Mediated Communication Technologies (MCTs) for remote family members’ interaction

For several years, communication technologies are increasingly being part of the everyday life contexts, in the circles of work, in social situations and even the most intimate and personal dimensions. Most of the research in this area is interested in studying the role the web was introduced in social relations and how the personal relationships have been affected by internet. During the last years we assisted to a proliferation of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in families, who are increasingly using these technologies assets according to almost different purposes. This change has been possible because family structure has also changed over time. Indeed, regarding to Laslett’s famous classification (1972) which provided from a differentiation according to the presence or absence of one or more marital units within the family, Mantovani (2005) stresses the currently importance to speak about "broken families", "step families" and "immigrant family". Today lots of people don’t live anymore in the same country of origin for various reasons, workplaces included. Thus it is necessary to bear in mind that today's families are more geographically distributed than few years ago, and the space gap sometimes does not allow family members to keep easily relationships. If on one hand there is the desire for greater communication and sharing with his family, on the other hand there are the difficulties related to the generational, cultural, and geographical level that influences in a consistent manner on using new communication technologies. This explorative study is led by the interest in focusing on the use of technology within a personal life context such a family, in which the MCTs are increasingly used to support and extend relations between people who do not live in the same country. For this purpose, 5 interviews have been conducted with people who live geographically distant from their families for reasons of work or study. Therefore people will be unable to join in events and / or important dates (eg. birthdays, religious holidays, births...). Initially we examined the technologies adopted in the family life of these people, and the parameters they used do decide which of those methods to use in different situations of daily life. Semi-structured interviews in face-to-face or in mediated conditions have been conducted. Subsequently, we desired to provide in-depth attention to the practices and strategies that people carry out for the family relationships’ management, having at disposal a wide range of MCTs, both, fixed and mobile, synchronous and asynchronous. In this setting we observed possible strategies that these families establish to improve their feeling of closeness. In this scenario, the new technologies of mediated communication (MCTs) expand the ways throughout people can keep in touch, even entering in the family context for communication and life sharing with their familiars. That is an attempt to replace the emotive and connective dimension of face to face communication using different channels. From this point of view, the MCTs try to minimize geographical distances between family members, without interfering with the professional life. For this type of remote relationship the technology assume a key role by the way daily interactions dependent on their intervention. Therefore it will be necessary to gain a better understanding of how and why people use these technologies for communication with particular attention to the socio-economic context in which they live.