Profile
[KMDiary 2005 Issue #2]:
Tracy 's dissertation - "The Digital Home in Canadian Context" - uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the prevalence of the Internet in Canadian homes, and investigates the implications of the household Internet on social interactions and relationships between family members. Her dissertation research is part of The Connected Lives Project, with Professor Barry Wellman heading the research team. In general, the project examines how people communicate and seek information through technology, via a triangulation of methods including questionnaires, interviews and participant observation.
Tracys contribution to the project is to examine how family members engage with the Internet in conjunction with face-to-face encounters, revealing the possibilities and constraints for communication patterns and domestic relationships that the Internet provides. Her research supports existing statistics from Statistics Canada in which many Canadian households are accessing the Internet in the home. However, her research moves beyond statistical queries regarding how many people are using the Internet to explore how diverse households work to integrate the Internet into their daily routine, and with what effects. For example, while some households are reconfiguring their homes to accommodate the Internet and other media as a collaborative social and leisure space, other households situate the Internet in a solitary and private space that segregates the user from other household members. This has ramifications on how household members spend their leisure time together or separate. The perception of public and private spaces within the home is contesting notions of space and place within a domestic context.
Tracys research also indicates that despite the location of the household Internet, the Internet is moving from a solitary activity to a collective enterprise. Households are beginning to use the Internet together as a leisure activity, challenging previous research concerning television and Internet that implicates the responsibility of technology in the decline of family cohesion. Considerable media hype and speculation has lead people to believe that the Internet encourages families to live separate lives, and become quite disconnected with each other. Her research illustrates this is not the case.
Tracy is a lecturer at Brock University in the Dept of Communications, Popular Culture and Film on the subjects of Media Analysis, Mass Culture and Cyberculture. She also teaches Technology & Society, Gender, Technology & Higher Education, and Gender & IT at the University of Toronto. She is also actively involved in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). More information can be found at her website: http://www.netwomen.ca |
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