Connecting Families? Information & Communication Technologies, generations, and the life course By Barbara BarbosaNeves and CláudiaCasimiro (Eds). Bristol: Policy Press, 2018. ISBN 978‐1‐4473‐3994‐6, 324 pp, £75 (hb)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Connecting families? Information & Communication Technologies, generations, and the life course edited by Neves and Casimiro is a collection of 14 scholarly articles investigating Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and family life. The book is divided into two sections. The first section, entitled ‘theoretical and methodological approaches’, covers the conceptual elements of digital and cross-disciplinary methods. Its main focus is on understanding the relationship between ICTs and family life and the application of digital methods in family studies. The second book section, called ‘empirical approaches’, is a series of cases studies covering topics such as digital solidarity, ‘kinwork’, digital storytelling, work-life balance, mobile parenting and family connections. Existing studies of ICTs are often isolated and ICT is rarely explored in relation to family studies, but this book is aiming to fill this gap and in doing so offers a global perspective. The scholarly articles are mainly looking at how families are connected, how digital media has become embedded in family lives and how it has changed our relationships not just with our families but also with ICTs. While some of the articles focus on positives of digital technologies that are helping families and people in general, for example by improving cognitive thinking, family communications and enhancing creativity, others are looking at negatives of ICTs, exploring family tensions, oversharing, parental authority, addiction and cyberbullying. There are several emerging themes and theories throughout this book. Firstly, that technologies can rapidly change and are constantly being reshaped by society. Secondly, that families are connected and want to be connected, both online and offline. This theme is dominant across the book and is for example explored by Wellman, who argues that families want to be connected rather than be alone. This is also part of discussion in chapter 4 on family connections by Quan-Haase, Wang, Wellman and Zhang, where the study explores how older adults want to stay connected as a result of reported social isolation and feelings of loneliness. While the scholarly articles prove that both young people, adults and older adults use ICTs and that families often rely on them, the book offers a critical examination of how families use ICTs and how it shapes family life and relationships. Quan-Haase, Wang, Wellman and Zhang's study of older adults in Toronto, Canada, suggests that they use ICTs as part of being in contact with their family and friends and being able to socialize and exchange support, although some of them are reluctant to use digital technologies. Du Preez's study on oversharing explores how teens react to friend requests from their parents and what role do their siblings play. It is a study based on South Africa but is using theories from across the world, mainly from the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the American sociologist danah boyd. This exploration into oversharing offers another perspective on how ICTs are used in families. Although the scholars report both positive and negative effects of ICTs on family life, Silva summarised it very well at the end of the book by explaining that the digital technologies are affecting all kinds of our lives, including social practices and relationships, emphasising that family life is certainly one of those aspects. Most of these scholarly articles have one thing in common and that is that they are exploring the changes in ICTs and treating family as institution that focuses on social activity by admitting that ICTs are transforming how people maintain family relationships. The most important point made in the book is that although ‘technologies are not so much novel; it is the increased speed that connect them that changes human interactions’ (p. 85). This book is a great contribution to family studies as it offers a combination of studies of family life and ICTs and provides academics, students and researchers an insight into how ICTs are used in family life and whether they are improving or ruining communications and family relationships. The book is suited for an audience that is interested in ICTs in relation to family and childhood studies, as well as scholars with research interest in digital media and social media. It is also relevant for anyone interested in the rise and changes in technologies in general.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".