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More work for Big Mother: Revaluing care and control in smart homes
Abstract
The home is an ever-changing assemblage of technologies that shapes the organisation and division of housework and supports certain models of what that work entails, who does it and for what purposes. This paper analyses core tensions arising through the ways smart homes are embedding logics of digital capitalism into home life and labour. As a critical way of understanding these techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction, we advance the concept of Big Mother – a system that, under the guise of maternal care, seeks to manage, monitor and marketise domestic spaces and practices. We identify three tensions arising in the relationships between care and control as they are mediated through the Big Mother system: (a) outsourcing autonomy through enhanced control and choice, (b) increased monitoring for efficient management and (c) revaluation of care through optimisation of housework. For each area, we explore how emerging technological capacities promise to enhance our abilities to care for our homes, families and selves. Yet, at the same time, these innovations also empower Big Mother to enrol people into new techniques of surveillance, new forms of automation and new markets of data. Our purpose in this paper is to push back against the influential ideas of smart homes based on luxury surveillance and caring systems by showing that they exist in constant relation with a supposedly antithetical version of the smart home represented by Big Mother.
... digital transformation in sales and marketing campaigns in luxury hotels, Lam & Law, 2019; digital menus in luxury hotel restaurants, Bonfanti et al., 2021); In parallel, promising works on cutting-edge digital technology (e.g. blockchain technology, Berneis & Winkler, 2021;Oguntegbe et al., 2022) applied to luxury research have emerged in other management sub-fields (e.g. economy, Sadowski et al., 2021;supply chain, Kim & Laskowski, 2018), as well as in recent review papers to generate novel managerial implications (e.g. Arrigo, 2018;Varsha et al., 2021). ...
... Arrigo, 2018;Varsha et al., 2021). Our dataset also extends luxury to a broad view that considers unconventional luxury, such as batteries as a luxury item (Zhang & Nguyen, 2017) and smart homes based on luxury surveillance (Sadowski et al., 2021). In line with the digital marketing innovation trend in luxury research, customers are moving from owning tangible luxuries to experiencing intangible, exclusive, and unique unconventional luxuries (Leban et al., 2020). ...
En la última década, el marketing digital ha obtenido una atención creciente en la investigación sobre lujo y entre quienes lo practican. Sin embargo, aparentemente, los que han mantenido el paso de la evolución de las tecnologías digitales avanzadas en el marketing de lujo o tienenun conocimiento profundo de cómo implementar estratégicamente el marketing digital en el ámbito del lujo son pocos. Al hacer un inventario de la literatura existente sobre investigación en marketing digital en el mercado de alta gama, este estudio se propone rastrear los cambiosen el mismo al considerar temas y cuestiones relacionadas con el lujo. En el artículo figuran contribuciones de un examen del estado del campo del segmento de investigación más amplio sobre lujo, para el cual se uso el proyector de datos VOSViewer con el cual se identifican losestudios y a los autores que mayor influencia han tenido en este tema. Mediante la combinación de análisis bibliométrico y la revisión de la literatura, el objetivo del presente estudio es mitigar las limitaciones de la revisión tradicional de la literatura (por ej., con sesgo en la interpretación) y obtener hallazgos esclarecedores. Con miras a desarrollar un marco conceptual, identificamoscinco grupos principales de investigación mediante el análisis de las palabras clave que surgieron de las publicaciones destacadas y de los autores influyentes, y la fuerza de las percepciones en relación con las marcas y redes de investigaciones previas. Por último, el estudio ofrece indicaciones detalladas para campos potenciales de investigación que serían sumamente relevantes tanto para los académicos como para quienes realizan el marketing.
... The study has demonstrated how the gendered division of roles between digital and traditional housework can reinforce traditional gender roles as men spend more time on digital housekeeping and less time on other household tasks. This tendency is also highlighted in other SHT studies (Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021;Strengers et al. 2019;Strengers and Kennedy 2020). However, the findings presented in this study add further nuance to this issue. ...
... As with the male participants in this study, when household members spend a considerable amount of time on digital housekeeping, they are likely to spend less time on traditional household tasks. This risks reinforcing existing gendered roles in the division of household labour (Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021;Strengers et al. 2019;Strengers and Kennedy 2020). In the findings presented from this study, female participants were more reluctant to use SHT and often became reliant on their male partners in various SHT interactions. ...
