Family relations : Emotional overload

Abstract

This chapter explores the process of mediatisation with an institutional and bottom-up approach to mediated family communication. For this empirical study two sets of data were collected with the messaging application WhatsApp among six Finnish families, including parents and children. When the data were analysed using grounded theory, four categories of family communication emerged: those of the practical family, the dispersed family, the entertainment-oriented family and the loving family. In my discussion of the specific features of contemporary, mediated family communication, I propose the concept of digital family talk, that is an internalised way of interacting observed in families when they use media and especially private chats for their everyday conversation. The mediatised family is found to be a highly contradictory construct that is adapting its practices to a prevailing, emotional media logic. Such a dependency is making the smallest unit in society, the family quite vulnerable to the dominance and the constantly shifting prerequisites of media. Mediatisation is a transformative process that may even be levelling out the differences and increasing the similarities between families around the world.