Sucharita Sarkar is Associate Professor of English at D.T.S.S College of Commerce, Mumbai, India. Her doctoral thesis investigated print and online mothering narratives in contemporary India. Her research focuses on intersections of maternity with body, family, culture, technology and narrative. Some recent publications include articles in
This is the source
This review synthesizes Sakari Taipale’s book
warm expert.The final section assesses the book’s conclusions in the context of changing social policies. It also looks at the possibilities for future research in the domain of digital family studies (and, by extension, in digital humanities) that can germinate from Taipale’s concise study.
Auto-ethnographic review of Skarai Taipale's
As a matricentric feminist
researcher, I am deeply interested in how mothers
negotiate and maintain relationships within and outside the family (both immediate and
extended) in ways that both stereotype and empower them, especially in an increasingly
mediatized environment
Taipale’s ethnographic research is based on extended group interviews conducted with
sixty-six key respondents in Italy, Finland, and Slovenia in 2014 and 2015. He
contextualizes his research against the rapid digitization of family life since the
late 1980s and 1990s, limiting his observations to North America and Western Europe.
Specifically, he notes a general trend of families
family
affords his research both scope and uniqueness. He rejects the
stereotypical notion of the urban nuclear family confined to one household,
preferring to engage with the emerging phenomena of numerous
mixed and extended families made up of members regularly switching between
households and belonging to many families at once
Taipale examines the existing scholarship on extended families, referring to
approximate terms like Rainie and Wellman’s concept of networked
families
as a good starting point for understanding
the digitalization of family relationships
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
skipped-generation
communication between grandparents and grandchildren, a relation which is often
excluded from official European data
that focuses only
on first degree family relationships
Examining the factors that led to the rise of the digital family, Taipale expectedly
skims over the sociocultural transformations, like developments in Assisted
Reproductive Technology (ART) and the reconfigurations of patriarchal systems.
Instead, he focuses on the advancements in communication technologies that have
changed the ways families relate and connect to each other. He considers the swiftly
changing mobile-phone-that-has-morphed-into-the-smartphone, where the latest model
grows old in just a couple of years,
as a metaphor
and metonym of the fast pace of technological
advancement
polymedia
to explain the ever expanding
catalogue of personal media technologies
as well as the personalizable
content of smartphones that is accessible to
members of digital families
Although classic sociological theories focus on parents’ roles in socialization,
Taipale cites modern family studies research which explores the two-way influences between older and younger family members
In a book on intergenerational digital communications, it is expected that there will
be a central chapter examining the concept of generation and the processes of
generationing. Taipale recognizes the obsoletion of the conventional notion of
kinship-based, lineage-oriented generation in families because of the rapid and
diverse pluralization of family forms. He rejects the concept of strict generational division
and considers a more flexible and processual
post-Mannheimian approach to generational identity
update Mannheim’s original
conception
of generational identity by inserting an doing
each cohort generation has no choice but to over and over again
reassess its technological self-understanding and reconsider its relative position
vis-à-vis other generations, as new digital tools, applications and services are
constantly being introduced that soon become perquisites for a well-functioning
independent life
digital pedagogy
and digital literacy
to understand the uneven digital learning
processes and outcomes in family generations
In the second part of his book, Taipale continues his critical strategy of
re-contextualizing and nuancing current theoretical concepts, as he attempts to
articulate the new roles and everyday practices that are shaping digital families.
One of the pivotal concepts that Taipale revisits is the role of the warm expert,
Maria Bakardjieva’s term for an Internet/computer technology expert in the professional sense or
simply in a relative sense
who is in a close personal
relationship
with, and is immediately
accessible
to, the less knowledgeable other
(in contrast with the cold expert — the external professional helper)
Warm experts may be physically present and may co-use digital technologies and
applications with older members (for instance, grandchildren using Skype when
visiting grandparents), or, they may be proxy users for older members who are unable
to learn new digital skills (like paying bills online). Taipale’s research indicates
that most warm experts are youth between 20-35 years helping their parents or older
siblings; some are skipped-generation warm experts,
who
provide help to grandparents without parents getting involved; and sometimes, even,
older family members are acting as warm experts for their
age-mates
especially if they lived in the same household
Along with rejuvenating the notion of the warm expert, Taipale introduces the concept
of digital housekeeping, referring to all the responsibilities and tasks required for
the functioning of the digital family. As the digital housekeeper, the warm expert is
consulted — in varying degrees — about most digital hardware
purchases
by the family, although the cultural
norm
is that parents make decisions regarding purchase of appliances,
since they pay for them empowers younger family members, consolidates family connections and enhances
solidarity across generations
smart data
which is clean,
structured,
and represents selectively constructed
the object of inquiry, in this case, being the digital
family as interpreted through the data and lens selected by Taipale some aspects of a given object of humanistic inquiry:
However, Taipale is insistent about not replacing one homogenized norm with another
