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Reports regarding media usage indicate that the internet plays an important role in today’s people’s work as well as their home life – many people go online daily using a variety of online activities (ABS, 2016, 2017; Koch & Frees, 2016). It is difficult to imagine for the current generation of digital natives who grew up with the internet, that in 2005/2006 it was quite common to go online only a few times per week, with some even not yet going online from home at all (ABS, 2007; Statistisches-Bundesamt, 2006). Heavy users could be considered those who were online for more than an hour per day, which is a striking difference to today where people check their Smartphone several times per hour.
Much research has been conducted into social and spatial inequality in personal internet use (Atkinson, Black, & Curtis, 2008; Gibson, 2003; Holloway, 2002; Robinson et al., 2015; Stern, Adams, & Elsasser, 2009, among others). This research into the digital divide has concentrated on the socially and economically disadvantaged (Holloway, 2005; Hsieh, Rai, & Keil, 2008; Robinson et al., 2015) has examined gender differences (Kennedy, Wellman, & Klement, 2003; Weiser, 2000) as well as age (Hargittai & Hinnant, 2008; Lichy, 2011). Less empirical research has been dedicated to how internet usage affects the domestic sphere (Hertlein, 2012). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a historical snapshot of personal internet usage across two countries and continents (Australia and Germany) in the hope to better understand how internet usage impacted the home life and lifeworld (Geißler, 2006) of couples in those two countries. Qualitative studies such as this one are important to reconstruct a picture of Internet usage and its transformation.
In the next section we provide a brief review of the literature and theoretical models that underpin the integration of the internet into the domestic sphere. Following that, we outline the home ethnographic approach employed in this research. Then the findings are presented prior to a discussion. We finally conclude and provide the limitation of the present study.