Domestication (Domestication Theory)
What it is
Domestication is a framework for studying how people absorb information and communication technologies (ICTs) into the routines, spaces, and values of the home. Rather than asking whether a device is adopted, it asks how an unfamiliar object is gradually tamed: brought indoors, given a place, woven into daily habits, and made to mean something. Technology and household reshape each other over time.
The core idea
A new technology is not simply bought and used; it is worked on. The household, treated as a moral economy that exchanges goods and meanings with the wider commercial world, converts a market commodity into a personal possession through four overlapping processes: appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion. Meaning is negotiated, not delivered, and the user holds real agency against any built-in script.
How it is used
Researchers use domestication as a qualitative lens, typically through home interviews, diaries, and ethnography, to trace how a technology settles into family life. They map where a device sits, who controls it, which routines form around it, and how owning it signals identity to outsiders. The approach grounds debates about media in the texture of ordinary households rather than in adoption statistics alone.
In practice
Consider a family that buys a smart speaker. At purchase it is appropriated, carried across the threshold from store to home. It is objectified when placed on the kitchen counter, on display rather than hidden. It is incorporated as the household builds routines around it, morning news, timers, music at dinner. It is converted when the family tells friends how indispensable it has become, folding the device into who they are.
Key studies & evidence
Domestication grew out of audience and media-consumption work at Brunel University in the late 1980s. The defining statement is Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, and David Morley's 1992 chapter, Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household, in the edited volume Consuming Technologies. There they borrowed E. P. Thompson's 1971 notion of moral economy and set out the four-process model. Silverstone and Leslie Haddon extended it in 1996 to link design and use, arguing that designers inscribe imagined users that households then renegotiate. Subsequent ethnographic studies of television, telephones, and home computers, and Berker and colleagues' 2006 collection, broadened domestication beyond the single household to workplaces, schools, and mobile, networked settings.
Critiques & limitations
Critics note that the original model centered on the stable, middle-class Western household, a poor fit for mobile, portable, and always-online technologies that are used across many sites and never fully settle. The four processes can blur in practice and are hard to date precisely, and the framework describes rich cases better than it predicts outcomes. Some argue it underplays power, gender, and economic constraint inside the home, treating negotiation as freer than it is. Rival accounts, including diffusion of innovations and the social construction of technology, cover adjacent ground; diffusion offers cleaner adoption metrics, while domestication offers depth at the cost of generalizability.
Applications
Domestication informs research on smartphones, smart-home devices, streaming services, and now generative AI assistants, asking how each is folded into household rhythms and identities. In communication teaching it pairs well with units on media audiences and technology adoption, giving students a vocabulary for their own device habits. For AURA Lab contexts it offers a frame for how mediated-presence and social-VR systems get taken up: a headset is appropriated, given a place in a room, incorporated into family or study routines, then shown off to peers. The same lens helps interpret streaming behavior and social-media analytics, reminding analysts that usage data reflects meanings negotiated at home, not just features pushed by platforms.