Platformed Atmospheres: How Digital Platforms Reshape the Felt Experience of Family Life

This article develops the concept of platformed atmospheres to address how digital platforms reshape domestic life. Platformed atmospheres are defined as the multisensory and affective environments that emerge when platforms become infrastructural to family life, shaping not only what families communicate but the felt, sensory, and temporal conditions through which homes are inhabited. Drawing on interviews with twenty-one intergenerational families in the UK, the article shows that platforms operate as atmospheric infrastructures that structure how domestic spaces are sensed, occupied, and experienced. The analysis conceptualises platformed atmospheres as relational formations produced through encounters between bodies, devices, spaces, platforms, and data flows, negotiated within families yet unevenly experienced across generations and shaped by differences in age, embodiment, housing arrangements, and material resources. The article is grounded in the theory of atmospheres, drawing on feminist and sensory scholarship to foreground questions of inequality, materiality, and everyday experience, and apply these insights to the study of platform-saturated homes. In doing so, it asks what platform-saturated homes feel like, and for whom. Empirically, the analysis unfolds across three dimensions of platformed atmospheres. Spatially, platforms redistribute presence through features such as location tracking and video calling, reconfigure domestic boundaries like the closed bedroom door, and relocate sites of intimacy across households. Sensorially, platforms privilege vision and hearing while marginalising touch, taste, and smell, producing sensory substitution and generational distance in how care and closeness are felt. Temporally, platforms restructure family rhythms into polyrhythmic and often exhausting orders, through algorithmic time (autoplay, infinite scroll) and deferred co-presence (voice notes, asynchronous messaging) that stretch intimacy across misaligned tempos. The article concludes by showing how the concept of platformed atmospheres extends existing theories of atmosphere to networked, algorithmically mediated conditions, and extends theories of digital family life by foregrounding the pre-reflective, felt dimension underlying communication, monitoring, and care, before identifying directions for future research on digitally mediated inequality and everyday experience.