neighbors, family, and friends) (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). It is because they become shared resources or be used in activities that are past home-base limitations. In longer terms, the changes in media technology ‘usage’, for example, as TV watching and telephony practices keep developing has a bearing to matters of time allocation as well as the activities’ timing, for telephony, this impacts the manner in which there is the management of relationships with different social networks. The disposition includes the feeling of comfortable across the encouragement of viewers to focus on the new media dimensions. However, the children grow up with an understanding of social importance of for uneasiness in using media in its existing forms. They end up giving endless experiences of cultural anomaly of the media usage as a way of easing their squirming observers. Currently, they develop narratives that exemplify how the realization of private spaces always depends on the accountability of social understandings for the categories in place. The goals of the argument is developing a window of how different sets of magazines for the technology and decoration continue manifesting choices through placing media technologies in different homes (Silverstone, 2005). The due focus is on the macro-structures for the features administered by different editors. This means that investigation rendered here is a revelation of the homes as physical spaces and ICTs as objects attaching each other planet to the existing media formats. The overall findings are an indication that technology on one hand is an acknowledgement of machinery even though not virtually in context for the usage. The interior design media forms put much effort towards representing decorations as well as in the living styles that virtually develop free technology. Such deeply differentiated fragment schemes in today’s living world create a thorough mismatch bound to leading into conflicts on the internal levels. In its theoretical framework, the media create usage in homes suggests an extensive reduction for reality while favoring selectivity. These findings are illustrative of the strong selectivity of the ways that homes and media domestication approaches take image. It will usually take a while, as it will require analytical focus prior the marginal technologies existence for the naturalistic pictorials from homes due to their visibility in particular decoration formulations. Similarly, the analysis approach is needed for seeing behind the decisions in construction of the format for media technologies representation in the technology periodicals. All home-to-home media technologies have marginal utility (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). The outcomes take the attention of odd dramatization due to the lack of inherent demarcation of the technologies and the reasons why they are not integral parts of a constellation within homes. The other concept in redefinition is that of household and the home. Silverstone issues a conscious direction while making the distinction across these terms. Such limits within the household continue to break down due to the various new media technologies (Silverstone, 2005). Mobile phone ads propounding the ability of their products in allowing them take their home within are springs to the mind. Silverstone describes households to be social, political, and economic units through the introduction of the “moral economy” term as well as the different sets of values in commonality with several households. This translates into the attention of a family’s moral economy. Most proponents of the theory agree that a household defines the characteristic lines across the internal coherence absence for its consistency. On the contrary, these media technologies take the design and merchandise of domestic use. In the previous decades, most media technologies have faced domestication and, therefore, they belong to inventories of other standard household belongings. In conducting the exploration, many users grow sensitive to their inherent social materiality readings within their homes. For instance, even if they do not map objects consciously when visiting homes, there is not recognition of possible signs of TV sets, computers or related ‘normal’ home media technologies. For such homes, missing media technologies is a significant derivative while they lead into interpretations with extensive connections to alternative technological values accounting for such facts (Berker, Hartmann, Punie & Ward, 2005). Viewing decorated media forms as nonprofessionals, most people do not pay attention to the lack of display media technologies. It means that the media formats produce idealized perceptions of the homes and media forms through particular discourses that the selectivity levels are essential parts of the genre. Therefore, all research towards domestication based on the public magazines articulates on the tension across public privacy through different forms from the lived privacy of closed doors for private homes. Silverstone also goes on to encourage individuals to perceive that the consumption levels tally with those of production. This means that, through the consumption of technological goods, people create other different things by the domestication processes into their lives. The apparent formulation of postmodernism brings in the idea of everyone bringing new ideas to the text and ideas, technology- new opinions, experiences - and, therefore, no technology is transformed (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). One of them is domestication as the conservative response of the technological change challenge. Here, new and frightening things are made familiar and general even though they also engage methods that the consumption has a link to the levels of invention and design. This means that the acceptance of new technologies embrace minute pieces while combining with the major boundaries of machine and humans redefinition. On the other hand, the home remains a self projection where a home notion attaches meaning to the mobile phone keypad. The idea props up another meaning to home as a place where one’s heart continues and is a true determinant of people keeping their social life restricted to media technologies. This view of a virtual home blurs the lines across private and public social integrations. Individuals electronically engage with members of the public. As Silverstone mentions no one notices public and private. Most people hold that better times are yet to ahead while technologies continue transforming the home, people’s lives, their social patterns, as well as habits more (Berker, Hartmann, Punie & Ward, 2005). One form of media domestication is through appropriation. The focus in this case goes to the reasons for the technologies’ acquisition. The consumers provide diverse reasons towards buying the technology in place for due access to the family members and close friends. It also presents a ‘peace of mind’ in times that they are not around. The consumers use home phones (mostly, landline phones) as primary tools for information in a number of purposes including that of making appointments with social activities. They also get the necessary information from other people. In turn, the mobile phones were the secondary communication means with family members and close friends while they travel away from their homes (Silverstone, 2005). The consumers take their phone to achieve safety concerns. Particularly, these include the health-related emergencies as top concerns. The other contributor to this is the lack of information while acquitting the item. The consumers express a degree of lack of information resources with respect to the mobile handsets and media services while choosing the ideal forms of their needs. A good percentage of them report the heavy reliance on the recommendations of sales persons while making phone purchases. On the other hand, the recommendations are usually made based on business purposes and not mostly on the needs of the users. The other form of media domestication is through objectification. It includes carrying of behavior through gender differences of behavioral aspects that