generalized conclusion. He points out how gendered anomalies often exist even in the
generationally radical concept of digital housekeeping. Some of his key respondents
articulated normative expectations
of motherhood: Digitally skilled mothers sometimes considered themselves
responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of software and applications in
the family
traditional role of mothers
as the maintainers of the home and domestic social relationships
into the
domain of software care,
because, with the rise of
women’s digital skills, even the task of digital housekeeping would perhaps quietly end up being included
in the already time-consuming
burden of domestic care work that women are expected to manage visible feminism
Taipale does, however, reveal other findings that are significant from a motherhood
studies perspective. In his analysis of the increasing uses of WhatsApp in
intra-family communication, he notes how this multimodal, scalable, private, instant
messenger service enables both dyadic and also larger group communication between
family members. For Taipale, the larger meaning of sharing and exchanging small
messages, photos and video clips
on WhatsApp resides in the insertion and expansion
of the ethics of sharing as caring
into the everyday family digital space new forms of immaterial labour
or care work
that is gendered
Moving around feminist analyses of intra-family digital communication, Taipale
chooses to probe deeper by using Bengtson and Roberts’s model of intergenerational
solidarity
Grounded in the theory of intergenerational solidarities, and acknowledging the
differences in the various respondents, Taipale introduces the notion of
re-familization
to understand the cohesive impact of digital technologies in the
context of extended and geographically distributed families;
he politicizes this
notion by contextualizing the current social thrust on re-familization against the
earlier policies of de-familization pursued by welfare states citizen empowerment
through policies accelerating digitalization, is rooted in the need to restrain
public expenditure
doing
families; the
internal, intergenerational solidarities within digital families increase. However,
Taipale also notes the unevenness in re-familization in the three countries studied.
He notes the continuation of inequities marking re-familization, as fathers and
grandparents are left out while mother-children communicate
Taipale mentions the digital skills gap that exists between older and younger
generations, and also between the less educated and more educated members in
families. However (and perhaps expectedly), there is no mention of the digital divide
that is so marked in countries like India, where I am located. Even his choice of
respondents excludes ethnic minorities or immigrants. This may be considered a
limitation, but it also helps in sharpening the focus of his investigations on his
selected group of ethnic-majority digital families in Finland, Italy and Slovenia
that may be multi-generational, blended, extended, and distributed. In Taipale’s
concise book, each chapter has an abstract, keywords and a separate references
section. It is, according to the publisher’s strategy, explicitly directed towards a
mixed readership of students, lay readers, and researchers. The heterogeneous target
readership perhaps accounts for the repetitiveness of certain concepts, arguments and
conclusions throughout the book. The book also reads somewhat drily, without the
conversational flows and narrative interest that often mark interview-based
ethnographic research. Taipale’s interview extracts are inserted within his analyses
in specifically marked sections, and they are not integrated into the flow of the
writing. We do not get to know the fleshed-out stories
of the respondents, even
those whose quotes appear multiple times in the book. In contrast, Julie Wilson and
Emily Yochim’s recent book,
Despite the structural and stylistic stiffness, the book adds significant insights to
the emerging scholarship about digital communication and family, which is where
Taipale locates his research. He moves beyond earlier research that focuses on
technology use by individuals or by diasporic/transnational families, and focuses on
studying the everyday use of digital media in families. Unlike existing research
which often concludes that digital media has negatively impacted the affective,
intimate relations between family members, Taipale takes a moderate, balanced view in
his study of linkages between digital connections and caring relationships within
families. In his concluding chapter, Taipale suggests that further research may be
done to investigate how caring relationships are played out in
practice in the digital family
or on any possible
positive long-term effects of the help and care provided by warm experts
doing family
rather than being family,
configuring family as asynchronous, always-in-process, and
mediated through communication technologies: his aim, he states, is to promote thinking that deviates from that represented by the
individual networking and one-household approaches
do
families. For instance, Taipale acknowledges that
although use of WhatsApp between peer-to-peer groups among children and youth have
been documented, the growing use of WhatsApp in the everyday
life of extended families is still an unexplored territory
There are several possibilities for further research that extends digital family
studies to digital humanities, and this can include scholarship with a matricentric
feminist focus. Scholars have made persuasive arguments for including genealogy and family history
in the cohort of humanities
computing and digital humanities doing
families) can be mapped and studied through other ‘texts’ such as
mom-blogs or Facebook posts. Expanding the possibilities beyond social media texts,
we may apply the findings regarding relational dynamics within digital families to
analyses of family relations in literary texts studied in digital humanities. Many
such interventions from multiple theoretical and multidisciplinary standpoints are
possible in the imbrications of digital family studies and digital humanities. The
Digital Humanities 2.0 Manifesto states that Digital Humanities
studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an
active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these
technologies