Warm Experts 2.0

Abstract

This chapter focuses on family roles in digital families, drawing upon, and updating for the present day, the concept of the warm expert. First, the impact of information and communication technologies on family roles is investigated, based on qualitative research material collected from Finland, Italy and Slovenia in 2014 and 2015. After that the analysis looks at how family roles and responsibilities can change over the human life course. Three types of warm experts are identified, with their characteristics described and discussed. Lastly, the argument is made that intimately knowing the other family members is an essential quality of those acting in the role of warm experts, and that while acting in the role of an warm expertise is often demanding, it can also be rewarding to not just those benefiting from it, but also those in it. The concept of the warm expert has continued to attract many new media and communication researchers. Introduced by Bakardjieva (2005), it was intended to help investigate the first wave of ordinary technologies in the early 2000s that allowed people to access the Internet from their homes. Warm experts, for Bakardjieva, were people with relatively advanced skills and knowledge about new technology who were readily available to assist novice technology users taking only their first steps in using digital technologies. In contrast to outside professional helpers-'cold experts'-the warm experts Bakardjieva (2005) described share their daily lifeworld with people needing their help, and are thus readily at hand for them to demonstrate, drawing upon their own experience, the advantages of being digitally connected. In her study, such everyday help and support by these experts were typically favoured over professionalized forms of assistance, including those provided through telephone helplines and computer service shops. The larger the knowledge gap between the helper and the helped, however, the higher the threshold for asking assistance would appear to be (Barnard, Bradley, Hodgson, & Lloyd, 2013). This much seemed evident also from the account provided by the Finnish key informant Lucas (aged 38). As he reported, his mother