Dr Leslie Haddon

I have been a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the LSE since autumn 1998 After my original Sociology degree, a PGCE and some years teaching general sociology in a college of Further Education, I studied first for an MA in contemporary cultural studies and then for a PhD looking at the genesis and the gendered popularity of the early home computer. This was my first move into considering the social dimensions of information and communication technologies in the home and I have specialised in this area ever since, conducting research and teaching for a number of years at Sussex university before moving to the LSE.

My first major research project examined the social shaping of home automation, electronic messaging and multimedia technologies (Cawson, A., Haddon, L. and Miles, I.(1995) The Shape of Things to Consume: Bringing Information Technology into the Home, Avebury, London). For many years have continued my interest in intelligent homes, conducting market research, editing a trade news letter, writing further academic papers on the topic and more recently being involved in the Integer project to construct Green and Intelligent homes

For large parts of the 1990s I turned my attention mainly to the home, looking at the consumption of ICTs by particular groups (teleworkers, lone parents, young elderly, social class AB) or the consumption of specific ICTs such as the Internet. Increasingly this has involved (some publishable) research for companies (e.g. BT, TeleDanmark, Telewest, Telenor, Swisscom), some quantitative analysis (a 5-country study of telecoms for Telecom Italia) and international collaboration (within the COST248, COST269 and EMTEL networks, co-ordinating a 5-country study of the Internet for NCR).

I have taken part in a variety of EC initiatives such as ACTS-FAIR that looked at telematics initiatives in Europe, considering especially issues of social exclusion and ICTs. I was responsible, with the help of Roger Silverstone, for the Report to the High Level Group of Experts on issues around the future of ICTs in the home. An EC project followed which examined the extent to which and ways in which ICT developers consider users, especially elderly and disabled ones, and the principle of Design for All. Most recently I participated in a EURESCOM quantitative and qualitative study looking at the themes of time stress, mobility and social networks in relation to the mobile phone and Internet.

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