Abstract. This study explores how households use information and communication technology (ICT), the meanings ICT has for household members, and how their lives are being affected. In-depth interviews were conducted in Australian forefront user ('infomated') households. Sixmajor themes emerged: technology erases boundaries between home and work; people compartmentalize activities to shore up the work/non-work boundaries; motivations for household ICT extend beyond work; technology changes the social dynamics in the household; constant contactability becomes an achievable, high priority goal; ICT provokes negative emotions and concerns. The households actively, and often creatively, use these technologies to make their lives easier and enrich them. Basically people seem satisfied with their technologies, although households are still struggling to control and adjust to perceived negative impacts. The findings may provide guidance for households considering ICT adoption.

Use of information and communication technology (ICT) is leading to radical social changes, including new kinds of social life as the cost of communicating falls dramatically (Cairncross, 1997). Organizations are embracing ICT, which is rapidly enabling them to become "anytime/anyplace" entities capable of responding to customer demand or competitive pressures without regard to office hours or location (Cairncross, 1997; "Firms that Never Sleep," 1998). The increased sophistication and falling costs of ICT make it easier for organizations to develop virtual structures that transcend traditional space and time limits, and to employ out-of-office, or remote, workers (Reich, 1992; O'Hara-Devereaux & Johansen, 1994; Handy, 1995). Urban planners and architects predict lowered pollution and traffic congestion as a result of increased homeworking, emergence of new communities, and major changes to our existing institutions (Mitchell, 1995). Workers, particularly those with child-care responsibilities, expect a more family-friendly world of work to emerge (European Telecommuting Online, 1999).

The current interest in working from home suggests a radically new world of work; however, successful home-based working is not new. In 1985, before the advent of sophisticated ICT, F International had already completed its first 20 years as a pioneering homeworking business (Shirley, 1985). Managing a highly skilled and productive workforce of 200 knowledge workers at the time, Shirley (1985, p. 56) concluded that it is just "a business operating in a new way". Over 30 years after its inception, FI now has more than 1600 IT professionals working from a home base. Standen (1997) also argues that homeworking exists informally in many organizations, and is likely to have done so for some time.

Despite the occasional success stories, a survey of 100 Fortune 500 Industrial firms found significant differences between the more and less successful virtual projects (Davenport & Pearlson, 1998). Some of these differences were attributed to the extent of support and preparation accorded remote workers, and recognition that technology in the home affects a party not normally part of the employer-employee contractual relationship - namely the household.

Taking work home has long been part of life for many senior white-collar workers. In the late 1980s, a study of workers who engaged in supplemental work at home found a positive relationship between the availability of a telecommunications link between the office and home computers, and the number of supplemental hours worked at home (Venkatesh & Vitalari, 1992). These authors predicted that telecommunications linkages would play a central role in remote working arrangements of the future, and considerable research suggests that this is the case, as Venkatesh (1996) describes.

Traditionally, the home has been set aside primarily for non-work activities, but with the rise in affordable ICT, work is being done in this once-domestic sphere by increasing numbers of people in the US (Frazee, 1996) and Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1998). Without doubt the household is also becoming a technology-rich environment for non-work applications, including for home entertainment and social purposes, as well as for financial and other services (Cairncross, 1997; Kraut, Patterson, Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukopadhyay & Schleris, 1998).

With ICT entering the household for work and other purposes, how households function can be expected to change profoundly. For example, with a VCR, television programs can be recorded and viewed at another time, thereby enabling household members to use their time differently. The Internet provides instant access to information, often replacing the trip to the library or watching the news on TV. Mobile phones enable people to be reached wherever they happen to be, potentially allowing people to be mobile while still on duty. Internet and telephone banking, smart cards and electronic debit cards mean fewer visits to the bank to conduct financial transactions and allow banking virtually anytime/anywhere. Soon wired households will free their inhabitants from many more time and place constraints in going about their daily activities.

Silverstone (1994) argues that familiar communication technologies like the car and television set have significantly changed how we conduct everyday life, because they lie at the center of a complex system of technical and socio-cultural relationships. For similar reasons, ICT is expected to have far-reaching impacts on the household. Originally, communication technology was essentially a conduit linking different physical locations. Now communication via ICT has become a destination in its own right, a virtual space in which we spend much of our business and personal lives (O'Hara-Devereaux & Johansen, 1994).

Evidence indicates that contextual characteristics, such as location, cues, and ambience, influence adaptive learning around new technology (Tyre & Hippel, 1997). Fulk & DeSanctis (1995) point to a growing literature documenting that the effects of electronic communication are socially constructed by individuals within the organization in which the technology is used. Thus, the household context would be expected to be a factor affecting how ICT is used, potentially altering usage patterns compared with ICT use in other settings. It is likely that the picture is far more complex at the household level than current research suggests.

Earlier research into the impact of ICT on households conducted in Silicon Valley suggests that ICT does impact the dynamics of these households, particularly regarding the penetration of work into the home and blurring of the distinction between work and home (Darrah, English-Lueck & Saveri, 1997; English-Lueck, 1997, 1998). However, the extraordinary involvement of the Silicon Valley community in developing ICT may make this an atypical community to study.

