PlatFAMs: Platforming Families – tracing digital transformations in everyday life across generations

How are digital platforms embedded in the lives and practices of modern families? This is studied by involving three-generation families (children, parents, grandparents) in five European countries. Digital platforms have penetrated deeply our everyday life, affecting people’s informal interactions, ways of living and understanding the world, and the institutional structures that underpin these. Whereas digital platforms are tools, ‘platformisation’ describes processes. Despite growing research interest in the fundamental social, institutional and individual consequences of platformisation, we know less about how families are transforming with the everyday use of today’s heavily commercialised and globally networked platforms and their algorithms. The PlatFAMs project focuses distinctively on intergenerational experiences in relation to the platformisation of family life. The core of the project is the study of up to hundred three-generation families in five European countries (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain) over a two-year period, across different spaces online and offline, using a breadth of qualitative and participatory methods. In addition, we will do secondary analysis of longitudinal quantitative data across European countries. The ambition is to unpack the relational and temporal aspects of digital platforms’ wide-ranging social transformation of everyday family practices and inter-generational relations in contemporary societies.

The goal of the PlatFAMs project is to understand the digital lives of families. We will do this by tracing the activities and practices of families interacting with online platforms across Europe and explore how different generations – grandparents, parents and children in each family – use digital media and online platforms in their everyday lives. In doing so we will unpack their digital lives, as lived experience, comparing families in five European countries/regions (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain/Catalonia). Digital platforms (like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, but also platforms used within education and work) have become the dominating infrastructure for online participation and creation by all citizens and with huge impacts on our daily lives. The main research question is; What are the lived experiences and practices of families (teenagers, parents, grandparents) in dealing with digital transformations and participation across online platforms? Key topics in the research will be on ‘digital navigation’ (how children, parents and grandparents by themselves navigate across different platforms in their daily lives), ‘digital negotiation’ (how children, parents and grandparents negotiate and interact within the family about regulations, connections and networking using digital technologies and online platforms), and ‘digital futuremaking’ (how different age groups make opportunities and think about their own future trajectories within families and communities, as well as matters of sustainability, in their digitalized lives and as part of digitalized societies). We will follow 20 families in each country over 2 years, and for each family we will document the digital lives of teenagers, their parents and their grandparents of each family to see how family life in the digital age is changing, The potential impact for the project is high for both future policy, practice and research on family life in the digital age.