Keywords

When reviewing research on new media and communication technologies, it quickly becomes evident how much scholarly attention has been given to dyadic communication practices in one-house families, especially among young people. In comparison, geographically distributed multi-household families, often consisting of several generations, have been left on the sidelines (e.g. Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012). Family ties, however, tend normally to extend beyond the walls of a single household (Borell, 2003). Thanks to new digital media and communication technology, these distributed families can today nevertheless remain connected and feel a sense of togetherness, even when their members are not physically close to one another.

A large body of literature has explored media and technology use among children and young people, with especially the changing models of parenting in this regard attracting much interest (e.g. Lamish, 2013; Livingstone, 2002, 2009; Singer & Singer, 2012). The reasons behind this rather single-minded research focus are fairly obvious and quite understandable: children and young people are particularly vulnerable in the online environment, due to their cognitive and psychological immaturity and their relative lack of ability and experience. More recently, studies have, however, also begun to pay attention to middle-aged and older adults as users and consumers of personal communication technology and social media (e.g. Comunello, Fernández Ardèvol, Mulargia, & Belotti, 2017; Friemel, 2016; Ivan & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2017; Kuoppamäki, Taipale & Wilska, 2017; Kuoppamäki, Wilska & Taipale, 2017; Tsai, Ho, & Tseng, 2011). In many of these studies, which present older adults as a heterogeneous group of technology users, individuals’ differing personal needs for, and ways of using, new media and communication technologies have been highlighted. Older adults have, among other things, been found to have become better equipped, more skilled and more interested in putting technological advancements to use for their ends, following their recognition of how new technology may facilitate their daily chores and help sustain their social relationships after retirement transition, with the old age approaching (Taipale, Wilska, & Gilleard, 2018).

Yet, despite this focus on individual persons in the families, families as such have not completely fallen under researchers’ radar. There have been, for instance, attempts to address the effect of digital technologies on the lives of families, perhaps the most notable in Rainie and Wellman’s Networked: The New Social Operating System (2012). In the book, the authors describe networked families as a social structure that provides families ‘with a great deal of individual discretion, abundant opportunities for communication, and flexibility in their togetherness’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012, p. 147). While, we are reminded, the networking of families indeed began already prior to the ICT revolution, it was nevertheless not until the arrival of personal ICTs that wired (landline) phone calls and visits to people’s homes, made to contact the entire household as a collective unit, were transformed into person-to-person communication events that subsequently replaced them. As Kennedy and Wellman (2007) have pointed out, however, also households have become more networked. New communication technologies have enabled family members to live their individual lives and go in different directions while still remaining connected, often even more than before, via mobile communication tools.

The networked or connected home is a concept closely related to the idea of the networked family. Venkatesh, Kruse, and Shih (2003) have defined it as a living space with multiple centres of activity (entertainment, work, communication, learning, etc.), which can be structurally divided into social, physical and technological spaces (e.g. Little, Sillence, & Briggs, 2009). Initially, the aim of the connected-home approach was to show the pitfalls of the then-current research agenda on smart homes, which stressed the multiplicity of the ways in which the domestic space was connected beyond the four walls of the home (Harper, 2011). With the concept of the connected home, attention was drawn to the power relations among family members and the power geometry within the domestic space. What remains unaddressed in these studies, however, are any technology-mediated and technology-related connections between family members who live in separate household or switch between two or more households while still perceiving themselves as members of a single-family unit.

Another major contribution to technology and family studies is made by Neustaedter, Harrison, and Sellen (2013), whose edited volume Connecting Families: The Impact of New Communication Technologies on Domestic Life explores the new ways family members connect with one another, and not only within the same household but also across distances and borders. The scope of the investigation extends beyond pure analysis of family networks, demonstrating the importance of the sense of connection for the identity of being part of the same family. Acknowledging that one often belongs to multiple families at once, and making a clearer distinction between ‘family’ and ‘household’ than what we can find in, for instance, Rainie and Wellman (2012), the book spotlights the role of grandparents (cf. Moffat, David, & Baecker, 2013) who, living elsewhere in other households, nevertheless play an important part in the life of the (extended) family. In families made up of several households and consisting of more than two generations (parents and their children), technology-mediated communication is shown to often serve families’ need of staying connected, with the informational content of the communication being of no more than secondary importance.