The present study examines the household impacts of ICT from the perspective of the householders - a perspective from which this question is probably best explored - by gathering data in present-day forefront households from an urban center in Australia. The chosen Australian community is not as strongly related to the ICT industry as is Silicon Valley.

Australia provides an appropriate setting for such a study because it is in the forefront of technology use in the household. Australians have developed a reputation for rapid adoption of new technologies, including in electronic banking. In November, 1999 over 5% of employed adults in Australia reported that they were able to access their employer's computer system from home via a modem, with 4% of employed adults having a teleworking agreement with their employers that enabled them to work from home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000). Nearly 50% of Australian households had a computer in November, 1999 and 25% had home Internet access (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000). In 1998, 26% of the adult population had accessed the Internet within the previous 12 months, and by November, 1999 this figure had grown to 44% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1998, 2000). Home and work locations were the most frequent places of Internet access (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000).

Australia also has a high per capita rate of adoption of mobile phones, nearly 38% of the population in 1999 (Budde, 1999). The US-based Institute for the Future (1998, p. 17) commented that "due to pricing of wired and cellular telecommunications, Australians are much higher cellular users than Americans". Clearly, ICT is becoming well established both outside the workplace and in the Australian home.

The study reported in this paper explores the ways in which Australian households use ICT, the meanings these technologies have for household members, and how their home lives are being affected.

Sample

In this qualitative study, we interviewed households who are forefront users of ICT devices and services. These "infomated" or "connected" households were first identified within the Silicon Valley community and are defined in terms of the number of different ICT devices and services they own (Institute for the Future, 1995; Katz, 1997; Darrah et al., 1997).

This "intensity" sampling entails selecting "participants who are experiential experts and who are authorities about a particular experience" (Morse, 1994, p. 229), a sampling procedure appropriate when the research design calls for "information rich" data (Patton, 1990; Morse, 1994). Households in this study were invited to participate in research into how they use modern information and communication technologies in their homes. To locate suitable households, individuals believed to possess large amounts of ICT were referred to the researchers. These individuals were contacted, and qualified according to the number of ICTs in their household.

Ten "infomated" households in Sydney participated in this study. The sample included diverse household types, ranging from two-person households to families and households containing unrelated "flatmates" (see Table I for sample details). Some households were located in the inner city, and some in the suburbs of Sydney. In addition, the sample contained individuals from a range of ethnic backgrounds, ages, and types of work or business they were in. The sample included people who ran businesses from home, people who were employed but did some or all of their work at home, and people who went out to work and study. Anonymity was assured to participating households.

Households qualified for interviewing if they had 7 or more of 14 specific ICT items. In the present sample, households contained an average of 11ICT items on the qualifying list, distributed as shown in Table II. Some households added a variety of other items to the list of ICTs, but these additional technologies were not used to qualify the households for participation in the study.

Procedure

In-depth interviews were employed to try to understand the real life issues of people who live in the selected infomated households. Appointments were made to conduct a two-hour interview in their home with all members of the chosen household simultaneously. The objective of the interview was to elicit a picture of the household as the context within which technologies are used by household members. The focus was on the dynamics of the household, rather than on the technology itself. Opportunities to probe answers were used as fully as possible to explore the meaning and uses of ICT.

Interviews were standardized by using a detailed interview guide (Patton, 1990), but were conducted as free-flowing conversations. At the beginning of the interview, household members individually ranked the importance of the listed ICT items in the household, and then nominated a spokesperson, around whose technology rankings for most important and least important ICTs the interview was conducted. The entire household was interviewed, focussing on the spokesperson's most important and least important ICT.

 The topics were grouped into seven areas. Householders were asked:

1. about how and why those particular ICT devices and services came into the home,
2. questions on the expectations, hopes or fears associated with those devices and services,
3. to give concrete examples of how the devices and services have been used,
4. to give examples of how the particular technology improved their life or made it more difficult,
5. how they use ICT devices and services to interact with other household members and with people outside the household,
6. what next device or service they want to have in their household, and
7. about the members of the household and their work/activities, and why they perceive themselves as constituting a household.

In addition to being asked questions about the spokesperson's most and least important ICTs, respondents were asked specifically about computer and Internet use if those items were not dealt with earlier. When time permitted within the two-hour period, the researcher asked about an additional item over which the household members disagreed regarding its importance rating. Respondents were rewarded with a gift voucher at the end of the interview.

The tape-recorded interviews were transcribed by a professional transcription service and then two researchers independently read transcript data to identify the themes that emerged within each of the households. Themes were instances in which respondents described how the household used their ICT devices or services, why they were used, the meanings these technologies had for the household members and how their lives were being affected. Then, using the entire data set, recurring themes were identified. In an iterative process, the recurring themes were grouped into larger categories. For example, comments about limiting the use of a particular technology to specific functions or to certain times of the day and comments about dividing devices such as organizers into work and non-work sections were combined under the larger category of 'compartmentalizing activities to shore up the work/non-work boundaries'. This process produced a number of categories which formed the basis of discussion between the researchers and resulted in inter-subjective agreement as to the pre-eminence of sixunderlying themes. These six broad themes appeared in the transcripts with approximately equal frequency.

Households which were forefront users of ICT devices and services were interviewed, with the objective of developing an understanding of the context within which these technologies are used by households. Recurring themes were then identified in the interview transcripts, and broader underlying themes were derived. In this section we describe the six broad themes which emerged from the interview transcripts. Descriptions and quotations from the interviews are identified as coming from the interview households using the numbering system in Table I.

