Home Computer: Digitalization and the Domestic

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Christina Bartz; Dr. Monique Miggelbrink
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441593838

Since October 2020, the project has been dealing with the domestication of the computer from a media studies perspective. It examines the genesis of the computerization of the home at the interface of personal and home computers and thus for the period of the 1970-1990s. The question is under which historical conditions and with which effects the computer becomes part of the domestic ensemble. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach consisting of design history, environmental thinking inspired by actor-network theory (ANT), and discourse analysis. The arrangement of the living space and the computer are conceived as a relational structure whose elements mutually dynamize and stabilize each other. The project aims at analyzing these domestic environments in order to observe the genesis of the computer from a media-historical deconstructivist perspective, as expressed in the conceptual structure „ComputerWohnen“. Methodologically, this is a theory-guided material analysis, primarily of interior design and computer magazines als well as the IKEA catalogue, which are understood as a visual and textual archive in which the cultural negotiations about the home use of the computer in everyday life are documented by presenting the computer in concrete (usage) settings, among other things. The project extension now applied for represents a consistent continuation of the current project, which could not be brought to a conclusion due to the corona pandemic. The focus is on the continuation of the analysis of computer magazines. They are of interest with regard to questions of housing, i.e., it is a matter of reconstructing the enclosure of the computer in a housing that makes it an addressable unit available for housing. Moreover, they can be used to redefine the relationship between personal and home computers, and thus the relationship between work and domesticity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants