ICTs, domestication and language-games: a Wittgensteinian approach to media uses

This article acknowledges the vital role that the Domestication Research-perspective has in media research, but criticizes it for being analytically ambiguous in its use of the central term ‘domestication’. By way of a contrastive set of data from an ongoing research project, we argue for a dislocation of ‘domestication’ from the domestic and the private. Instead, we wish to retain the meaning and use of the term to acts of domesticating, i.e. processes of ‘taming the wild’. By connecting our arguments to Wittgenstein’s concept of the ‘language-game’, we emphasize the practical aspect of language and meaning, and how ICTs become meaningful only as parts of practical-communicative contexts.We argue that this steering towards ‘domestication’ as contextualization highlights the universal and fundamental process of enculturation. Such a turn frees the perspective from historical and cultural specificities and thereby accentuates its analytical potential in a post-national,