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 October
2008
Associate CRITO Director and Professor Alladi
Venkatesh’s article Digital Home
Technologies and Transformation of Households
is featured in Information Systems Frontier’s
special edition on Adoption and Use of Information
& Communication Technologies (ICT) in the
Residential/Household Context (2008 Volume 10).
Professor Venkatesh examines whether and how contemporary
home life is being transformed with the arrival
of new digital technologies. He conceptualizes
the home as having evolved into eight centers
of activity: the home management center, the
entertainment center, the work center, the shopping/financial
center, the family interaction center, the information
center, the communication center, and the learning
center.
From a technology point of view, in the 1950s,
the concept of the home was in terms of the home
management center. Most early technologies
into the home were targeted toward specific household
activities relating to cleaning, meal preparation,
washing clothes, and other various household activities.
These technologies were primarily labor or time-saving
devices. With the introduction of the television
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the home became
an entertainment center. In the 1980s,
with the arrival of computers in the home, it
became possible for people to work at home and
we see the beginnings of the work center.
In the 1990s, new media and information technologies
and in particular, the Internet has begun to transform
the home even more dramatically. The home is now
viewed as a shopping center as in home
shopping, the communication center, the
information center and learning center.
It is these new developments that have contributed
significantly to reconfiguring the home in terms
of digital networks.
Venkatesh believes that a framework that incorporates
these centers and maximizes the technology application
into these centers provides the best solution
for the personal computing industry as a whole.
A copy of this paper can be found here.
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