1. Technology erases the boundaries between home and work

A strong theme emerging from our interviews is that in these households the distinction between work and home is blurring. In each of the households at least one person works fulltime from home or brings supplemental work home every night. Technology is very important in supporting these activities. As A. in H1 noted: "So now home is my work ...and I really run everything from here". The couple in H5 agreed that "we bring work home every night". S. from H5 said "even if, for instance, we decided that we found the time to start a family, I can see the advantages of working from home, because then you could be able to juggle ... the family with work, rather than having to completely give up your work. You just move your office into the home."

Decisions about which technology enters the home are strongly influenced by work-related considerations. Much home technology purchase and use is for work or business. A. in H1: "And that's why my computer now isn't just a home toy or an entertainment, it's really running our company as well" S. in H7: "Once I started the business, that [mobile phone] was the first thing I got". D. from H9 and A.& S. from H10 purchased the mobile phone, fax and computers for their home-based businesses. P. in H5 relates: "My needs and requirements predominantly revolve around work ... If, for example, the company does move to a software which actually exceeds the capacity of the ...PC that we have at the moment, then of course I will have to upgrade".

Work and home as "all muddled up" is evident in all households. A. from H1 referred to the blurring of the boundaries between home and work-related uses of technology: "It all gets muddled up together. Sometimes if there's pressure in one area I might leave the others until later, but in general it's just all muddled up. So if I've got a paper I've got to get in or something like that, then perhaps the personal side might slip. But usually it's just a muddle." In H8, the laptops "go wherever we go", and because their home computer produces better graphics than those they have at their offices, the home system is used for their work productions at times, as well as for family applications like invitations. P. from H5 says "... I work, sleep, eat with a PC", which he uses for word processing, games, entertainment and as a TV.

Forms of 'work' relating to education have long been widely accepted as appropriate to the home, and educational applications of ICT within our households were very common. Technology is used by school-age children, and also for university undergraduate and graduate work. Parents in our households often mentioned computers, the Internet and Pay-TV (for documentaries and quality programming channels) as important for their children's education and future careers, and as providing their children with an advantage. M. from H4, mother of a 10-month old baby, said: "We've already started [teaching the baby] ... He bangs on the keyboard very hard... I think technology can be a very useful education towards ...the future ... There are lots of games, education, math games and things like that."

2. People compartmentalize activities to shore up the work/non-work boundaries

Our interviews provided many examples of people using the technology to put in place certain boundaries between their work and non-work lives. They carefully manage their accessibility via the ICT devices by turning them off, exerting other controls over them, or using devices only for certain functions. This was particularly evident with organizers, mobile phones and computers.

S. in H7 turns his mobile phone off at a specific time each day, so he can have some quality family time. His wife laments: "...we'll just sit down to have lunch and the phone will ring and it's the only time I get to speak to him all day." Similarly, the business couple in H10 never give their home phone number to business contacts, they only give them the mobile phone number. The reason given was that the mobile phone can be turned off for peace and quiet.

Some people use devices for certain purposes only. D., a young single male in H9, only uses his mobile for business, not for social activities. S. in H7 uses his organizer only for client contact information and his computer only for a few specific business tasks. In the same household, the members leave non-essential messages on the answering machine, rather than on the mobile phone's voicemail, and do not use the mobile phone for family calls, as "it's not really professional" to use it that way. In H3, I. bought a laptop for his studies at home in preference to using his employer's computer, primarily to avoid confusion with when he was working. The laptop also enables him to study while traveling. S. in H5 uses her PC for work only, and other ICT devices such as her karaoke and DVD systems for fun.

Another approach to separating the different activity spheres is to divide devices such as laptops and organizers into work and non-work sections/folders. In H10, the wife's organizer contains business, personal and family sections, and one byproduct mentioned by her is that her teenage children can easily locate information for her if she leaves the organizer at home by mistake.

People have developed a variety of ways of managing the potentially all-pervasiveness of ICT in their lives. In H2, K. likes to create psychological space for herself: "...I walk down to the park and [have] my own time... I prefer to be out of [contact]. I am not ever that desperate to get in touch with someone".

3.. Motivations for household ICT extend beyond work

The interviews reveal a range of work and non-work motivations for adopting ICT in the home, including convenience, to overcome distance, and for financial matters, entertainment and personal safety.

"Convenience" and "makes it easier". These were very strongly supported themes in this Australian sample. The following story, from a singles household (H2) trying to coordinate paying their bills, illustrates the dramatic increase in convenience that was provided by the electronic payment card, which H2 nominated as the most important technology. P. relates: "K. used to go out monthly. We'd have to write a cheque ...there were screw-ups getting a cheque book ordered ...and so I used to have to transfer from that joint account into my account and then I'd write a cheque from that and then somebody'd have to go the post office, and then they'd key it in and then it'd be three days later before it actually went in to the DEFT ... And [now] you can just call up and that's it. It's like one lunch hour a week that somebody doesn't have to cram in running around and paying rent and standing in lines ...that's probably another striking example of where it just made everything much, much easier."