The concept of the networked family thus offers a good starting point for understanding the digitalization of family relationships. Nevertheless, its historical rootedness in one-to-one communication technologies may no longer be suitable in today’s world characterized by a wide array of communicative practices and patterns that extended families, sometimes living in multiple households, make use of to sustain family connections over temporal and spatial distances. The terms distributed family (Christensen, 2009) and multi-household families (Borell, 2003) describe such families perhaps more accurately. A distributed family is a variant of modified extended families, consisting of related family units born out of children moving out (Litwak, 1960). Yet, despite living far from one another and constituting households of their own, the members of a distributed family can continue to engage in, and develop, common family activities, and on a regular basis at that, by either visiting one another or using communication technologies for their purposes (see Browne, 2005)

Studies exploring the role of digital communication technologies beyond both dyadic family relationships and one-household families are, to be sure, not many. Judge, Neustaedter, and Harrison (2013), however, have carried out work on domestic media spaces specifically created for intra-family interaction, which they call the Family Window and the Family Portals, in an effort to understand how these can foster communication in modified extended families. In addition, they have provided a useful overview of other technologies developed for messaging between two or more households. Among these are platforms such as commuteBoard (see Hindus, Mainwaring, Leduc, Hagström, & Bayley, 2001), messageProbe (Hutchinson et al., 2003) and Wayve (Lindley, Harper, & Sellen, 2010). In Taiwan, Tsai, Ho, and Tseng (2011) have examined communication within three-generation households, finding that, in addition to face-to-face interaction, communication via telephone, email, instant messaging and social network sites contributed to family socialization, and that also older family members began to gradually use the Internet more, to establish and maintain contact with their children and grandchildren. Similar results have also been obtained in Estonia, where Siibak and Tamme (2013) have studied web-based communication tool use in three-generation families. What they found was that digital tools considerably facilitated intergenerational communication, over distances but also within the same household, and helped to revive intergenerational communication that had attenuated. In the section that follows, the concept of digital families is more systematically introduced and defined, to help us better understand how digital media and communication technologies are interwoven with the daily life of families of three or more generations that live in either one or several interconnected households.

What Makes a Digital Family?

Digital family, as defined for the purposes of this book, is one form of distributed extended family, consisting of related individuals living in one or more households who utilize at least basic information and communication technologies and social media applications to stay connected and maintain a sense of unity despite no more than occasional in-person encounters between them. Families of this type are, in fact, only now developing and becoming visible, after older family members, grandparents in particular, have begun to adopt and make use of a larger variety of digital technologies for family communication. Although person-to-person communication via mobile phone calls and text messaging, which formed the foundation of networked individualism (see Rainie & Wellman, 2012), has already established its position in families, today’s mobile and social media applications offer novel avenues for group-based family communication to develop.

Digital families represent the outcome of family members’ collective actions, including both deliberate and non-deliberate use of personal and mobile communication technologies to nurture family relationships. Besides direct technology-mediated communication, also digital appliances and software applications tie family members together, thus requiring intergenerational and intra-generational collaboration in the maintenance of the digital home. The new forms of intra-family collaboration range from actions taken to coordinate new digital hardware purchases and installation to those around configuring, updating and recycling the equipment.

In this connection, it is important to note that what allows a family to become, specifically, a digital family is its flexible social structure. Given the fluidity of contemporary human relationships and our increasingly non-standard personal biographies, also our family compositions tend to become more changeable over time. Who the persons making up our family are can thus change, even several times in the course of an individual life (cf. Finch, 2007; Venkatesh, Dunkle, & Wortman, 2011). This can happen with the ageing of the family-forming group, with family members getting married and separating, and with new members being introduced to the family group through births, remarriages or new partners. Owing to this structural instability, I argue below, any digital family should be seen as a changeable configuration that keeps being shaped and reshaped by both family members and non-members.

