Home is Where the Hub Is? Wireless Infrastructures and the Nature of Domestic Culture in Australia
Katrina Jungnickel, Genevieve Bell · IGI Global eBooks · 2008
From WiFi (802.11b) with its fixed and mobile high-speed wireless broadband Internet connectivity to WiMAX (802.16e), the newest wireless protocol, extending the reach of WiFi across longer distances and more difficult terrain, new wireless technologies are increasingly thought to impact the ways in which we encounter social spaces in public, civic and commercial sites within large urban centers. This chapter explores how and to what extent these new wireless technologies might also be reconfiguring and reorganizing domestic practice and social relations. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of WiFi and WiMax provisioned homes in a major Australian metropolitan center, we argue that new wireless infrastructures are impacting how people imagine and use mobile devices, computers and the Internet in and around the home but not in ways wholly anticipated by commercial Internet service providers.