Convenience provided by ICT use is also often intertwined with work or educational activities. Respondents, including several computer support staff, welcome the opportunity to work at home rather than having to physically go into the office or library on weekends and after hours. As the couple in H5 related, beginning with P.: "If I didn't have that [technology], I would have the inconvenience of actually making the traveling effort to go to work ..." S. added: "Yeah, well it [the computer] has improved my life, in the sense that I've been able to do a lot of work from home and it's alleviated the pressure on me in the office." Similar comments were made by members of H2, H3 and H9. ICT is not always seen as improving life, despite its contribution to convenience. As R. in H7 said: "I wouldn't say it improved the life, it makes it easier ... I don't think those sorts of things improve our life."

To overcome distance. The "Tyranny of Distance" is frequently mentioned in Australian media and popular culture, possibly because of the large distances within the country, its location far from most other countries and the tendency for Australians to travel a great deal. This theme was very strong in our interviews.

ICT makes international activities easier for Australian households, as one respondent in H9 related about an item he needed to have manufactured: "It only took me a matter of an hour. By the next day I found several US-based firms to make the product for me ...it made the world a much smaller place for me." I. in H3 uses Internet cafes to stay in touch with the household when he's traveling on business, and the husband in H10 also stays in touch while on trips away from Sydney. Two of the households with Chinese-speaking members (H3, H4) use the Internet to read Hong Kong newspapers.

Forming technology links to distant family and friends is a recurring theme in the interviews. In H6, the young daughter uses the family's fax machine to stay in touch with a schoolfriend whose family is now living overseas. The couple in H4 wanted videoconferencing so that they could show their new baby to their relatives overseas. H1, H2, H3 and H5 also mentioned how much they would like to have videoconferencing for family contacts.

Not only are these links needed for immigrant families to stay in touch with overseas family and friends, but this need is evident even within Australia. As A. in H1 related, her strong wish is to see her granddaughter, who lives in a rural area, grow up: "The thing I really, really, really want more than anything is the C-U/C-Me or video conferencing, so I can see my granddaughter ... I know sometimes when I'm on the phone she doesn't know who she's talking to. Last night she said to my daughter when she came off the phone, 'I sang happy birthday with that lady'. And my daughter said, 'that lady is Nanna A.', and she said, 'that's not Nanna A. She doesn't sing happy birthday'. It'd be nice if she could see that it was Nanna A."

Money and financial matters. Two households rated the Electronic Payment Card/Smart Card as their most important technology, and a third household discussed its ranking as number 1. H7 values the EFTPOS card because it avoids carrying around cash while shopping, and decreases the likelihood of running out of cash that might be needed for smaller purchases like ice creams for the children.

Nearly all households mentioned bill-paying, purchasing, banking applications or financial management in connection with their use of computers or the Internet. In response to the questions about which next device or service they would like to have, many households mentioned finding better logistical solutions for monthly bill-paying. In response to the question about how technology really improved his life, I. of H3 mentioned using the computer for budgeting. The Internet enabled H3 and H5 to keep track of their current net worth. K. of H6 found many applications: "I run all our household financials on [Quicken software]. Plus I'm the treasurer for a local tennis club and I do the tennis related financials on it as well " and "... use in our tax situation and things like that certainly have dramatically gone up. I've probably reached the stage now when I couldn't do it manually".

Entertainment, recreation, relaxation, pleasure. Recreation is a major reason for current technology use, and is the motivation behind some of the next devices or services that the households would like to get. Computer games and electronic games were mentioned frequently by respondents as pastimes, as was communicating with others via the Internet.

Entertainment ranged over many devices and enriches life spent at home. The teenage son in H10 spends more time at home now that the household has a new PlayStation. H8 possesses 600 videos and watches movies most nights, while H9 has a full bookshelf of CDs, its owner describing himself as addicted to music for relaxation. The entire family in H6 listens to music together on their CD player, which was the item, which they each individually selected as their 'most important' technology.

ICT devices also make staying at home more appealing when the household has other reasons for doing so, as with families who have young children or if singles (H2) are saving for a major trip. M. from H4 related: "before we used to go out a lot more. Which we don't do as much, because ...of the baby. ... We have to find things to entertain us ...now because we are home a lot more, we got a bigger TV and you can buy videos to amuse yourself".

Personal safety. Sometimes decisions about technology use are based on minimizing fears about personal safety. Although often owned for emergencies, most mobile phones are not used for this purpose. However, R. in H7 tells of one incident in which the mobile phone helped her when driving in the car alone with the young children. In an accident, she was able to contact her husband on his mobile phone. Although he was on a site painting, "he dropped everything and ran". R. also prefers to use a plastic EFTPOS card instead of carrying much cash around to avoid being the target of a potential bag snatcher. A young single, K. from H2, tells how the mobile phone rescued her at Mardi Gras: "A mace bomb was let off and we all lost each other in the coughing and spluttering. It was pandemonium.... We would have lost each other had I not had the phone on me that night."

4. Technology changes the social dynamics in the household

Technology impacts the way households function, on the one hand encouraging physical and psychological separation of its members, but on the other, helping to support group feelings and an enhanced sense of being a household. It also contributes to development of new technology-related roles in the household.

