‘I wish there was a f*** it app’: creative strategies of digital un-use in family settings

Abstract

Families creatively negotiate many different types of digitally mediated communication to do social family work–sometimes playfully and sometimes due to urgent need. This negotiation can manifest in numerous ways, reflecting the dynamic nature of modern family life. Such creative acts are performed across a multitude of interfaces and media forms and serve to maintain family intimacy and cohesion. In this study, we combine the concept of creative un-use with the study of family life and digital technology. We analyse in-depth interviews with Swedish extended family members who are curating, cutting, reducing, or modifying their uses to ‘do family’. Our results show that these social and creative acts are constantly negotiated and shifting as new technologies are adopted and uses, norms, routines, habits, and expectations change. We show how acts of creative un-use, always oscillating between use and non-use, and as small or sometimes quirky they may be, are deeply entangled with family work and used as a means to support both within and between household family ties. The study finally explores what creative family appropriation of digital communication technology means for how these very systems are designed.