Membership and Composition

Family membership can be defined in different terms, based on, for example, legal, biological/genetic or affective membership, or any combination thereof. In Western societies, family membership has traditionally been viewed through the lens of law, as configurations of legal relationships translating into obligations divided between parents, children and the state. These obligations range from those relating to custody and the responsibility to provide maintenance to minors and secure their physical, mental and financial well-being, to those entailed by the biological/genetic and marital relationship in the form of, for instance, inheritance rights after a family member’s death (Olivier & Wallace, 2009). As Olivier and Wallace (2009, p. 205) have shown, human–computer interaction research typically takes these formal and statutory frameworks as its starting point, making families appear as pure ‘functional units that work, eat, relax and partake in leisure activities, more or less together’. Conceiving the matter this way is clearly not very productive for those wishing to understand how the practices of technology use shape digital families.

Family membership may, however, also be regarded as based on affective bonds between family members. Unlike that derived from statutory obligations, affect-based family membership comes about as a result of shared everyday life and mutual interactions. A significant part of that life and those interactions is, however, today mediated by personal media and communication technologies. As research has shown, personal communication tools, especially mobile phones, also serve as an important reservoir of personal and family memories (Oksman & Turtiainen, 2004; Vincent, 2006; Vincent & Fortunati, 2009). Sharing emotions forms a crucial part of affective relationships, and of our personal communication tool use mode (Lasen, 2004), as it enables the creation and sustenance of loose bonds that can be easily untied when needed or wanted. Some of the affective bonds may be widely shared and electronically mediated within the extended family, while others might connect only a small group of people to one another, such as one parent and her or his biological child or children in a mixed family.

Like all other families, digital families are diverse in terms of their size and their gender and ethnic composition.Footnote 1 Key family members may be suddenly lost to unexpected death, or changes in the family composition may occur more predictably, such as when children grow up and move away from parents to start a family of their own, or couples decide to apply for a final divorce following a mandatory reconsideration period. In such and other cases, the addition of new, and the loss of current, family members prompts the remaining family to reconsider and adjust their ways of using technology for communication. In the process, those involved in it must consider ‘again and again whom to include as members of their family’ (Epp & Price, 2008, p. 52).

Very often in statistical research and official statistics, any changes in household size are taken to be indicators of transformations in family structure, even though household data cannot fully reflect either the diversity of families or differences in individual perceptions about who ‘belongs to my family’. At the same time, however, the household is not entirely irrelevant for the way the family composition is perceived, either. The immediate household shapes family practices and has functional ramifications for the daily life of the digital family. For instance, the presence of children in the household promotes older family members’ use of digital technologies (Kennedy, Smith, Wells, & Wellman, 2008; Lin, Tang, & Kuo, 2012; Luijkx, Peek, & Wouters, 2015; Mori & Harada, 2010). In 2011, Hamill showed computer adoption in the United States to be influenced primarily, not by money, but by the presence or absence of children in the household (Hamill, 2011). Elsewhere, in Latin America, Cáceres and Chaparro (2017) have found that while the presence of young people in the households promoted older adults’ Internet adoption to begin with, the presence in them of their spouses or partners increased the time these adults actually spent online. Correspondingly, when family members do not share the same household, older family members appear to learn and adopt digital technologies far more slowly or reluctantly (Taipale, Petrovčič, & Dolničar, 2018).

Although extended families likely represent the most common family type in many Western countries today, we still lack relevant family statistics to enable a full picture of their diversity to emerge (cf. Browne, 2005, p. 92). Official European data in the area is limited to first-degree family relationships, counting only the relationships between parents (of either sex) and their (blood, step or adopted) children (Eurostat, 2015). At the same time, the household statistics (Eurostat, 2015, 2017; Oláh, 2015) provide a rather unambiguous view of the changes either taking or having already taken place in the family composition. In Europe, the overall trend has been towards smaller households, owing to the decrease in the number of extended families living in the same household and the growing share of people, both young and the elderly, who live independently, along with declining fertility rates and increasing divorce rates. In 2013, single-person households accounted for about one third (32%) of all private households in the EU28 group of countries. In the same region, the share of households consisting of one or two persons rose from 59 to 63% between 2005 and 2013. What one also should note here, however, is that regional differences remain quite notable within the EU. Single-person household are more numerous in Northern Europe (making up, e.g. 41% of all households in Finland in 2016) than in Southern and Eastern Europe (30% in Slovenia in 2016, 32% in Italy in 2015; see Eurostat, 2015, 2017).