Technology separates households temporally, spatially and psychologically. Within our households, the technologies are often scarce resources that need to be shared. The interviews contain many stories indicating that the members do not find sharing easy. For example, A. in H1 was frustrated when not able to watch her TV because her son was playing games on it. Trying to share a device/service often leads to arguments, as well as to time fragmentation.

The solution that most households adopt is to acquire multiples. Ownership patterns of one-device-per-person were quite common in our households, and those that do not have multiples aspire to it in the near future. One computer per person, one mobile phone per person is usual. One family has an organizer per person, a household of young unmarrieds has one Internet provider per person, another household is talking about one phone line per person, and yet another household of three people has four computers. The parents in H6 described what happened in their family after the children corrupted the software: "... we've learned not to let the friends come around with their latest PC Games magazine and say 'hey, really like those games!'... We are hoping that the advent of the new computer may solve [this problem]. Children will have access to one, we'll have access to the other [computer]."

This solution of acquiring multiples even applies to CD players. The singles in H9 each have their own CD player, but only one of them is ever played at any one time. The person who has chosen the music plays it on his own device and both listen to it. The family in H6 is considering acquiring a second CD-player now that the children are getting older.

Having multiples of devices and services within a household leads to the members separating spatially and pyschologically. This seems to be particularly true when the technology is used for work purposes. In H5, S. talks about the psychological separation from her husband while at home: "I find that he's increasingly spending more time on his computer and I'm spending time on my laptop. We seem to get along quite well, and ... the day just goes by without us really physically communicating with each other ...we catch up with one another over dinner ...and on the weekend."

The interference or disturbance caused by technologies is a further cause of separation. An example of how bringing technology into the home can be disturbing to others came from P. in H2 who tells of her fears about bringing her beeper home: "I remember when I was first setting [the beeper] up. It kept moaning and stuff. It would make such a noise ... [I would] put some pillows over the top ... oh my God, I'm going to hear about this tomorrow'" if it disturbed her flatmates. K., her flatmate, described the disturbance: "Our bedrooms are close. I hear it if it goes off. It was shrill."

Technology supports group feelings and sense of being a household. Within our households, technology is also used in ways that seem to overcome this tendency to fragmentation. The members reported use of phones, email, voicemail and even fax to share their experiences, problems, feelings, and information with one another when they were not together, and to express care and love for one another. The couple in H3 use email and voicemail to contact each other during the day with spontaneous messages. They even send emails to one another to test whether the partner has recovered from an argument.

Some uses are more unusual. Singles household H2 email each other poems, and acquired a new dictaphone especially to express feelings and leave songs for other members. This same household also leaves CDs in the player for someone else to find later - a form of asynchronous communication within the household. In H8, the husband phones his wife on the mobile phone on his way home from work, and uses this period to "shift gears" from work mode to home mode. If she is unavailable for this call, he misses it.

New roles related to technology. Examples of technology-related roles emerging within households occur in our sample. In H6, the wife is responsible for hardware connectivity, the husband for software installation, and the son is the games installer. In H8, the husband is the 'techno-savant' who initiates the acquiring of new technology in the household, and the wife, who is actually quite a sophisticated user, adopts the role of the technologically naïve person. In H10, the teenagers have become more expert than the parents with some of the family's technologies, thus sometimes reversing usual parent-child roles. The teenagers related a story about how upset their parents became when the electronic games were left connected to the parents' TV set, and the parents did not know how to disconnect the games to watch TV shows.

5. Constant contactability becomes an achievable, high priority goal

Being able to be contacted by others and being able to contact certain others are major goals, which ICT use helps people achieve. As a respondent in H8 put it: "...the expectation is, that I'm always going to be in communication". Most households use a variety of technologies, including phone, fax, email, and mobile phone, to maximize contactability.

Devices and services are interleaved and used in diverse ways. For P. of H5, a computer support person who is not always in the office, voicemail is an important means of contact. Both he and his wife use email, mobile phone, fax, answering machine, and pager to communicate with close relatives outside their household, as well as for business. Interviewees mentioned redirecting the home phone to a mobile phone, so as to maintain constant contactability. Mobile phones were often used at home instead of a second phone line, so that Internet use would not interfere with being contactable. Households sometimes put a lot of effort into contactability - both H6 and H9 described stringing out long phone extension lines to enable them to check their email.

Technology can "extend boundaries". One parent from H8 coined the term "extended boundaries" in reference to how technology such as mobile phones enables their teenage children to roam further afield, but still remain in contact with home. Parents give their teenage children mobile phones to take with them when they go out socially. If the child has a phone and it is turned on, then the parent does not need to remember where the child was going but can always get in touch with them. Also if the child encounters a problem, needs a ride home or will not be able to be home at the time previously arranged, he or she can get in touch easily.

The concept of extending boundaries applies to adults as well as children. For instance, the young mother with a new baby from H4 relates: "I think with me, [the baby monitor] gave me the freedom that I could take the monitor with me, go upstairs and do the laundry and still be able to hear him, if he, you know, woke up or whatever." This young family can also visit friends and leave the baby in a bedroom located a long way from the dining room (where without the monitor they would not hear the baby crying). H6 uses the answering machine to keep in touch with their children: "he might be at a friend's place and he'll ring through: Mum I'm here, I've been invited to stay for lunch, I'll be home at 2 o'clock". The children in H6 agreed and one said: "we take the mobile phone to ring Mum and tell her where we are ...so it frees up the other person".