This paper investigates the social and gender implications of smart home technology (SHT) by looking at its role in everyday practices and domestic relations. Based on qualitative interviews and “show-and-tell” home tours in Danish smart homes, empirical insights on digital housekeeping are presented, a concept often associated with masculinity in the literature. By showing how digital housekeeping also relates to housework traditionally associated with femininity, including home decoration and cognitive labour, the paper nuances the gendered implications of the concept. The meaning and effects of digital housekeeping are discussed by critically examining the gendered manifestations in everyday practices and household members’ experiences. The paper shows how digital housekeeping potentially redistributes (gender) roles of everyday practices and forms a new point of control in the home. Although involving acts of inclusion, digital housekeeping also risks reinforcing power imbalances and existing domestic gender roles. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
... In this chapter, we explore how the automated decision-making (ADM) carried out by voice assistants uses emotions as the basis for that decision-making and show how those decisions are tied up in services that are intended to automate diferent forms of care that resemble 'women's intuition', or the feminised labours historically associated with high levels of emotional intelligence and gender (Hochschild, 2012;Sadowski et al., 2021;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). We focus on Alexa and its associated 'Echo' devices, as the world's most widely used digital voice assistant run by the largest e-commerce company in the world: Amazon. ...
... Through this discussion, we contribute to long-standing debates in anthropology, sociology, geography and science and technology studies (STS) that have critiqued the idea that we can universalise emotions and care (Lupton, 1998;. In addition, we contribute to emerging critiques of voice assistants and other smart technologies that use their femininity to mask the extraction of data from people under the guise of maternal care (Bergen, 2016;Sadowski et al., 2021). We draw on our past research, particularly content analyses of popular media and trade press articles about digital voice assistants and automated technologies, promotional materials related to digital voice assistants and related devices, patents identifying the automation of emotion recognition and industry reports on afective computing (Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). ...
... In this chapter, we explore how the automated decision-making (ADM) carried out by voice assistants uses emotions as the basis for that decision-making and show how those decisions are tied up in services that are intended to automate diferent forms of care that resemble 'women's intuition', or the feminised labours historically associated with high levels of emotional intelligence and gender (Hochschild, 2012;Sadowski et al., 2021;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). We focus on Alexa and its associated 'Echo' devices, as the world's most widely used digital voice assistant run by the largest e-commerce company in the world: Amazon. ...
... Through this discussion, we contribute to long-standing debates in anthropology, sociology, geography and science and technology studies (STS) that have critiqued the idea that we can universalise emotions and care (Lupton, 1998;Wajcman, 2017). In addition, we contribute to emerging critiques of voice assistants and other smart technologies that use their femininity to mask the extraction of data from people under the guise of maternal care (Bergen, 2016;Sadowski et al., 2021). We draw on our past research, particularly content analyses of popular media and trade press articles about digital voice assistants and automated technologies, promotional materials related to digital voice assistants and related devices, patents identifying the automation of emotion recognition and industry reports on afective computing (Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). ...
... In this chapter, we explore how the automated decision-making (ADM) carried out by voice assistants uses emotions as the basis for that decision-making and show how those decisions are tied up in services that are intended to automate diferent forms of care that resemble 'women's intuition', or the feminised labours historically associated with high levels of emotional intelligence and gender (Hochschild, 2012;Sadowski et al., 2021;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). We focus on Alexa and its associated 'Echo' devices, as the world's most widely used digital voice assistant run by the largest e-commerce company in the world: Amazon. ...
... Through this discussion, we contribute to long-standing debates in anthropology, sociology, geography and science and technology studies (STS) that have critiqued the idea that we can universalise emotions and care (Lupton, 1998;. In addition, we contribute to emerging critiques of voice assistants and other smart technologies that use their femininity to mask the extraction of data from people under the guise of maternal care (Bergen, 2016;Sadowski et al., 2021). We draw on our past research, particularly content analyses of popular media and trade press articles about digital voice assistants and automated technologies, promotional materials related to digital voice assistants and related devices, patents identifying the automation of emotion recognition and industry reports on afective computing (Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). ...