To summarize, we can thus make the observation that families in Western societies have become less stable in their structure and more diverse in their composition than before. This circumstance forces digital families to constantly take up and think over the issue of which digital technologies and applications they should use for family communication. Adjustments to the established modes and manners of communication may also be inevitable when the composition of the family changes.

Doing Digital Family

Based on what we just learnt above, it makes sense to conceive of a digital family as more of a process of ‘doing’ than just ‘having’ or ‘being’ something (Morgan, 2011). Digital families are transformed and reshaped as old and new family members move in and out of them, and as these members start and stop making use of certain communication technologies together. Digital communication thus both constructs and reflects all the different configurations of family relationships that we see today. Accordingly, Lim (2016) has described intra-family communication as a process of ‘doing’ family, whereby a relational culture is constantly created, sustained, recreated and redefined both vis-à-vis one another and through the mediation of technology. From this perspective, a digital family is an endless work in progress that will never be completely finalized or fixed.

Digital media and communication technologies enable doing family in a context where family members’ daily schedules and routines are very different and hence difficult to synchronize. Doing family via new communication technologies, however, involves not just a joint effort by the children and their parents: it engages all family generations. Also, grandparents partake in it and that regardless of whether they share the same household or not. Doing family, moreover, can also take the form of a skipped-generation communication whereby children and their grandparents are directly in contact with each other, without the parents’ involvement. In fact, grandparents play a crucial role in the ‘doing’ of extended families. As research has shown (Tsai et al., 2011), senior family members often act as family historians, advisors, nurturers and surrogate parents within the overall framework of the extended family. Grandparents represent a kind of ‘reserve army’, supporting both parents and their children when the family faces a crisis, such as in the form of a severe illness or unemployment, or when parents get divorced. Grandparents also help younger family members to see and place themselves in a long historical continuum of technology use. This they do, for instance, by sharing memories about the domestication of first home electronic devices and how these were used together and shared in their own family. Very commonly, the youngest family members today have little or no knowledge of what family life was like before, when there were no personal communication technologies such as smartphones and tablet computers. Understanding the generational differences in the experiential component of these technologies’ use is, however, critical in bringing family generations closer to one another. The sense of belonging in a family is created through communication, and this sense endures principally only when family members work together to sustain it jointly.

Considering the formative role of senior family members and (other) family members not sharing the same household with rest of the family, it seems obvious that the identity of a distributed extended family can only come about and be established as a result of a collective effort in a shared process. In the digital family, technology-mediated interactions and technology-related family discussions lay foundations for, and shape, the family’s ‘we’ sense. As Epp and Price (2008, pp. 50–51) have stressed, ‘[a]s families construct identity, they face competing interests and demands, increasingly elective and fluid interpersonal relationships, and blended family forms that depart from prevailing ideals’. In that situation, family identity then emerges as a combination of individual experiences, family relationships, and a collective ‘we’ sense. It makes possible for family members to reflect on who ‘we’ are as a family and in what respects that ‘we’ differs from the ‘we’ of other families (cf. Bennet, Wolin & McAvity, 1988). This is so also in terms of the family’s technology use.

Digital families, accordingly, represent a diverse set of distributed extended families, made up of two or more generations that use new media and communication tools as well as social media applications to sustain and even revive family ties. Starting out from this definition, my aim in this book is to promote thinking that deviates from that represented by the individual networking and one-household approaches. The focus in that effort is on intergenerational communication practices as they appear in distributed extended families, in which children, parents and grandparent are all, even if differently, engaged in the use of ICTs and social media applications.

The Perception of Family in Three Countries

The families in the three countries studied for this work, Finland, Italy and Slovenia, differed considerably in terms of their size, shape and technology use patterns. In general, what is regarded as a ‘family’ is both an individual and a cultural question, and the answer to it can also change over time. As a result, the concept of the family varies even greatly, referring to many things from a mini-group of two persons (adult–adult or adult–child) to large extended and mixed families involving multiple generations and a number of distant relatives.

