Concurrent with the explosive pervasion of information and communication technologies in recent years, mediated communication has gained a strong position in the daily interaction between family members. Based on the results of qualitative interviews with families in Denmark, this article shows how the mobile phone is used by parents and children to mediate a feeling of closeness while they are physically separated. This practice of `connected presence' is based on frequent calls and text messages between parents and children as well as between parents themselves. The article also analyses families' use of the mobile phone in the context of modern family life, emphasizing the importance of the temporal and spatial dispersion of family members in explaining the form and content of intra-familial mediated communication. Finally, the dual role of media technologies (including the mobile phone) in both integrating and dispersing families is discussed.

The aim of this article is to advance theoretically the debate on the interrelation between robotization and the domestic sphere. I adopt a critical approach to the political economy about the diffusion of machines in the domestic sphere (unexpected and not predicted by the classical theories of capital) and the automation of everyday life, including that of the human body. In the first part, I focus on why robotics has shifted from the industrial sectors in the domestic sphere and on which features characterize today this sector. Then, I describe the trends that robotics has put in motion in the domestic sphere and Europeans’ attitudes toward it. In the final part, I analyze the processes of automation that are taking place. I will conclude posing the problem of what kind of society we want to build and live in by introducing the social robots and which future perspectives emerge at social level.

In this article, I discuss an issue which lies at the core of today’s “political economy” of the domestic sphere. The issue in question is that human beings are pushed to “outsource” their emotions, information, communication, education, organization, and entertainment, while they are left with scarce new technological support with which to cope with the fatigue, stress, boredom, and complexity of housework. My question is “Why has technology which is related to the material aspects of housework ceased to develop, whereas the technology connected to its immaterial aspects (information and communication technologies or ICTs) has grown at an increasing rate?” For answering this question, I analyze briefly how the machinization of the domestic sphere has developed the technologies connected to material labor such as means of transportation and domestic appliances and those connected to immaterial labor such as mass media, ICTs, and new media. A double strategy has always been pursued: a specific strategy is applied to immaterial labor, involving a great deal of technology, and an opposite strategy, involving much less technology, is applied to material labor. This bifurcation is necessary to maintain a high level of value production in everyday life. Nowadays immaterial labor not only creates value in the process of reproduction of the labor force but also generates capital directly. One only needs to think, for example, of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and so on. They are basically enterprises which extract value directly from sociability, friendship, and emotion for producing capital.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and people’s interactions with it—through virtual agents, socialbots, and language-generation software—do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that have long focused on human–human communication. To address this disconnect between communication theory and emerging technology, this article provides a starting point for articulating the differences between communicative AI and previous technologies and introduces a theoretical basis for navigating these conditions in the form of scholarship within human–machine communication (HMC). Drawing on an HMC framework, we outline a research agenda built around three key aspects of communicative AI technologies: (1) the functional dimensions through which people make sense of these devices and applications as communicators, (2) the relational dynamics through which people associate with these technologies and, in turn, relate to themselves and others, and (3) the metaphysical implications called up by blurring ontological boundaries surrounding what constitutes human, machine, and communication.

This article argues that systematic comparative analyses of women's strategies and coping mechanisms lead to a more culturally and temporally grounded understanding of patriarchal systems than the unqualified, abstract notion of patriarchy encountered in contemporary feminist theory. Women strategize within a set of concrete constraints, which I identify as patriarchal bargains. Different forms of patriarchy present women with distinct “rules of the game” and call for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of oppression. Two systems of male dominance are contrasted: the sub-Saharan African pattern, in which the insecurities of polygyny are matched with areas of relative autonomy for women, and classic patriarchy, which is characteristic of South and East Asia as well as the Muslim Middle East. The article ends with an analysis of the conditions leading to the breakdown and transformation of patriarchal bargains and their implications for women's consciousness and struggles.

This article examines the complexity of feminized domestic labor in the context of global migration. I view unpaid household labor and paid domestic work not as dichotomous categories but as structural continuities across the public and private spheres. Based on a qualitative study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, I demonstrate how women travel through the maid/madam boundary—housewives in home countries become breadwinners by doing domestic work overseas, and foreign maids turn into foreign brides. While migrant women sell their domestic labor in the market, they remain burdened with gendered responsibilities in their own families. Their simultaneous occupancy of paid and unpaid domestic labor is segmented into distinct spatial settings. I underscore women’s agency by presenting how they articulate their paid and unpaid domestic labor and bargain with the monetary and emotional value of their labor.