... In this chapter, we explore how the automated decision-making (ADM) carried out by voice assistants uses emotions as the basis for that decision-making and show how those decisions are tied up in services that are intended to automate diferent forms of care that resemble 'women's intuition', or the feminised labours historically associated with high levels of emotional intelligence and gender (Hochschild, 2012;Sadowski et al., 2021;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). We focus on Alexa and its associated 'Echo' devices, as the world's most widely used digital voice assistant run by the largest e-commerce company in the world: Amazon. ...
... Through this discussion, we contribute to long-standing debates in anthropology, sociology, geography and science and technology studies (STS) that have critiqued the idea that we can universalise emotions and care (Lupton, 1998;. In addition, we contribute to emerging critiques of voice assistants and other smart technologies that use their femininity to mask the extraction of data from people under the guise of maternal care (Bergen, 2016;Sadowski et al., 2021). We draw on our past research, particularly content analyses of popular media and trade press articles about digital voice assistants and automated technologies, promotional materials related to digital voice assistants and related devices, patents identifying the automation of emotion recognition and industry reports on afective computing (Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). ...
... Although there has been an increase in a US-inflected form of multicultural marketing for particular products such as the Amazon Echo (Horst and Mohammid, Forthcoming;Shankar, 2015), many of these new products depict smart homes and devices in modern, spacious and expansive homes occupied by white heteronormative men and women who represent the ideal consumer (Phan, 2019). As we have seen in previous research on the marketing and use of microwaves, vacuums, cleaners and other consumer household items (Shove, 2003), images of smart consumers often reproduce the gendered divisions of labour, reproducing assumptions about men as technologically savvy and women as the primary carers and managers of domestic work (Sadowski et al., 2021;Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). In effect, much of the advertising of smart homes and devices reinforces a range of structural inequalities such as race, class, gender, sexuality and other measures of difference that effectively exclude consumers who do not fit the model of the smart household. ...
... This approach recognises the role and interplay of humans and nonhuman things, spaces and places (Krajina et al., 2014;Lupton, 2019;Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013). It positions the home as a place, in the geographer Massey's (2005) sense of the term, where human/nonhuman assemblages comprised of diverse agents are constantly changing as the human occupants of the home enter, exit and engage with each other and the other living things and objects within the home space (Horst and Sinanan, 2021;Maalsen, 2020;Pink et al., 2017;Sadowski et al., 2021). ...
... Koshy et al. found this to be true: SHT maintainers feel like they put all the effort into managing the smart home, while others only benefit [21]. This interplay demonstrates that for both individuals the SHT becomes a burden and reinforces gendered distribution of labor [6,28]. ...
Setting up a smart home network in a shared household is typically initiated by individuals with a strong interest in technology, who consider the corresponding research, purchases, installation, and maintenance required, a hobby. Other people living in the same household, such as partners, are thus exposed to the technology. We interviewed 12 female users whose partners set up smart home networks in the shared home. From the perspective of the individuals confronted with technology usage, we explored adoption and acceptance processes and how they collaborate as a couple in designing their shared, connected home. To form the interview guideline, we conducted a pre-study in which we analyzed a sample of online forum threads, in which smart home hobbyists discuss challenges and tensions that arise with their partners. Proceeding from the insight that creating a shared smart home is a process highly influenced by the roles users assume in the household, we contribute to understanding the perception of smart home benefits, appreciation, and participation from the angle of users who did not initiate the setup of the network.Keywordsshared smart homecollaborative usesecondary users
... In the private sector, surveillance technologies are used, for example, in children's toys (Holloway, 2019), domestic appliances (Sadowski et al., 2021), domestic drones (Bracken-Roche, 2016), online price discrimination (Zuiderveen Borgesius & Poort, 2017), real time bidding for online advertising space (Irish Council for Civil Liberties, 2020;Veale & Zuiderveen Borgesius, 2022), and for the extraction of data from sensors installed in "smart homes" to inform pricing policies in sectors such as finance, insurance and real estate and to incentivise "good" behaviours by punishing the "bad" (Maalsen & Sadowski, 2019). Private companies are increasingly reliant on surveillance practices built into their business models which reflects a new political-economic order with surveillance at its core (Becker & Stalder, 2009;Zuboff, 2015;Srnicek, 2016;O'Neil, 2016;Lyon, 2022). ...
... This requires substantial work and expertise and a good understanding of how these technologies can fit within established routines of the household (Tolmie et al. 2007). Taking as a starting point that homes are now becoming hubs of emerging technologies that shape the households' everyday routines and labour (Sadowski et al. 2021), and that technologies have allowed for the reduction or reallocation of household labour, the present paper explores in what ways practices of energy household labour, as identified below, are shaping the gender roles and performance of household labour, paying attention to the mental aspects of it. ...