In Europe, the main difference in the family concept is typically taken to be that between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ societies (Jokinen, 2014). It is, for instance, considered characteristic of the Nordic countries that the link between marriage and family formation has considerably weakened in them. In contrast, a more traditional family model based on marriage appears still relatively strong in Southern European contexts. Also internally within some countries, such ‘regional’ differences in the perception and meaning of family can be seen to be in evidence. As Piumatti and collaborators (2016), for instance, have noted, the better employment and educational opportunities that, say, people in Northern Italy can enjoy favour generational transitions, leading to looser psychological and economic family bonds and smaller family units, compared to the country’s south where large family units are still what provide individuals with many of the affective bonds and social safety-net functions that they need.

The key informants of this study supplied, among other things, also their own family definition, describing who belonged to their particular family. The definitions they gave typically reflected the general notions prevailing in their respective countries. Accordingly, as most of the Italian key informants were from the country’s North, another one of them, Emilio (aged 30), who was born and raised in its South instead, made a point of noting how his view of ‘family’ differed from that of his colleagues:

Coming from southern Italy, my own personal experience is that of the ‘classic’ extended family. The way I see it, to my family belong also numerous uncles, aunts, and cousins of different ages. The family bond is stronger on my maternal side, though, as we’ve spent a lot more time together in the last couple of years.

In general, the Italian key informants counted as part of their families not only their parents and siblings but also their grandparents and cousins. As appears from the quote above, sometimes also aunts and uncles could be included. Another informant presenting such a broad notion of family was Bruno (aged 30), who reported that ‘My family consists of my parents, my brothers and sisters, their companions and their children, my grandparents—although they have deceased—as well as my uncles and cousins’. The Italian key informants’ close relationship with a wide range of their relatives was also reflected in their selection of interviewees for this study (see Appendix). Nineteen out of the 21 informants in Italy included also family members other than their parents, siblings and grandparents in their fieldwork. In contrast, only four out of the 22 key informants in Finland conducted ‘family member’ interviews with their cousins and/or aunts, with everyone else restricting them to their parents and siblings only, albeit including also stepparents, stepsiblings and adoptive siblings in these categories. Also, co-habiting partners and, sometimes, parents-in-law and siblings-in-law could be defined as family members.

Compared to their Italian counterparts, the Finnish key informants thus defined their family more narrowly, likely reflecting the distinction drawn in the Finnish language between the kinship terms perhe and suku. Of the two, the former covers only the closest family community, while the latter refers to all blood relatives. A typical Finnish definition of a family (perhe) was provided by Jenny (aged 25): ‘As I define it, it’s my father, my mother, and my sister who make up my family, and my boyfriend, too. To me, my relatives or my partner’s family don’t fall under the category of “my family”’. There were, however, a couple of other key informants in Finland who included their grandparents in their concept of family. One of them was Emma (aged 24), who, to be sure, also herself noted that hers was an unusually broad family definition for the Finnish cultural context. Another was Marika (aged 29), who stated that:

My notion of who belongs to my family is quite broad. Of course, there is the core family that includes my mother, my father, and my brother, but I also think my grandparents are part of the family. My boyfriend has also become part of my family in the course of our long dating period.

Also, Benjamin (aged 29) in Finland regarded his grandparents as part of ‘the family’, even if he drew a small distinction between them and his other, core family members: ‘Both of my grandparents and my sister-in-law, too, are people who, to me, are almost comparable to family members’. Interestingly, the Finnish key informants who lived in blended families did not present any broader definitions of their families along these lines, apart from including stepparents, stepsisters and stepbrothers in them (e.g. Ella, aged 24; Laura, aged 29).

Similarly in keeping with this narrower family conception, the Finnish key informants, furthermore, tended to divide their families into subunits, or inner and outer family circles. Julia (aged 21), for instance, did so when stating as follows:

My family consists of my boyfriend and a cat that we live together with. In addition, also my mother, my sister, and my brother belong to my family, all somehow a bit differently. My other family ties are pretty loose, and if someone were to ask me about them, I wouldn’t, for example, define my father or my grandma as part of my family.

