Dr Leslie Haddon

Dr Leslie Haddon

Visiting Lecturer and Senior Visiting Fellow

Department of Media and Communications

Telephone
020 8441 2959
Languages
English, French
Key Expertise
Sociology, Media Studies

About me

Biography

Dr Leslie Haddon is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.

Dr Haddon received a degree from Cambridge (Kings) in Social and Political Sciences, an MA in Contemporary Cultural Studies from Birmingham and a PhD on the origins and popularity of the home computer from London (Imperial). After his degree he obtained a teaching qualification (PGCE) and taught sociology in Bournville College of Further Education in Birmingham for five years.

 On completing his doctorate he was mainly based at Sussex University for ten years, first as a researcher on a project with Alan Cawson and Ian Miles looking at the social shaping of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), then working with Roger Silverstone on the domestication of ICTs, focusing initially on teleworkers, lone parents and the young elderly. After 2000 Leslie was mainly based at the LSE, although he also conducted research for the Digital World Research Centre at Surrey University (reviewing the telepresence literature) and for the Oxford Internet Institute (interviewing people about their experiences of email and spam).

Until 2015 Leslie was a senior researcher working with Sonia Livingstone on the EU Kids Online project  and he worked for two years on the Net Children Go Mobile project. Subsequently he was senior researcher on the Toddlers and Tablets project. Currenty, he is working as a member of the ySkills project.  He teaches the course 'Media, Technology and Everyday Life' at the LSE. 

Expertise Details

ICT Consumption And Domestication; Children And The Internet; Mobile Phones; Social Shaping Of Technology

Commercial Research

During the 1990s Leslie was for seven years co-editor of a trade journal 'The Intelligent Home'. Over the past 20 years he had undertaken numerous and diverse commercial research projects (e.g. organising focus groups on home automation, jointly writing an 'Innovator's Handbook', looking at disability and telework, conducting research for the Integer project that was developing 'green and intelligent homes', interviewing people about the take-up of cable TV and the later the early adoption and non-adoption of the internet, conducting literature reviews on social issues relating to ICTs, examining how people budget when using mobile phones and interviewing children about their particular experiences of mobile phones).

Key publications

Design of ICTs:

Various projects and literature reviews:

International Projects

In the mid-1990s Leslie was part of the ACTs-FAIR project reviewing European telematics programmes for the EC and in the late-90s he was part the of an EC project looking at the users who were envisaged by ICT designers and the broader adoption of Design for All principles.  He helped devise and analyse a five-country survey of ICT use in Europe in the mid-90s, funded by Telecom Italia. In 2000 he participated in the EURESCOM (European trade association for telecoms) project looking at European attitudes to ICTs and was subsequently involved in research for UMTS Forum (Mobile phone trade association). At the same time he was on the steering committee of and wrote a chapter for the EC funded e-Living project. More recently he was one of the experts working for the EC, evaluating whether internet companies had met their commitments about safer internet principles.

Leslie has been a visiting researcher at TeleDenmark (Denmark), Chalmers (Sweden) and Hallym University (South Korea). Since the 1990s he has participated in the EMTEL research network European Media, Technology and Everyday Life Network, (1994-7) and three European COST Actions: COST248 (The Future Telecommunications User, 1992-7), COST269 (User Aspects of ICTs, 1999-2004) and COST298 (Participation in the Broadband Society, 2006-10).

Key publications

5-country study:

e-Living:

Korea visit:

Children and mobile phones

COST

Publications

Latest publications:

Green, L., Haddon, L., Livingstone, S., O’Neill, HB., Stevenson, K. and Holloway, D. (2024, July) Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six, Bloomsbury, London.

Haddon, L. (2023) ‘Variety within domestication research: Time, perceptions and interactions’, in Hartmann, M. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Media and Technology Domestication, Routledge, Abingdon, pp.401-414. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/119464/

Haddon, L., Cino, D. and Doyle, M-A. (2023) ‘The Challenges of Conducting Systematic Evidence Reviews: A Case Study of Factors Shaping Children’s Digital Skills’, Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 158, 71–90. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/119265/

 

 Full list of publications and presentations:

Selected Publications

PhD:

Social shaping of ICTs:

  • Cawson, A., Haddon, L. and Miles, I. (1995) The Shape of Things to Consume: Bringing Information Technology into the Home, Avebury, London.

Domestication:

EU Kids Online:

Net Children Go Mobile:

Series Editor

Leslie Haddon and Nicola Green were the series editors for the 'New Media' series of textbooks from Berg (subsequently Bloomsbury) . The titles in this series are:

References