Gender considerations, such as the division of household labour and the coordination of everyday household practices, are important for the energy transition of households. Household labour involves everyday practices (e.g. cooking, laundry and caring for others) and practices of energy household labour ('e.g'. managing digital technologies and energy systems). Emerging smart energy technologies require energy flexibility and efficiency, thereby introducing new forms of household labour can have implications for the household which are not well understood. Through a literature review and some empirical insights from a European Horizon 2020 project, mental aspects of energy household labour are identified: practices of coordination and multitasking, remembering and anticipating, and powerful emotional labour which shapes the practices. Smart technologies and energy systems add more physical and mental labour to households due to the need for additional coordination and change of practices. This additional demand for coordination can exacerbate existing gender inequalities in the division of household labour: technological strategies and designs need to engage with this and reduce new burdens. Considerations for future research are proposed and a gender-sensitive framework for understanding the transition of energy household labour is outlined. 'Practice relevance' Despite the balancing of more stereotypical gender roles in everyday life at home, the mental load of household labour still overburdens women. Technology design and strategies for its domestication need to recognise this load and adopt more gender-sensitive ways of supporting the mental aspects of household labour performed for the organisation of home and provide appropriate digital literacy opportunities for those who use them, without undermining their contribution in the process. Technology-assisted support for the mental aspects of household labour should allow for better negotiations and distribution of household labour required for a successful energy transition, without at the same time adding extra work for both men and women. The initial empirical insights call for a gender-sensitive framework for investigating the emerging practices that this involves, for the energy transition of households.
... One of the most persistent visions of a safe and secure society by corporate actors concerns the notion of a "smart home." The use of interactive technologies to make homes smarter has become a global narrative that promises to improve resource efficiency and decision making, increase leisure criminologicalencounters.org time, and help residents to feel safe (Maalsen & Sadowski, 2019;Sadowski et al., 2021). Some argue surveillance technology has made smart homeowners become self-managing prisoners in their own privately owned panopticon where our household objects invisibly monitor us, turning us into household-monitored objects (cf. ...
This article analyses the increasingly influential role of tech companies in designing and deploying smart surveillance in private vehicles. Using the case of Tesla, a company that makes optimistic promises and has a hopeful vision for more sustainable electric cars by decreasing the ecological footprint, the article will discuss the problematic aspects of artificial intelligence, big data and algorithms for total surveillance by private companies. In particular, light will be shed on the issue of discourses on sustainable and smart vehicles that dim the light on the problematic aspects of luxury surveillance. As will be made clear, Tesla's green and lean-aspirational-ambitions through different technological and surveillance advancements revive old forms of control and introduce a new set of power/knowledge relations. Beyond the question of privacy and personal data harvesting , this article discusses the wider social and political consequences of smart car luxury surveillance by private companies such as Tesla.
... The well-known substitute phenomenon of social conflicts can arise in the event of conflicts, as "preferences become a proxy for something else, and emit strong feelings about how household members view another person as lazy, careless or wasteful" [154]. Furthermore, it has been proven that these systems are capable of "enrolling people into new techniques of surveillance, new forms of automation and new markets of data" [155]. ...
The Corona pandemic has led to the increased use of online tools throughout society, whether in business, education, or daily life. This shift to an online society has led social scientists to question the extent to which increased forms of control, surveillance and enforced conformity to ways of thinking, attitudes and behaviors can be promoted through online activities. This question arises overtly amidst a pandemic, but it also lurks behind the widespread diffusion of smart energy systems throughout the world and the increased use of smart meters in those systems. The extent to which forms of monitoring, disciplining and sanctioning of energy behavior and practices could come to reality is thus an important question to consider. This article does so using the ideas of Michel Foucault, together with research on smart energy systems and current trends in energy policy. The article closes with a discussion of energy democracy and democratic legitimacy in the context of possible effects of smart technologies on community energy systems.
