Renewing learning: Reimagining the newness of families' sociotechnical practices towards ecologically sustainable media engagement

Abstract

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of families using new media and mobile technologies around their homes. While I was originally studying how families' everyday practices were being reconfigured by these new tools, what I found unsettles assumptions about learning with “new” media and about processes of technological change. This paper examines how older and newer technologies coexist in practice, and offers renewability as a key phenomenon for children learning in the context of family life. Drawing on observations and interviews with two sisters, nine-year-old Lara and twelve-year-old Latasha, I develop the concept of renewability through their sociotechnical practices of recycling and interleaving media forms as they went about routine activities like studying and reading after school. I present the cases narratively and adopt a media archaeological approach to studying material culture, where moment-to-moment interactions with technology provide proleptic evidence of future media strata and substrata. I then discuss families' changing practices in terms of processes of technology development, focusing on paper technologies and the contradictions of contravening on complex social-ecological conditions. I conclude that designing for renewability of learning is a way of envisioning responsible forms of technologically re-mediated action in an era of climate change. • Children and families use a wide variety of older and newer technologies. • Media engagement at home sometimes involves using old tools in new ways. • Learning technologies rely on resource extraction, exploiting local ecologies. • Families' ways of recycling valued technologies are ecologically sustainable.