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Gendering the Internet: Claims, Controversies and Cultures 263

consensual, is never finished and always under contestation. Other authors use
other concepts for the same process: Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1987), for instance,
speaks of the consumption junction in which technologies acquire meanings, and
Everett Rogers (1983) has referred to the everyday use of technology in terms of
the reinvention of technology.
These studies all suggest that the decisive moment in the circuit of culture
is in the moment of consumption, when technologies are domesticated in everyday
lives. In these everyday lives gender appears in its three dimensions simultane-
ously; whereas social structures, individual identities and symbolic representations
of gender may be analytically distinguished, in the concrete social practices of the
everyday they work inextricably together in their interpellation and positioning of
women and men. How these three dimensions come into play in concrete everyday
situations was the object of an exploratory qualitative study we conducted among
24 young Dutch couples, between 20 and 30 years old, living together without chil-
dren. In-depth interviews were held and transcribed about the uses and interpreta-
tions of various ICTs in their households, with particular attention to their uses of
the Internet. The analysis followed an accumulation of analytic procedures, analo-
gous to techniques proposed by Strauss and Corbin (1990) to develop ‘grounded’
theory. Each conversation fragment in the interview was first represented as a
unique proposition. As a second step in the analysis, these propositions were then
clustered according to similarities in content. Finally the interviews were consid-
ered in terms of discursive styles characterizing the specific interactions between
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the couples. The outcomes show how specific family relations result in different
articulations of gender and the Internet, which – in their turn – inspire new rituals
and relations within the household. The dimensions of gender that come to the fore
in this process appear to vary across households, resulting in the reconstruction of
four kinds of articulations which we labelled as traditional, deliberative, individu-
alized and reversed IT cultures in the household.

Articulating gender and the Internet in everyday life

The various ways in which gender and the Internet appeared to be articulated in
the 24 households we studied, could be summarized as four ‘media cultures’:
First, there is a fairly straightforward traditional culture in which computer and
the Internet are considered to be the domain of the male partner in the house-
hold. He uses them most often, knows most about it and is highly interested in
these new technologies. In the most extreme cases, he monopolizes the computer
and the Internet:

Man: Actually I work alone on it. Occasionally Ingrid would like to send a
mail or so, but we do that together. She will tell me what has to be in
it, and then I will do the actual sending. She has become more inter-
ested in the Internet. Before she didn’t pay any attention to the com-
puter, but now once in a while she likes to send a mail, or look up
some information, for the holidays or so.