Home health aides are paid professionals who provide long-term care to an expanding population of adults who need it. However, aides' work is often unrecognized by the broader caregiving team despite being in demand and crucial to care---an invisibility reinforced by ill-suited technological tools. In order to understand the invisible work aides perform and its relationship to technology design, we interviewed 13 aides employed by home care agencies in New York City. These aides shared examples that demonstrated the intertwined nature of both types of invisible work (i.e., emotions- and systems-based) and expanded the sociological mechanisms of invisibility (i.e., sociocultural, sociolegal, sociospatial) to include the sociotechnical. Through these findings, we investigate the opportunities, tensions, and challenges that could inform the design of tools created for these important, but often overlooked, frontline caregivers.
In my previous progress reports I suggested that geographers might attend more to the leaky boundaries of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ and to their imbrications in the mundane spaces of the everyday, and that stances of analytical critique might be joined by practices of engaged imagination of alternative lifeworlds in the shadow of the Anthropocene. In this final report, I zoom in on care as a ‘concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation’. This has recently provided a focus for much innovative and impactful research in critical geography. I explore the analytical and political potential of centring care within geographical engagements with science and technology, and suggest that nuanced engagements with the concept contain valuable insights into the everyday geographies of technoscience, and into how practices of care are central to – but not exhaustive of – political strategies for building alternative lifeworlds in uncertain times.
Technologies are at the heart of geographic analysis. More-than-human geographies, actor-network theory, and new materialism have all called for attending to technological infrastructures and artefacts. This attention is directed mainly towards large-scale technologies. What often escapes geographies of technoscience are small, mundane, and unspectacular technologies. Bringing into conversation work from feminist technoscience and feminist geographies, we broaden the understanding of technology in geographies of technoscience by developing the concept of intimate technologies. By exploring three sites that lie at the centre of feminist technoscience – the home, the laboratory, and the clinic – we carve out the spatial politics of intimate technologies.
This article investigates two recent fictional representations of the feminized US surveillance state and its “security feminists” (Grewal), with an eye towards limning what visions of social transformation and political life such representations make possible. It first examines Gish Jen’s 2020 novel The Resisters, considering how the novel’s characterization of the US surveillance state as a snoopy suspicious Aunt maintains American liberal fantasies about the value of productive work and institutionally-sanctioned responses to state violence, even as the novel attempts to find grounds for reinvigorating a democratic commons. Jeff Vandermeer’s 2021 novel Hummingbird Salamander, in contrast, is suspicious of democratic visions of the social. Instead, the novel unravels the privatized figure of the “security mom” (Grewal) in order to experiment with how a queer antisocial orientation might confront environmental and institutional collapse and reimagine the idea of “security” itself.
This article makes the case for considering conversational AI devices a critical urban challenge, particularly as the home gains importance in everyday life. Drawing on excerpts from conversations with Alexa – the market-leading digital voice assistant designed and manufactured by Amazon – the article illustrates how this device’s friendly feminine personality masks significant environmental and gender effects. Building on the author’s ongoing research on the smart home, the article considers how the “feminist reboot” proposed by Strengers & Kennedy in The Smart Wife could provide promising routes for urban scholars seeking to disrupt and intervene in the troubling trajectories of feminised AI.
This paper focuses on the consumer preferences for the so-called “smart homes” (also known as “smart houses”) which represent a novel addition and a product of the on-going digitalization and the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). The major scientific contribution of our study is the empirical model build on the data from the online questionnaire conducted with randomly selected respondents (N = 523) from four European Union (EU) countries and Russia. Even though our results are subject to limitations (no Southern of Northern European countries are included in the scope of this research, which might have yielded different results due to the differences in wealth of citizens and climate in comparison to the Central and Eastern European countries or Germany), they demonstrate that the users included in our sample generally feel inclined to the smart homes technologies and perceive them as a plausible means for improving the safety and security of their lives. On the other hand, some respondents from our sample expressed their concerns over the cybersecurity and technology dependence issues associated with smart homes. It is also apparent that younger respondents (aged 16–35) featured in our research are more worried about their personal data being monitored and analyzed (with a pending threat of leakages). All these results are original and constitute an important scientific value-added to the field of research in smart home technologies and their acceptance by the general public. We demonstrate that the further enhancement of smart homes, and the increase of their popularity and affordability among the customers both in the Central and Eastern European countries and beyond, might depend on the development of the smart grids which these smart homes are an integral part of. The reliability of the smart systems constitutes the key element for achieving the satisfaction of the smart homes residents, and hence needs to be achieved and secured in an effective way. This would ensure the right mix and balance of energy security and efficiency for all customers involved in this process.
