B05 - (Early) Childhood and Smartphone. Family Interaction Order, Learning Processes and Cooperation
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Streeck
„By investigating sensory practices in digital childhoods, the project makes a fundamental contribution to understanding the cooperative constitution of the human and technical sensorium.“
Executive Summary
Media practices unfold the ways of the world becoming experienceable and understandable in digital childhoods. They also link everyday family life to social processes of digitalization. This is the overall conclusion of the first two phases of our study of mediatized forms of everyday family interactions with children from 0 to 6 years. As the possibilities of media-based interaction become more and more a comprehensive, unquestioned part of everyday existence, a paradox arises: The “accents of reality” (Schütz 1971) are shifting between digital media-based and co-present interaction. While the first funding phase investigated smartphones in early childhood as a cooperatively created condition of cooperation in everyday family life, the second funding phase focused on learning practices that unfold in situations involving adults, children, and digital media. Observations and analyses of the production and evaluation of family films, selfies, and photos have outlined virtual worlds as everyday familial places and the smartphone as a repository of memory data. It shows how media practices expand and change the familial biographical context of experience. Using video interactions as an example, the project shows how new forms of being-in-contact emerge without touching things and bodies. The boundaries of digital and analog, of touching and being touched, shift and transform the everyday life of children. This insight is reflected in our publication and exhibition “Reinventing Touch”, a laboratory of gazes, in which touch in digital spaces is presented in an (audio)visual arrangement as a set of innovative and cooperative sensory practices.
Taking up this thread, the project will further analyze the sensory and sensorial practices in the third funding phase. The main interest focusses on the cooperative constitution of the human and technical sensorium in the context of familial and everyday interaction with digital media. The project continues the long-term camera ethnographic study on digital media practices in early childhood with a research concentration on sensory practices. The leading questions are firstly, how sensory practices that are physically and bodily analog relate to digital ones. Secondly, it asks how these digital and analog “ways of worldmaking” (cf. Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman 1978) interact and produce new forms of sensory experience. For this purpose, the subproject conducts circular and contrastive field research phases in informal (family, peers) and formal (educational institutions) settings, researching in families and building up access to schools and kindergartens. Based on the observation of temporary boundary shifts between both analog and digital and living and non-living actors in the media practices of young children, digital (educational) games will also play a central role in the planned observations. The project continues to develop our experimental arranging style of research on audiovisual materials in order to test new ways of investigating practices from the perspective of observation. In this way, the project opens up an innovative methodological approach to situatedness as a dense context of action consisting of mutually reciprocal interacting (sensory) practices.
The project focuses on the question of the co-operative nature of the human and technical sensorium in the context of family and everyday interaction between children and digital media.
The research focus on sensory practices asks how these practices manifest themselves in their analog-digital interweaving and everyday life, for example when playing on a smartphone, watching family videos on a tablet (Fig. 1) or saying goodbye to grandma in a video call with a long-distance kiss (Fig. 2).
(© Astrid Vogelpohl)
(© Bina E. Mohn)
Camera ethnography enables systematic access to digital-analog, sensual and sensory phenomena. It is the centre of the methodological approach and expands participatory ethnographic research with a research-reflexive concept of cooperation that combines cooperation and (inter-)disciplinary positioning.
Different visual research formats that refer to the situatedness of practices and enable arranging research material are being explored in the project. For example, the research tool Wordless Language Game, an interactive video archive sorted according to practices and media (Fig. 3), was developed as well as an interactive, non-linear film project that was created through using the video authoring software Korsakow (Fig. 4).
Furthermore, the increasing age of the children suggests a multi-method approach that also includes interviews, drawings or explorations of digital environments, which takes greater account of the experiences of children as experts on the reality of their lives in the research methods.
(© Bina E. Mohn, Pip Hare, Astrid Vogelpohl)
„Showing doing being Nauka“
(© Astrid Vogelpohl)
Since 2016 the long-term study has been investigating how children (aged 3-10) in families create 'analog-digital' worlds as natural 'hybrids'. This can be observed in everyday situations such as when falling asleep (Fig. 5) and in the digitally mediated perception of the world (Fig. 6).
Starting 2024, the project will open up for kindergartens, schools and extracurricular facilities as new research locations.
The results of the 12-year long-term study will be published in a multimedia publication and presented at a final exhibition with video installations.
(© Pip Hare)
(© Astrid Vogelpohl)
➔ Find the Project Archive 2020–2023 here.
Publications
Current
Berührung neu erfinden. Sinnespraktiken in digitalen Kindheiten. Ein Blicklabor an 10 kamera-ethnographischen Szenen
Reinventing Touch. Sensory Practices in Digital Childhoods. Diverse perspectives encounter 10 camera ethnographic scenes
What happens to touch when we come together digitally? This publication brings together diverse perspectives and approaches to interrogate the widespread contention that increasing digitalisation in childhood leads to tactile deprivation. The authors describe sensory practices in early childhood as media practices in which skin and screens, eyes and ears interact synergistically to bring forth sensorial events. The publication is built around 10 short films featuring touch. The combination of texts and films explores interrelationships between embodiment, materiality, and virtuality in digital childhoods. (c) LIT Verlag Berlin-Münster-Wien-Zürich-London.
Mohn, B. E., Wiesemann, J., Hare, P., Vogelpohl, A. (Hrsg.). 2023. Berührung neu erfinden: Sinnespraktiken in digitalen Kindheiten. Ein Blicklabor an 10 kamera-ethnographischen Szenen | Reinventing Touch: Sensory Practices in Digital Childhoods. Diverse perspectives encounter 10 camera ethnographic scenes. Reihe: Camera Ethnography. Berlin, Münster, Wien, Zürich, London: LIT. ISBN: 978-3-643-25034-6.