Domestication of Technology Analysis
Also known as: Domestication theory, Domestication approach, Taming of technology analysis
Domestication of technology analysis studies how people 'tame' new technologies—turning a strange, commercially loaded object into a familiar, taken-for-granted part of everyday life. Developed by Roger Silverstone and colleagues to understand media and information technologies in the home, it treats consumption not as a single moment of purchase but as an ongoing process through which artefacts are appropriated, given a place, woven into routines, and made to express identity. The household is analysed as a 'moral economy' that negotiates the meaning and use of every technology that crosses its threshold.
Key highlights
- Reframes consumption as an active, ongoing process of meaning-making rather than a passive endpoint of innovation, restoring agency to users.
- The four-phase model (appropriation, objectification, incorporation, conversion) gives a clear, repeatable analytic scaffold for empirical work.
- The 'moral economy of the household' concept surfaces gender, generational, and power dynamics that shape who controls and benefits from technology.
- Travels well across media, mobile, energy, and workplace technologies and accommodates both successful and failed or partial domestication.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use domestication analysis when you want to understand how a technology is actually taken up and lived with—rather than how it was designed or marketed—and when adoption is better seen as a prolonged, negotiated process than a single purchase decision. It is well suited to media, communication, and information technologies in the home, but has been extended to workplaces, mobility, and energy use. It assumes you can gain qualitative, often longitudinal access to users in their everyday settings through interviews, diaries, and observation. It is less appropriate for predicting aggregate adoption rates, for technologies that never enter sustained personal use, or when only survey-scale quantitative evidence is available.
Strengths & limitations
- Reframes consumption as an active, ongoing process of meaning-making rather than a passive endpoint of innovation, restoring agency to users.
- The four-phase model (appropriation, objectification, incorporation, conversion) gives a clear, repeatable analytic scaffold for empirical work.
- The 'moral economy of the household' concept surfaces gender, generational, and power dynamics that shape who controls and benefits from technology.
- Travels well across media, mobile, energy, and workplace technologies and accommodates both successful and failed or partial domestication.
- Originally tied to the household, it can fit awkwardly onto mobile, public, or networked technologies that are not bounded by a single domestic space.
- Its rich qualitative orientation limits generalisability and makes large-N comparison difficult.
- The four phases can be applied mechanically as a checklist, flattening the messy, non-linear reality of actual use.
- It tends to foreground users and meaning while saying relatively little about the materiality and obduracy of the artefacts themselves.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What are the four phases of domestication?
Silverstone's model identifies appropriation (acquiring the technology and bringing it into the home), objectification (giving it a physical and symbolic place in the domestic space), incorporation (integrating it into daily temporal routines and practices), and conversion (displaying and talking about it to the outside world as a marker of identity and status). The phases overlap and recur rather than running as a rigid sequence.
What is the 'moral economy of the household'?
It is Silverstone's idea that the home is an economy of meanings and values, not just money, within which the family transacts with the public world of commodities. When a technology crosses the threshold it must be negotiated against the household's values, routines, and power relations—who is allowed to use it, where it belongs, what it should mean. Domestication is the work of bringing the object into line with that moral economy.
How does domestication differ from script analysis or SCOT?
Script analysis (Akrich) focuses on how designers inscribe roles into artefacts and how the gap between projected and real users plays out; SCOT focuses on how relevant social groups shape an artefact's design and closure. Domestication picks up where design leaves off, concentrating on the user side—how, once an artefact exists, people incorporate it into everyday life and remake its meaning over time. The approaches are complementary: design inscribes, users domesticate.
Sources
- 1.Silverstone, R., & Hirsch, E. (Eds.). (1992). Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Routledge.ISBN 9780415067003
- 2.Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y., & Ward, K. (Eds.). (2006). Domestication of Media and Technology. Open University Press.ISBN 9780335217687
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Domestication of Technology Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/science-technology-studies/domestication-of-technology-analysis