Enclosed, controlled environments, stretching from sites of luxury consumption to urban food production, are proliferating in cities around the world, utilising increasingly advanced techniques for (re)creating and optimising microclimatic conditions for different purposes. However, the role of automated control systems – to filter, reprocess and reassemble atmospheric and metabolic flows with growing precision – remains under-researched. In this article, we explore the phenomenon of automated environmental control at three sites in the UK city of Sheffield: a botanical glasshouse, a luxury hotel and a university plant growth research lab. In doing so, we first show how controlled environments are constituted through specific relations between the inside and outside, which are embedded in inherently political urban contexts and processes. Second, we identify the technical and ecological tensions and limits of indoor environmental control at each site which limit the scope of automation, and the considerable amount of hidden labour and energy required to maintain and restabilise desired conditions. Drawing on these more established examples of ecological interiorisation in a key moment of transition, we raise urgent questions for critical urban and environmental geographers about the possible futures of controlled environments, their practical or selective scalability, and who and what will be left ‘outside’, when they are emerging as a strategic form of urban adaptation and immunisation in the face of converging ecological pressures.
This article centers the role of digital technologies in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the US housing market in the wake of the global financial crisis. I argue that while post-crisis market conditions provided an opportunity for large investors to acquire foreclosed single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and roll out an new asset class based on bundled rent checks, these conditions were insufficient on their own. Digital innovations coming to prominence since the 2008 crisis were required to automate core functions, such as rent collection and maintenance, in order to efficiently manage large, geographically dispersed property portfolios. New information technologies enabled investors to aggregate ownership of resources, extract income flows, and securely convey these flows to capital markets. Such advances have, therefore, given rise to the “automated landlord”, whereby the management of tenants and properties is increasingly not only mediated, but governed, by smartphones, digital platforms, and apps, and the data and analytics these devices and infrastructures gather and enable. This article shows how technological transformations actively participate in the ongoing, dynamic process of financial accumulation strategies, and contends that digital technologies, therefore, also comprise a crucial terrain of struggles over housing’s place in contemporary capitalism.
Some of the largest tech companies in the world, not to mention a stream of smaller startups, are now our roommates. Homes have become the target for smart devices and digital platforms that aim to upgrade old appliances, like refrigerators, and provide new capabilities, like virtual assistants. While smart devices have been variously championed and demonized in both academic literature and popular media, this article moves critical analysis beyond the common—but still important—concerns with privacy and security. By directing our attention to the wider political economy of datafication, it reveals the increasingly influential, yet shadowy, role of industries outside the tech sector in designing and deploying surveillance systems in domestic spaces. Namely, the FIRE sector of finance, insurance, and real estate. When Amazon and Google moved into our homes, they also let in a suite of uninvited third parties.
This article discusses the positioning of children both as objects of economic activity as and subjects of market relations under surveillance capitalism. It looks briefly at the history of children’s engagement with the market economy from their engagement in the labour force during industrial revolution times; their disappearance from direct economic activity during the Romantic Movement; through to their emergence as both data sources and data consumers within a big data economy. It argues that this is the first time since children retreated from the paid labour force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to labour law reforms that their activities are of significant economic value, and that the emergence of Internet-connected toys and things for children will significantly amplify children’s position as data sources under surveillance capitalism.
The collection and circulation of data is now a central element of increasingly more sectors of contemporary capitalism. This article analyses data as a form of capital that is distinct from, but has its roots in, economic capital. Data collection is driven by the perpetual cycle of capital accumulation, which in turn drives capital to construct and rely upon a universe in which everything is made of data. The imperative to capture all data, from all sources, by any means possible influences many key decisions about business models, political governance, and technological development. This article argues that many common practices of data accumulation should actually be understood in terms of data extraction , wherein data is taken with little regard for consent and compensation. By understanding data as a form capital, we can better analyse the meaning, practices, and implications of datafication as a political economic regime.
