Communicating with Our Families: Technology as Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation

Communicating with Our Families: Continuity, Interruption, and Transformation explores the impact of personal communication technologies on family communication. In this historical moment, novel communication technologies and social media applications infiltrate our family units. This edited collection examines how communication technologies are shaping childhood, parenthood, and families by exploring topics such as parental loneliness, family storytelling, family technology rules, mindful technology usage, multigenerational communication, and community. The scholars in this volume work from a human communication perspective and use various research modes of inquiry including quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive methods. Through the integration and presentation of diverse research questions tested and responded to from a variety of scholarly approaches, a nuanced exploration of communication technology utilized within a family setting is provided. Since the family is indeed "the first communication classroom," this volume interrogates how that classroom may be changing and the implications of that change on different roles, responsibilities, and relationships within the family. Perhaps the most significant question implied by our contributors in this volume: Will the introduction of new communication technologies fundamentally alter familial forms and will those new grouping that emerge resemble what has been generally assumed for several millennia?