Gender and new media. The family context
Liesbet van Zoonen
Prev. research:
feminist media studies: 1994, but not yet outdated: gender as a social construction, in social interactions, as a performance, something you do, not something you are.
gendered meanings of Internet: from ‘the new medium’/the post-modern experimenting with gender to we do what we always have, just online
social construction of gender, mutual shaping
This presentation and study:
gender and interactive television
more general: everyday media use
industry rhetoric built on individual male user
Terms and applications
Interactive television; web tv; TIVO; PVR; enhanced television; value added television
On demand
Participation: as in Pap-project
Selection: Audience with possibilities to choose
Addition
Communication
Localization
Time shifting
Rhetoric of change
For the better or worse. Comes with technological developments.
Audience are however, reluctant. Lack of knowledge (as claimed from industry)?
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Not the case: history shows similar cases:
When old technologies were new” : telephone (corporate > social), radio (radio amateur > family), minitel (directory > Minitel rouge), Internet (data sharing > e-mail/communication + games; social). Users tend to reinvent technology to their own needs.
What risks for ITV?
Supply:
I methodology (indicates that engin. will understand technology from his own needs.
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Business model: shaky. “If you can’t build them, kill them”
Regulation: works against
Demand:
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Geared at a individual male user
Selective use
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Active
This is not how we use and understand TV in everyday life.

Audience desires:
History; Social contact, family contact
Postmodernity: need for community, performance
Media experience: gendered
Phenomenology of TV
The way we experience television.
TV experience:
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Flow  program
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Ritual  choice
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Collective  individual: Family viewing, conversation tool, imaginary gendered communities.
Research at Centrum voor populaire cultuur
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Expectations from audience
Domestication
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Social construction: N = 100; Dutch (couples and young families).
Families and their media
Expecations.
Four use cultures:
1: Traditional use culture : men decide, women follow (PC/Internet)
2: Reversed use culture: women decide, men follow (Television)
3: Individualized culture: individual ICT equipment (telephone, not television).
Second television sets are hardly used.
4: Deliberative culture: negotioation about leisure (dominant pattern).
Young couples (dinkies)
TV/VCR:
Deliberation
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Sharing leisure time: common frame of experience, reconstruct relation
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Shared history
Second set rarely used
+
PC/Internet
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Male territory
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Work and study use
Source of stress if used only for leisure
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Extra lap top

Interactive television
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Men in general could imagine, women distanced and critical
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Together: individualized TV use undesirable
Big !! concerning the community-parts of watching television.