Electricity is hidden within wires and networks only revealing its quantity and flow when metered. The making of its properties into data is therefore particularly important to the relations that are formed around electricity as a produced and managed phenomenon. We propose approaching all metering as a situated activity, a form of quantification work in which data is made and becomes mobile in particular spatial and temporal terms, enabling its entry into data infrastructures and schemes of evaluation and value production. We interrogate the transition from the pre-digital into the making of bigger, more spatiotemporally granular electricity data, through focusing on those actors selling and materialising new metering technologies, data infrastructures and services for larger businesses and public sector organisations in the UK. We examine the claims of truth and visibility that accompany these shifts and their enrolment into management techniques that serve to more precisely apportion responsibility for, and evaluate the status of, particular patterns and instances of electricity use. We argue that whilst through becoming Big Data electricity flow is now able to be known and given identity in significantly new terms, enabling new relations to be formed with the many heterogeneous entities implicated in making and managing energy demand, it is necessary to sustain some ambivalence as to the performative consequences that follow for energy governance. We consider the wider application of our conceptualisation of metering, reflecting on comparisons with the introduction of new metering systems in domestic settings and as part of other infrastructural networks.
In this article, I seek to draw a lineage between the long history of the female cyborg and the interactive technologies (Siri, for example) that we carry with us everywhere today. Thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway’s seminal ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, the female cyborg is still an assemblaged site of power disparity. Imprisoned at the intersection of affective labour, male desire and the weaponized female body, today’s iteration of the cyborg-the intelligent assistant that lives in our phone-is more virtual than organic, more sonic than tangible. Her design hinges on the patriarchal, profit-driven implementation of symbolic femininity, accompanied by an erasure of the female body as we know it, betraying the ways in which even incorporeal, supposedly ‘posthuman’ technologies fail to help us transcend the gendered power relations that continue to govern real human bodies. © 2016, Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploiesti. All rights reserved.
Smart homes are a priority area of strategic energy planning and national policy. The market adoption of smart home technologies (SHTs) relies on prospective users perceiving clear benefits with acceptable levels of risk. This paper characterises the perceived benefits and risks of SHTs from multiple perspectives. A representative national survey of UK homeowners (n=1025) finds prospective users have positive perceptions of the multiple functionality of SHTs including energy management. Ceding autonomy and independence in the home for increased technological control are the main perceived risks. An additional survey of actual SHT users (n=42) participating in a smart home field trial identifies the key role of early adopters in lowering perceived SHT risks for the mass market. Content analysis of SHT marketing material (n=62) finds the SHT industry are insufficiently emphasising measures to build consumer confidence on data security and privacy. Policymakers can play an important role in mitigating perceived risks, and supporting the energy-management potential of a smart-home future. Policy measures to support SHT market development include design and operating standards, guidelines on data and privacy, quality control, and in situ research programmes. Policy experiences with domestic energy efficiency technologies and with national smart meter roll-outs offer useful precedents.
This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home-functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home-prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home-hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns-privacy and control-that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.
The life and times of the Smart Wife—feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available.
Meet the Smart Wife—at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant—a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma—sends her “master” helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”—domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers—designed in male-dominated industries—is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It's time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.
What's wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes—so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices re-inscribes those outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Advanced technology is taking us backwards on gender equity. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife “manifesta,” proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.
Smart meters are a central element in strategies to create data-rich environments that enhance the rationalization and technical optimization of electricity production and consumption. Bold claims are made by industry and government that smart measurement devices will enable a new class of responsibilizing subjects who can be nudged and incentivized to orchestrate efficient low carbon energy governance. The carbon governmentality literature reveals the microphysics of power involved in responsibilization-as-governance. However, it insufficiently explains how the individualization of responsibility is shaped by and coexists with other sectoral and policy priorities, and political-economic imperatives. I show how the obdurate political-economic relations of the Australian electricity sector shape what can be measured, who can do the measuring, and who can access the metrics from smart meters. Utopian promises to govern for all by metrics are constrained by industry accumulation strategies, weak regulation and the embedded inequalities of infrastructural projects. I then show how responsibilization is being eclipsed by responsiveness as the new regime of accountability. Responsiveness bypasses active individual consumer decision-making, in favour of technologically-mediated automated processes. I show how responsiveness regimes are being driven by new whole-of-economy accumulation opportunities and enabled through the creation of a weakly-regulated sectoral market for electricity consumption data. Metering is a crucial but insufficient condition for the larger assemblage of responsiveness that involves data mobility through third party access, new forms of market competition, and value creation in demand response.
