Platforming Families: Tracing Digital Transformations in Everyday Life Across Generations, 2024

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PlatFAMs is an international project on the digital transformations in everyday life across generations. It examines the embeddedness of digital platforms in the lives and practices of modern families by researching three-generation families (children, parents, grandparents) in five European countries (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain). Our objective is to reveal and critically understand the conditions of family relationships with pervasive, all-encompassing digital platforms, and generate recommendations for diverse stakeholders. We want to unpack relational and temporal aspects of digital platforms’ wide-ranging social transformation of everyday family practices and intergenerational relations in contemporary European societies. The project has the following aims: 1) To trace the impact of digital platforms through the life course as expressed in family practices. 2) To better understand the negotiations between family members and across generations about the use and implications of digital platforms. 3) To understand the meaning making of how different age groups within diverse families create and co-construct imaginaries of digital futures. The core of the project is the study of up to hundred three-generation families in five European countries (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain) over a two-year period, across different spaces online and offline, using qualitative methods. Three thematic strands are studied across families and generations: 1) Digital navigation and domestication (understood as the ways people interact with different platforms in order to identify inter-generational differences and similarities within diverse family structures); 2) Digital negotiation and co-construction (understood as relational aspects within diverse family structures regarding connections and networking using digital platforms); 3) Digital future-making (as the process of anticipating and creating imaginaries of digital futures, both personal and societal, that shape present practices in ways that are consequential for families). Data for this study were drawn from the UK-based PlatFAMs project, which employed a qualitative design involving 21 families (20 three-generation and one two-generation). The sample reflected diverse family forms, including single-parent, blended, and migrant families, as well as families with neurodiverse members. In total, 63 individual interviews and two follow-up family/group interviews were conducted approximately one year later.

Digital platforms have penetrated deeply everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, ways of living and understanding the world, and the institutional structures that underpin these. Despite growing research interest in the fundamental social, institutional and individual consequences of the platformisation of labour markets, educational institutions and the public sphere, we know less about how families are transforming around the everyday use of today's heavily commercialised and globally networked platforms. The PlatFAMs project focuses distinctively on intergenerational experiences in relation to the platformisation of family life. Prioritising new perspectives on digital mediation, domestication of technology, and relational perspectives on agency and generations, the project will critically examine how the platformisation of society challenges and transforms the conditions for agency, learning, socialisation, autonomy and care across the generations. What are the opportunities and risks emerging from families' practices of platform navigation and negotiation? What of families' futuremaking - the shared or contested imaginaries of the future on which their hopes and fears are pinned and to which their efforts are directed? Our ambition is to unpack the relational and temporal aspects of digital platforms' wide-ranging social transformation of everyday family practices and intergenerational relations in contemporary societies. The project will focus on the interaction between three generations (children, parents, grandparents) from five European countries (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain/Catalonia) chosen for their diversity in family life, technological infrastructures and socio-cultural context. Three thematic strands of the project will be studied across families and generations. First, digital navigation and domestication; understood as the ways people interact with different platforms in order to identify inter-generational differences and similarities within diverse family structures. Second, digital negotiation and co-construction; understood as relational aspects within diverse family structures regarding connections and networking using digital platforms. Third, digital futuremaking as the process of anticipating and creating imaginaries of digital futures, both personal and societal, that shape present practices in ways that are consequential for families.