Mother Media

Mother Media: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, under contract) tells the complicated story of American techno-parenting, from The Greatest Generation through millennials, for an object lesson in how using technology in our most intimate relationships became a moral flash point. Growing out of The Distance Cure’s consideration of technologized care, Mother Media contributes a history of the contradictions of techno-parenting via an investigation of how the use of some technologies are interrelated with concepts of “maternal fitness,” medical redlining, and socio-medical surveillance of children, parents, and other caregivers. Zeavin offers narratives of parenting in its extremity (Shaken Baby Syndrome) and its ostensible banality (the Nanny Cam) and how the two are often intertwined (one did indeed beget the other).

At its core, Mother Media takes on a simple contradiction: on the one hand, many argue, we have too much technology in domestic and educational spaces and that this technology is harmful. On the other hand, the world is terrifying, the labor of making family unending, and technology poses itself as a salve, if not an answer, to our problems. Put another way, technology in the home, and as an extension of parenting, either gets termed an answer to a problem or the problem itself.

This cultural contradiction is currently top of mind as intensive parenting, remote schooling, and pandemic conditions collide. However, Mother Media argues that, far from only being a recent concern, fears about what technology is doing to children have driven pediatric and social panics over the last century. The book explores the American century’s tense relationship to how and why we include technology in one of our most intimate bonds: that between parent and child.

Mother Media: Technology in the American Family has been recognized by the Society for the History of Technology, which awarded Zeavin the 2021 Brooke Hindle Award for this project.