In the fun house: visions of information technology in the domestic sphere

The paper examines the marketing and advertising of information technologies in the domestic sphere by examining a number of new publications aimed at the home market. By considering representations of the new “wired” households imaged in sources like HomePC and FamilyPC. I explore the ways in which these magazines call into play a number of other cultural discourses about home, family and gender and question whether these new stories of the domestic cyberfuture are really so new after all. Looking at these newly developing images can help us understand how popular discourses, while managing cultural anxieties about technology, also construct specific subject positions along gendered and familial lines. Such an understanding is the first step in challenging visions of the future which reproduce power hierarchies familiar from the past. Finally, this project, by examining popular representations of new technologies, offers a way to add a new level of specificity and detail to the often ungrounded theorizations of cyberspace which proliferate today