Dealing with others who are non-contactable. This problem is mentioned frequently by infomated households, particularly when someone they expect to be contactable cannot be reached. The parents in H10 mentioned how upset they were once when they could not reach their son after his mobile phone had 'died', and their daughter mentioned how annoyed she gets when she cannot reach her mother for a late night pick-up because the mother's mobile phone is switched off. The 17-year-old son from H10 gets frustrated when a friend has his mobile phone turned off: "...we wasted an hour and a half just trying to meet up with him, which was a pain in the butt."

Sometimes the desire for access leads people to give technology gifts, to try to make communication with others easier and more like the communication they have with the other members of the household. H8 gave mobile phones to relatives so that the calls are their only costs. H10, a family with their own business, gave their discarded mobile phones to certain employees who needed to be contactable. Not all recipients of technology gifts are willing to use them, as both H8 and H7 discovered. In H8 the wife's parents are difficult to reach. They were given an answering machine, but refused to use it. The mother said she wanted to hear her daughter's voice, and the father preferred letters, which could be re-read, to a phone call. In H7, R. gave her parents an answering machine but they would not use it. Then when R.'s grandmother was ill, R. could not reach her parents. When her Dad complained that no one called them, R. said, "I tried - if you had an answering machine, you would know".

In some cases, people want to share their pleasure in the technology with others. P. from H2 wished that she could now provide her grandparents with email, because she had already been successful in improving communication with one of her parents this way: "I've been thinking quite a lot about actually going to visit my grandparents again, but when I go over there, I'd actually like to set them up [with email] ...they're always really tense about phone calls. Like, you know, spending all this money on phone calls."

Communication media are often determined by what the 'other' uses. Not surprisingly, the choice of communication medium is influenced by the technology that the communication partner uses. H9, a household of two young males, reports using email with their male friends, but using phones most of the time with their girlfriends and families. H8 communicates with a close friend via fax, which is one of the reasons H8 still retains their fax machine: "We could tell when he wanted to play and so instead of joking back and forth on the phone which he couldn't do because of the distance, we would deal with faxes. And he'd fax something and we'd fax back a smart-alec answer and he'd fax back, and for maybe an hour this would go on ... And somebody who was in need had a little laugh, and that helped a lot."

6. ICT provokes negative emotions and concerns

Overall, the members of these households have a matter-of-fact approach to ICT. A comfortable feeling around technology is particularly evident among younger respondents, but is not exclusive to them. A common attitude was summed up by H8 - "It's so normal, you don't talk about mobile phones much any more". The younger people felt that technology had always been part of their lives. Many of them had first used computers as children. However, a range of attitudes towards technology devices and services was revealed, including some strongly expressed concerns about the negative impact ICT could be having on individuals and society.

Technology can be intimidating and frustrating. P. from H4 is unusual in regarding getting his computer to stay stable and not crash as a challenge and hobby. For most others it is a negative experience. How to operate ICT is often difficult to understand from the instructions that come with it, and some people are embarrassed by this failure. Having someone explain or demonstrate is the usual solution. Getting organizers to work was a problem for some respondents, computers and mobile phones for others. Some were disappointed when something was too complex, poorly designed or broke easily. For A. in H1, frustrations arise whenever she changes one component of her computer, because another one gets thrown out of working order.

For some older people whom respondents encounter, even common technologies like answering machines pose barriers. A. from H1 reports that friends in her age group (mid-fifties) are reluctant to leave messages on her answering machine or contact her on her mobile phone. A. relates: "An awful lot of my friends ...[say] oh I rang you and your answer machine was on so I didn't like to leave a message ...some of them ... don't like talking to answer machines".

Fear of addiction to technology. Particular concern arose about overuse of technology. As S. in H5 put it: " I find myself working sixteen hours a day now, because I just have access to work via the computer and via e-mail, and I'm sending myself e-mails from home and sending myself e-mails back ...your life just revolves around your work, because it's all in that little machine. And ...that's the trend right now, I guess ...it's not healthy." In H9, D. said that he had been on the Internet for 16 hours per day, but was trying not to stay up so late (he had been getting only 4 hours sleep per night for a while), and was now trying to at least have a shower before reading his email. M. from H4 tells of the stress caused by the long hours her husband spends at the computer: "I think the main stress is, you know, come four o'clock in the morning he's still playing on it."

Concerns about children's use of technology. Parents are concerned about their children's use of technology. In H10, the parents terminated the Internet connection after nine months because of its adverse effects on their teenage daughter's studies and general behavior. The parents also do not allow electronic games in the household during the school year. In H2, the teenage son was forbidden to have access to the Internet on his computer, but could access it via the parents' computer for a specific school-related task. The parents in H7 said that they wanted to get Internet and Pay-TV access, but were concerned about inappropriate content and addiction.

Mobile phones are polarizing. Strongly emotional comments were made about mobile phones. While mobile phones are clearly an important technology both within households and outside, attitudes towards mobile phones are complex, even within the same age groups. Respondents in the youngest age range hold diverse attitudes. In H2, two members (who had mobile phones) associated mobile phones with wealthy people who live fast lives, and think of many users as being pretentious. Most other young people in the study were enthusiastic about mobile phones. Among the adults there was also a range of attitudes. H10 thinks of them as necessities, and H8 praised the mobile phone as excellent technology in the context of managing a household. At the other extreme, H7 said that the mobile phone is intrusive, invading their private life and mealtimes.