In the same vein, Rita (aged 34) described that ‘I think I have two families. My own family is made up of my husband and my five-year-old daughter. But to my extended family belongs also my childhood family—my mother, my father, and my sister, both of my grandmothers, and my sister-in-law’. This inclination to view one’s family as consisting of separate units is probably, at least in part, attributable to the country’s public welfare system, which, providing economic stability to support the basic needs of citizens from early on, makes it possible for children to move out of the parental home relatively early in their lives. Setting up one’s own home at a very early age has become a strong cultural marker of independence acquired from one’s natal family.

The Finnish research material also contained some examples of blended and atypical families. Laura (aged 29), for example, lived in a family that had become blended already twice. In addition to her, her family was made up of her mother and two stepfathers, a stepbrother and a younger stepsister. Another example of the diversity of families was Teresa (aged 24), whose family comprised 17 members in all, including not only the key informant herself along with her siblings, parents and three half-siblings from her parents’ previous marriages, but also the spouses of her two siblings, her parents’ five foster children, her stepbrother’s children and a grandmother.

Just as in the Finnish cases, also the key respondents in Slovenia tended to distinguish between their immediate family and their extended family. Most typically, the immediate family was described as consisting of one’s parents, siblings and grandparents, but sometimes also of one’s aunts, uncles, and cousins (e.g. the families of Veronika, aged 27, Sandra, aged 25, and Alexander, aged 24). To their extended families some key informants, such as Marija (aged 25), included ‘certain other members of my wider family, like my mother’s cousins and the children and grandchildren of my mother’s uncle’. The Slovenian key informant Jakob (aged 26) drew the distinction between his immediate and extended family rather straightforwardly:

The way I look at it, I can say that my family is divided into immediate and extended family. The close family members all belong to my immediate family—my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my father, my brother, and my sister—as do also the partners and children of my brother or sister—my nephews and nieces—and my own partner—later, of course, our children as well. My extended family consists of the relatives of my parents—their aunts, uncles, cousins—and my partner’s relatives.

Some Slovenian key informants also referred to an inner family circle of theirs when speaking of their most important family relations. Anton (aged 29), for instance, spoke of how ‘I include my father and mother in the inner circle of the family. My immediate family includes the uncles, aunts, and cousins with whom I am in regular contact’. The key informant Tina (aged 25), for her part, had already established her own family, after marrying and starting to live together with her husband. Nevertheless, unlike her Finnish counterparts, she still regarded her immediate family as also including her parents (mother and father) and her sister, as well as her grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts and the latter’s children (cousins).

The most significant and distinctive feature of the Slovenian families in this study was that the criterion used for defining them as such was still to a notable extent based on the notion of family members’ physical vicinity to one another. There was resonance here with the tradition of multi-generation households and high preference for homeownership, often visible in the tendency to build large houses specifically for many family generations to live in, or to cluster multiple single-family houses on one and the same property owned by the family (Cirman, 2006; Mandić, 2001). The idea of the essentiality of the physical closeness of others that this tendency reflects was conspicuously present in the reports by Slovenian key informants. For them, their ‘family’ was made up of those whom ‘we see often, meaning we go visit them or they come and visit us’ (Marija, aged 25) or ‘who live in my immediate vicinity and who we socialize with frequently’ (Tina, aged 25; a similar definition was put forth also by Sebastjan, aged 26, and others). Correspondingly, long distances were cited as a reason for not regarding some people, even one’s grandparents, as family members. As Petra (aged 25) put it, ‘I don’t consider my grandparents as part of my immediate family, because they live so far away and we therefore don’t have such close contact with them’.

As noted already at the outset, the key informants’ understandings of what constituted ‘family’ for them varied notably from country to country. The Finnish key informants’ markedly narrow concept of it, combined with the ubiquity of blended families, is well in line with the popular notion that Northern countries have some of the least marriage-centred family cultures in Europe. Slovenia was in this regard the opposite to Finland, yielding a picture of large, multigenerational families for which the idea of spatial proximity of family members was important. Nevertheless, the Slovenian key informants’ inclination to classify their families into the immediate and extended family members—the family’s inner and outer layer—and the presence of many divorced parents among the interviewees indicate there to have been an already visible broader trend towards the pluralization of family forms also in Slovenia. The Italian families, as noted above, were considerably larger than their Finnish counterparts, typically involving also aunts, uncles and cousins, but, as in the Finnish cases, they were much more geographically distributed than the Slovenian ones.