Platforming Families: Tracing Digital Transformations in Everyday Life Across Generations, 2024

PlatFAMs is an international project on the digital transformations in everyday life across generations. It examines the embeddedness of digital platforms in the lives and practices of modern families by researching three-generation families (children, parents, grandparents) in five European countries (Norway, Estonia, UK, Romania and Spain).

Our objective is to reveal and critically understand the conditions of family relationships with pervasive, all-encompassing digital platforms, and generate recommendations for diverse stakeholders. We want to unpack relational and temporal aspects of digital platforms’ wide-ranging social transformation of everyday family practices and intergenerational relations in contemporary European societies.

The project has the following aims: 1) To trace the impact of digital platforms through the life course as expressed in family practices. 2) To better understand the negotiations between family members and across generations about the use and implications of digital platforms. 3) To understand the meaning making of how different age groups within diverse families create and co-construct imaginaries of digital futures.

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 qualitative methods. Three thematic strands are studied across families and generations: 1) Digital navigation and domestication (understood as the ways people interact with different platforms in order to identify inter-generational differences and similarities within diverse family structures); 2) Digital negotiation and co-construction (understood as relational aspects within diverse family structures regarding connections and networking using digital platforms); 3) Digital future-making (as the process of anticipating and creating imaginaries of digital futures, both personal and societal, that shape present practices in ways that are consequential for families).

Data for this study were drawn from the UK-based PlatFAMs project, which employed a qualitative design involving 21 families (20 three-generation and one two-generation). The sample reflected diverse family forms, including single-parent, blended, and migrant families, as well as families with neurodiverse members. In total, 63 individual interviews and two follow-up family/group interviews were conducted approximately one year later.