To summarize, six major themes emerged from the household interviews: technology erases boundaries between home and work; people compartmentalize activities to shore up the work/non-work boundaries; motivations for household ICT extend beyond work; technology changes the social dynamics in the household; constant contactability becomes an achievable, high priority goal; ICT provokes negative emotions and concerns. We now examine the implications of these results.

The themes provide a glimpse into the complex impact that ICT is having on Australian households, and how household members are struggling with apparently contradictory effects such as compartmentalizing activities while also maintaining constant contactability. By studying households in depth, we are better able to understand how people deal with ICT use in their households.

Consistent with studies of infomated households in Silicon Valley (Darrah et al., 1997; English-Lueck, 1997, 1998), we found that people adopt and use ecosystems of technologies rather than individual technologies. People combine different devices in creative ways to accomplish work or to manage their households. Householders also cited examples of how one technology could replace another (mobile phones and beepers, computers and electronic games machines, mobile phones and fixed phone lines, computers and VCRs). Therefore, there is benefit in having the focus of such household technology studies broader than individual technologies (English-Lueck, 1997). Our understanding of household use of technologies has been enhanced by including a broad range of such devices and services. Interesting findings arise in the Australian study, such as the role of a baby monitor in extending the boundaries for a couple with a young baby.

As others have found before us, boundaries are blurring between work and home, with activities becoming muddled up for many (English-Lueck, 1997, 1998; Darrah et al., 1997). Time, place, devices and services are no longer clearly separated as belonging to "work" or "home". This represents a major change for the home, which has been the traditional haven from work.

Blurring of work and non-work activities might be anticipated for telecommuters or those with a home-based business, but other people are also affected both by their own private technology and by that of others. Devices such as mobile phones, pagers and computers allow, and even encourage, work-related activities to enter the private sphere. We found that ICT devices such as pagers can disturb other household members, that it is sometimes more convenient to use private technology in preference to employer-provided devices, and that people select their household devices to be compatible with their employers' systems or their work needs. It is hard to escape the call of work when the technology accompanies householders on vacation and to parties and other social engagements. Although the intention might be to use the technology privately, work easily intrudes on personal activities, as our interviewees graphically relate.

People are reacting to this blurring and intrusion of work into the private sphere in different and creative ways. Some people try to establish boundaries between work and non-work activities by carefully managing which devices are used, when devices are switched on, to whom they provide accessibility, and by creating separate work/non-work sections within the one device. Similar attempts to manage access via ICT devices were found in Silicon Valley, with infomated householders there turning off the mobile phone, or checking for voice or email messages only at certain hours (English-Lueck, 1998).

Not all the effects of blurring found elsewhere were evident in our households. In the UK, Cairncross (1997) expects that the roles of home and office will not only blur but even reverse, with the home becoming the place of production and the traditional office the place for the social aspects of work. While we found blurring of roles, no evidence of a reversal between work and home arose in our study. Similarly, we did not find that people are fleeing the pressures of home for the relief of work outside, as Hochchild's (1997) research found in the US. She reports that the US household has now been invaded by the time pressures and efficiencies of work. Hochchild observed that corporate ways of thinking have become part of home life for many households. Even leisure time and quality time within the US household are allocated in carefully measured time segments, providing a domestic parallel to "office hours". We found that different time pressures are invading the Australian household, namely that of trying to maintain "quality" personal contact time with other people.

Certainly, today's improved technology is enabling people to take advantage of the convenience of working from home. The positive expectations in the 1980's and early 1990's about the use of remote working (eg from home) gave way to doubts about the benefits (Johansen & Swigart, 1994; Standen, 1997). Reluctance to work away from the office may have occurred because in the early stages of home-computer working, there were more barriers than facilitators, including primitive software, a lack of communications connectivity, and the perception that the industrial/business model was not applicable to the household (Venkatesh, 1996). Today, technology enables a wide range of activities, including the convenience of working from home, although this is not without its frustrations in dealing with the technology itself, as our householders made clear. Perhaps this is a message to manufacturers of ICT, that they need to recognize their responsibility to ensure that customers can use their technology as expected. Countries such as Germany are already legislating to this effect (Tuma, 1997).

In most cases, the ICT devices and services have become thoroughly integrated into the daily lives of the household members, and responses to our question about future purchases indicate these households will continue along this track. Household technology for entertainment, recreation and pleasure is tempting people to spend time at home, upgrading and/or expanding the technology to enrich life in the household. Taken further, this could lead to a cycle of purchasing additional technology to justify staying at home. Current ICT devices and services enable a wide range of activities to take place inside the household, with little need to go outside for work, banking, paying bills, entertainment or many other services. Households anticipate even greater convenience as technologies improve.

Technology is impacting the social dynamics of the household in a variety of ways. The technology is both destroyer and supporter of communication within the household. People's communication and interactions are fragmented by the technology, because although physically close, people tend to sit at their own devices operating in psychologically separated arenas. Householders tend to spend long hours with the devices, particularly computers and the Internet. Little time is available for communicating within the household.

