B05 - Early Childhood and Smartphone. Familial Interaction Order, Learning, and Cooperation
Principal Investigator:
Researchers:
Supporting researchers:
Anja Dreschke, Pip Hare, Sebastian W. Hoggenmüller, Susanne Minke, Claudia Rühle, Astrid Vogelpohl, Erik Wittbusch
Student assistants: Laura Heller
This subproject investigates the ways that children aged 0-6 years old engage with media and digital devices. The sudden proliferation and ubiquity of smartphones – it is assumed – has a fundamental impact upon learning and socialization in early childhood. This is particularly true in the realm of the family; the primary locus of media socialization. Hence, we focus on everyday situations in which smartphones and other digital devices are used in families, investigating the cooperative media practices that such situations bring forth. We seek to identify the manifold forms of interactive (media) practices, including the processes of appropriation, knowledge, and learning. We pay particular attention to the changes that are currently redefining the notions of public and private, presence and absence. Our research takes a radical approach to focus on social praxis by applying and developing mediaethnographic methods: ethnographic thick description, camera-ethnographic “thick showing”, and ethnomethodological sequence analysis. These situated (media) research practices are employed in order to investigate and (re)present the situated practices found in the field.