Understanding technology choices and values through social class

This ethnographic study of 22 diverse families in the San Francisco Bay Area provides a holistic account of parents' attitudes about their children's use of technology. We found that parents from different socioeconomic classes have different values and practices around technology use, and that those values and practices reflect structural differences in their everyday lives. Calling attention to class differences in technology use challenges the prevailing practice in human-computer interaction of designing for those similar to oneself, which often privileges middle-class values and practices. By discussing the differences between these two groups and the advantages of researching both, this research highlights the benefits of explicitly engaging with socioeconomic status as a category of analysis in design.

[1]  Alan Borning,et al.  Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems , 2020, The Ethics of Information Technologies.

[2]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[3]  Annette Lareau.  Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life , 2003 .

[4]  Richard Harper,et al.  Celebratory technology: new directions for food research in HCI , 2008, CHI.

[5]  Simeon Yates,et al.  Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader , 2001 .

[6]  Allison Druin,et al.  Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families , 2003, CHI '03.

[7]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions , 2006 .

[8]  Christena Nippert-Eng.  Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life , 1996 .

[9]  Morgan G. Ames,et al.  Making love in the network closet: the benefits and work of family videochat , 2010, CSCW '10.

[10]  H. Garfinkel.  Studies in Ethnomethodology , 1968 .

[11]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Conveying user values between families and designers , 2005, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[12]  Jennings Bryant,et al.  Television and the American family , 1992 .

[13]  Adriana Rodríguez Sánchez.  Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to Age Five , 2007 .

[14]  Susan Wyche,et al.  Values as lived experience: evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery , 2009, CHI.

[15]  Philip Auslander,et al.  Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, and: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America , 1994 .

[16]  S. Hall,et al.  THE SPECTACLE OF THE ' OTHER ' , 2003 .

[17]  Gilbert Cockton,et al.  A development framework for value-centred design , 2005, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[18]  D. Morley.  Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure , 1986 .

[19]  V. Strasburger,et al.  Children, adolescents, and television. , 1992, Current problems in pediatrics.

[20]  Susan R. Fussell,et al.  It's not all about "Green": energy use in low-income communities , 2009, UbiComp.

[21]  David Gauntlett,et al.  TV Living: Television, Culture and Everyday Life , 1999 .

[22]  Eric A. Brewer,et al.  The case for technology in developing regions , 2005, Computer.

[23]  Seymour Papert,et al.  The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap , 1996 .

[24]  Christopher A. Le Dantec.  Exploring mobile technologies for the urban homeless , 2010, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[25]  Adriana Rodríguez Sánchez.  Reseña de "Into the minds of babes. How screen time affects children from birth to age five" de Guernsey, L. , 2010 .

[26]  Roger Rouse,et al.  Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism , 1991, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.