Here, the technology comes to the rescue, helping re-establish connections among household members, as people send each other poems or jokes or other messages via email, leave voice messages on answering or dictating machines, and leave their favorite CDs in the players for others to enjoy. Some households try to overcome the tendency towards separateness by improving intra-household communication so that they are always able to be in contact with each other, or by using technologies that encourage group activities such as playing family games on computers or listening to CDs together.

English-Lueck (1997) reported that people develop roles of 'techno-savant' and 'techno-idiot' within households in the USA, and that these may be divided along gender lines. While some specialized technology roles emerged in our households, there was no evidence of gender differences. This may have been because the Australian sample was small, or possibly the Silicon Valley sample contained predominantly male engineers who took the 'expert' role.

Complex ambivalent attitudes towards ICT are evident, with attitudes to ICT in households being both positive and negative. Overall, the householders we interviewed take a largely positive view of ICT in the household, which is not surprising given the extent of their "connectedness". People value the convenience of ICT, that it makes life easier for them, enables them to bridge vast distances, provides entertainment to enrich homelife, enhances personal safety, enables people to be in constant communication, and extends the boundaries for some household members. The technology enables Australians to create much-needed "networks of connectedness" with distant friends and relatives, as English-Lueck (1998) also found in her Silicon Valley households.

This is consistent with Apgar's (1998) view that ICT facilitates interactions in unexpected ways. Previous findings that ICT in the home tends to increase social isolation from those outside the household (Gray, Hodson & Gordon, 1993; Kraut et al., 1998) did not arise as an issue for our respondents.

Like people in Silicon Valley, our householders tended to give technology gifts, sometimes items that they had replaced and were recycling (Darrah et al., 1997), particularly when they wanted to maximize their access to others. People give the technology which they hope would be used, for a variety of reasons. In some cases people were frustrated by not being able to contact others who did not possess appropriate technology (although people often adapted their communication channels to the technology others had available). Sometimes people wanted to share technology that had given them pleasure.

People are aware of the downside to household ICT - the frustrations in using the technology, the potential addiction to ICT at the expense of other activities, the dangers for children and the interruptions during non-work activities.

Householders appear to be struggling with the emotional and practical aspects of ICT entering the home, or with the "comingling of love and work" as Johansen & Swigart (1994) describe it. Clear rules have not yet emerged but individual households are attempting to find creative solutions to the pull of the technology at the expense of relationships with other household members.

Does ICT make people work harder or does it provide more free time? Until recently, most writers predicted that technology would free people from work to the extent that they would have a surplus of leisure time.Yarwood (1983, p. 21) reviewed home technology over the past 500 years, and, like many other researchers and planners in the early 1980s, concluded that the "challenge is how we will spend our time". In fact, the reverse is held to be occurring and people claim to be filling their time with work rather than leisure. While time surveys over three decades challenge these claims (Robinson & Godbey, 1997), people do report feeling more rushed than a generation ago. It is not clear whether feeling rushed and under time pressure is driven by technology or is a reflection of current attitudes to work itself (Robinson & Godbey, 1997; Bond, Galinsky & Swanberg, 1998). As Johansen & Swigart (1994, p. 39) wrote of work generally: "Work is time driven but no longer time bound". Irrespective of the reasons, the ease and constant availability of ICT in the household, coupled with the pressure for speed, and the demands of today's organizations, often lead people to spend 16 hours per day with the technology.

The objective of our study was to provide rich insights into the impact of ICT on infomated households. The generalizability of our findings is limited by the number of households interviewed, as the sample was very small and may not be representive of all of Australia. A useful further study would therefore be to replicate this study with a larger sample.

The present study could be broadened by conducting a longitudinal study, following a sample of infomated households over time. This would enable household use of ICT to be tracked over a period of time, identifying and seeking to understand changing use patterns, how balance is re-asserted, how contradictions are dealt with, and what adjustments are made to protect privacy and other aspects of household life.

The findings could also be extended by comparing the impact on the household for subgroups with different relationships to work activities. That is, does it make a difference if household members are running a business from home, or are employed and doing some of their work at home, or are employed and provided by their employer with ICT so they can do all their work at home? Does the different type of relationship with work function as a mediating variable so that these three subgroups experience their household ICT differently?

Further research could also ask whether the meaning of ICT varies among households in countries with different national values and degrees of ICT penetration. It would be interesting to learn whether ICT use in the household is leading to more uniformity among culturally-diverse households, and how households are developing ways of protecting their traditional values and behaviors.

The practical implications of looking at the impact of ICT on infomated households are manifold, including providing foresight to those on the next wave of ICT adoption. The next wave can be partially prepared for some of the impacts and issues that they will most likely face. They will become aware that ICT can fundamentally alter their households, affecting how, how much and where they work and entertain themselves; their relationships with others in the household; and even the boundaries between their lives and their technologies. Research into the impact of ICT on forefront households can provide newcomers with a range of solutions that have been tried elsewhere.
 

*Author's Note:   This study was funded and directed by the Institute for the Future in California as part of their global Outlook Project. The authors express their gratitude for permission to publish the Australian results. Preliminary results were presented at the Fifth International Conference of the Decision Sciences Institute, Athens, 4-7^th July, 1999.
 

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