seemingly exist. They require differential hardware as well as interface designs for the external users. The male population carries phones on their belt clips or in shirt pockets. This way, they stress on the need for thin phones, as the phone is one of the critical factors in achieving a comfort level while wearing their belts and keeping their phones in their shirt pockets (Berker, Hartmann, Punie & Ward, 2005). On the contrary, most female members carry phones within their respective purses or handbags that lead to a preference for phones with some level of thickness for ease in locating them in their purses. With respect to their unique carrying performance, the female members have a request for features facilitating the location of their phones within their purse. Such features blink its lights while ringing. The other media democratization is incorporation. Here, design errors have a relationship to the sensory-cognitive forms of aging. There are several faulty product designs, which do not reflect the cognitive and perceptual aging of the older adults. Evidently, the focus is on the dexterity, visual due to the working-memory capacity reduction while slowing the levels of mental processes coupled with the overall decline in the ability of repressing different forms of irrelevant information. The common problems in this case relate to the visual abilities even though most members do not necessarily encounter severe visual impairments experienced through their difficulties in interpreting the screen pictorials, as well as labels on the buttons (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). The perceptual barriers offer a dramatic prevention of the technology experts in the use of such features. The domestication of media technologies also arises through the limited instructional materials. The people with limited experience of their media methods report that they are not in place of properly making use of the contemporary instructional manuals because of the many difficulties developed in understanding and following such instructions. The use of subsequent media, like the video-based instructions as suggested in the alternative formations of instructional manuals is an important part in terms of structure. Conversion is another form of media conversion that is both common and influential in the application of media forms. The personalized adaptation in this case ensures pursuit engaged through the employment of different adaptation strategies in the media forms features. The consumers on the other hand are uncomfortable with menu navigation in their media devices into their choices. Therefore, the media technologies users prefer writing down such contacts for later use. This is a revelation of the technology domestication theory and its usefulness in developing the analytical frameworks while understanding and describing the user experiences (Berker, Hartmann, Punie & Ward, 2005). Without theoretical basis for the recent research in user experience, the idea of domestication provides a foundation that UX practitioners and researchers can engage in addressing the different user experiences. The belief is that it constantly leads into a broad practical and theoretical development implication of media products, which generate user experience of higher qualities. The media domestication idea, as well as that of technology, makes constant reference to the manner in which technologies including the TV, computer, and telephone, are integrated to the peoples’ daily lives. With a grounding on the different social technology shaping, media domestication has interests in the methods that the technological devices translates into viewership of dangerous objects allowed on outskirts of individuals’ lives into an acceptable and harmless nature of how best to be essential components of the household. The media technology domestication is all encompassing of ideas that make consideration of the ultimate term that contains the theories of accepting technology, normalizing the usage into the daily activities (Silverstone, 2005). This also includes how such acceleration focuses on adopting the changes and interactions with other. This way, there is a complex and dynamic concept in studying where the researchers are in a state of making in-roads. It includes entering people’s homes with the aim of seeing the use of media and technology in different contexts. The deliberations indicate that having the integration of technological devices into people’s lives is not purposed at developing benign. People can have relationships that vary with them and their feelings towards each of them fluctuating with reference to their usage, perception as well as how the media portrays. However, the latter brings in more impact while first adopting and thinking of integrating new technologies. The family bears the role of implementing this theory through its institution while it affects another generation (Bilandzic, Patriarche & Traudt, 2012). The intimate introduction for domestication of media technology is an illustration of how children grow up using Skype as one of the ways to keep abreast and tighten family bonds. The new electronic communication modes have become fundamental forms of infrastructure within family life. There are numerous studies on different family compositions such as low-income, single parent; multi-generational living together and immigrants using technologies live TVs, the Internet, computers, and videogames. The theory forms a great lens for which more profoundly investigations of emotions at work are due in consideration of the domestication process. Domestication makes use of concrete practices, devices, and artifacts enabling negotiations with respect to every day, family, and home life. Moreover, through the usage, they proceed to contribute into the overall understanding of public and private, private and family life, the gendered division of work and labor. Media technologies translate into an elementary part for daily experience; this is because it remains virtually impossible to disregard the element in daily life. The functions and routines for daily life are the signs if reproduction and stability in social patterns. The part also notes the introduction of technology in the context necessitating further review of the ordinary notions of life as well as technology (Berker, Hartmann, Punie & Ward, 2005). Daily life is unstable while technology goes past the revolutionary stages in the end. Various forms of technology including the home media technologies provide a distinct stimulus towards change even though it also serves in consolidating the reutilized approaches in day-to-day living. For the domestication research, there are emphases of adopting technologies as methods other than individual events. The use and consumption of different media technology products are parts of the means of production and culture above mirroring the significance as inscribed into technologies and products. The process of domestication appears to be in contact with various cultural media focus in which television is referred to as an essential part for family relations and social practices. The domestication idea suggests that media technologies face domestication, and they later only exist through resisting various forms of change across time. On the other hand, the contribution of technologies, for instance in the home settings, is a constant evolution where the familiar technologies include new characteristics. Media domestication refers to more than a process as it cuts across easy understanding precisely in the areas of communication and information technologies such as the home media devices that have multiple applications while there is a link to diverse scopes for social interaction. References Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y., Ward, K. 2005. Domestication of Media and Technology. New York: McGraw-Hill International. Bilandzic, H., Patriarche, G., Traudt, P. J. 2012. The Social Use of Media: Cultural and Social Scientific Perspectives on Audience. New York: Research Intellect Books. Silverstone, R. 2005. Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe: From Information to Communication. New York: Ashgate. Read More