Lockdown screen worlds: the domestication and re-socialization of Zoom

Chambers, D

doi:10.4324/9781003265931-41

Lockdown screen worlds: the domestication and re-socialization of Zoom

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Deborah Chambers ORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Abstract

To widen and attune the domestication approach, the chapter centres on three constituents that inform domestication: quantitative data to gauge wider patterns of media adoption and use; the concept of techno-social affordances; and Knorr Cetina's concepts of scopic mediation and synthetic situations. The chapter utilises quantitative survey data, as well as referring to qualitative research, to assess wider patterns of household adoption and use of emerging screen-based interactive technologies. An affordances approach explains the technological potentials and constraints of these interactive technologies as digital tools specifically designed to sustain an emergent mode of trans-domestic communication (Chambers 2019). The techno-social affordances and constraints that guide sensory and social cues of screen visibility, display, embodiment, immersion, and performative interaction that characterise video calling practices are pinpointed, advancing the term agency scripts. Knorr Cetina's twin concepts of 'scopic media' and the 'synthetic situation' enhances this affordances approach by explaining how the intervention of the screen - which denotes remote phenomena as situationally present - reconstructs and transforms interactive 'situations'. Drawing on Goffman's dramatology, the final section addresses contestations over domestic space to pinpoint the gendered and classed dynamics involved in the exposure of domestic backdrops during video calls. The chapter explains how, by supporting non-present face-to-face encounters, video technology's interactive logic and visual attributes dramatically impinge on the moral economy of the household.