From parenting with baby apps to coordinating dinner plans via WhatsApp, families are increasingly living their lives through digital platforms. But this is not just about convenience, it is also about power. Platforms shape family life, often invisibly, by setting the rules, gathering data, and influencing behaviours. For www.parenting.digital, Kate Mannell outlines key arguments from the new open-access book by a group of researchers across Europe and Australia ahead of its launch on the 20th of January. She shows how these everyday interactions — so often overlooked — are transforming family relationships and asks what this means for the future of family life in a platformized world.
The rise of platformization
Digital platforms now structure almost every domain of society. Scholars have tracked this shift, using concepts like “platform society” or “platform capitalism” to capture the wide-reaching implications of the growing power and influence of digital platforms. While platforms like to pose as neutral facilitators, they actively (often aggressively) set the terms of engagement: determining what can be said, what actions can be taken, what data must be disclosed, and what profit can be made by whom. They have increasingly come to serve civic functions despite often being profit-led, and while government and non-profit platforms exist, it is the concentration of power in the hands of a few corporate platforms that has been of greatest concern.
But what about family life? It is not just the functions of capitalism that have changed shape amid all this ‘platformization’. Communicating with loved ones through Facebook Messenger, checking the kids’ soccer schedule on Stack Team, ordering takeaways via DoorDash, managing home security with Google Nest, lazing on the couch watching Netflix, even turning on the lights using Alexa – so much of the everyday lives of families is now lived through and alongside digital platforms. The overriding aim of our book is to call attention to these easily overlooked ‘micro’ sites of platformization. What does platformization look like from the perspective of families, in all their diversity and complexity?
How is family life being ‘platformized’?
A family is not a static object – it’s a dynamic set of relationships and is constantly being made and remade through the practices of ‘doing family‘. The form these practices take and the meanings that emerge vary widely: for example, families can live together or separately and can provide support and care but can alsobe destructive or harmful.
Whatever they look like, the practices through which families are enacted are increasingly ‘platformized‘. We can think about this in two ways. Firstly, we can look to the role of platforms in the internal dynamics of the family –that is, how family members relate to one another by communicating, coordinating, managing resources, extending care and so on. One example that we discuss in our book is ‘baby apps’, which are used by new parents to track their baby’s behaviours and can become important sources of information, reassurance, and communication. Another example is fitness tracking apps, which some families use not only to track runs but communicate, offer mutual support, and connect through shared interests.
Secondly, we can look at families’ outward interactions with the world beyond – that is, how families interface with communities, institutions, businesses, governments, and so on. Actions like communicating with schools or applying for government services are also increasingly ‘platformized’. One example we discuss in the book is healthcare settings where new parents are encouraged to adopt specific baby apps so that they can more accurately report their baby’s behaviour to healthcare providers.
Why does this matter?
Platforms, like families, vary widely – not all platforms matter in the same way. But there are some common features that make the platformization of family life worthy of attention.
Platforms are typically marked by unequal power relations: they set the terms of use while giving users little say, and they often know a lot about their users while being impenetrable themselves. This means that while families adopt platforms for many useful, creative, enriching purposes, the terms on which they do so are often unknown or even unknowable. What kind of value do platforms derive from the activities of families? How might platforms seek to influence or structure family life and to what ends? This could include, for example, the way that platforms translate family life into data to be bought, sold, traded, and mined for insights.
At the same time, because platforms are so embedded in the practices through which families make themselves, their use also matters because of how it might be reshaping family life. Like many technologies before them, also ask families to reconsider their norms. When can a family member track another’s location? Is it okay for the kids to spend Christmas day video-calling their friends? We know very little about how family practices might be reconfigured through the use of platforms and what this means for the nature of the family itself. To understand this better, we need to ask: what opportunities and challenges do platforms provide for families? And how do families navigate these in pursuit of their own interests?
A new way of asking an old question
In many ways, these are new versions of an old question: to what extent are people’s lives determined by the systems in which they live and to what extent do they have autonomy to resist, co-opt, adapt, and leverage these systems to their own ends? This is a question that scholars have been asking for decades and one that – while impossible to answer –remains crucial to keep posing.
Yet, despite the long history, asking this question in the context of platformization raises unique theoretical and methodological challenges. In the book, we recommend methods that might help capture the rich, personal, everyday lives of families and offer a theoretical lens for bridging between the macro scale of societal platformization and the microcontexts of everyday family life. Our hope is that these inspire new projects, and new insights, into the changing experiences of family life.
An online book launch is being held on 20th January 2025. Register here.
This work was supported by PlatFams and the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.
First published at www.parenting.digital, this post represents the views of the authors and not the position of the Parenting for a Digital Future blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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