The aim of the proposed project is to analyse the changes of domestic communication cultures that can be linked to the mediatisation of the home, and to grasp these changes as a process.
The basic presumption is that the Internet and other domestic media technologies have contributed to a lively dynamic of the digital mediatisation of the home. This in turn leads to changes within the communica-tion between household members, alters the meanings of the ‘old’ media, and intensifies the mediatised connections of these households with extern spheres.
To reveal these processes an already existing sample of 25 couple households will be transferred into a panel and then analysed on the basis of qualitative, ethnographic orientated household studies. Since this sample, which was allocated according to socio-demographic criteria within the framework of an earlier project, was already examined in 2008, the proposed project can explore a process of more than three years in total.
Overall assumptions of the project aim at the alteration of domestic fragmentation and community, at a new interdependence between patterns of domestic media use and gender constellations, and at different mediatised communication practices due to varying educational backgrounds. Theoretically grounded in cultural studies the proposed project refers as much to the mediatisation approach as to the domestication concept.