This book, Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life , is concerned with the home, but it is not bounded by the home. While the home provides a necessary anchor point for our empirical and theoretical work, we are well aware that the home is not self-contained but is a node in multiple commercial, cultural, and technical networks, all of which interact, and all of which have local implications and global reach. The home’s socio-technical ecology operates in recursive relations with these much larger ecologies, none of which can be ignored if the home is to be understood. This book unearths this digital domesticity through accounts of evolving socio-technical relations as they unfold in processes of adopting and adapting to innovations; using, maintaining, and neglecting the complex of technologies in the home; and confronting the obsolescence of particular technologies and failure of systems of consumer technologies.
This paper discusses a utility-led research project which piloted smart meters and DSR products (a time of use tariff and a critical peak rebate scheme) with 500 low income households in London. As households set about the task of adjusting their electricity use in response to shifting prompts, they revealed the importance of managing domestic labour to generate value from DSR products and the role of women in carrying this out. The experience is at odds with the smart future more typically imagined in which chore-doing is handed over to feminized AI assistants who orchestrate IoT appliances to create comfort and capture value. Strengers has cautioned against constructing a smart future to serve `Resource Man'. Drawing on trial participants' experiences, the paper develops the concept of `Flexibility Woman' in order to bring the realities of domestic labour more sharply into focus. The paper argues that chore-doing needs to become a narrative in the smart future to understand the burdens and opportunities for `Flexibility Woman' to create value from her labour. It suggests that women unable to afford a surrogate AI wife may find themselves becoming `Flexibility Woman' or else excluded from accessing the cheaper, greener electricity of the future. It also suggests that ignoring gender risks undermining the impacts that policy makers and network operators hope to achieve through DSR.
The paper makes a unique contribution to our understanding of how DSR relates to gender roles and what the implications are for the effectiveness and inclusivity of flexibility products.
In this paper, we explicate how smart energy infrastructures embed and enact politics. By advancing the framework of technopolitics, and building on two in-depth case studies of the US and Australia, this paper analyzes the emergence and effects of the smart energy sector. With the aim of economizing electricity, the “modernization” of the energy sector has followed from historical dynamics of deregulation and marketization. Based on interviews and document analysis, we argue that a specific logic, which we call anti-politics, is now being enacted through the creation of policies and technologies that aim to reduce and remove human agency from energy systems. Analyses based on post-politics do not fully capture the extent to which politics—the continual process of disagreement and deliberation—has been purged from the ideologies and institutions that govern energy and society. In addition to the technocratic evolution beyond politics, we are witnessing the neoliberal elimination of politics.
In recent years, household sustainability has received increasing attention in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. This has largely been driven by the argument that through interaction design, we can create ‘smart homes’ that enable households to be more responsible with precious resources, such as food, water and energy. However, the assumption that home automation technologies lead to improved sustainability may not hold. As a contribution to this discussion, this paper demonstrates how home automation devices promote a lifestyle vision which may undermine intended energy savings. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of smart home articles, we identify and interrogate the industry vision of ‘pleasance’. We highlight seven qualities that underpin this vision: aesthetic experience, fun and cool, customisation and control, convenience and simplicity, peace of mind, extension and expansion, and effortless energy-saving. We analyse how energy-intensive pleasance is embedded within two commercially available types of devices: smart thermostats and networked lighting. We show how these devices and the pleasance vision that they mobilize may encourage householders to use more energy. The paper concludes with design suggestions on how HCI community can re-envision pleasance through the examples of thermostats and networked lighting to achieve energy reductions and sustainability outcomes.
On its surface, the ‘smart home’ marks an effort to augment everyday domestic life to the benefit of its members, through the pervasive digital technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Through an analysis of the family-imitating group accounts offered by both Google and Amazon, as part of their smart home ecosystems, this paper identifies a project of constructing a new site for platform capitalism, in the form of the platform family, and its effort to pacify domestic life. The platform family is an engineered simulacra of domesticity, formatted to run on the smart home operating system, serving simultaneously as a vehicle for domestic consumption, and a vehicle for consuming domestic life. Drawing on sociology of the family, we contextualise this by showing how the home has long been a site of struggles between internal and external control. Addressing the reconfiguration of membership possibilities within the platform family, we show how it seeks to intervene in domestic life, by reshaping family'smaterial possibilities and normativities. Looking past the technologies to the social forms they imbue reveals a project that is ultimately motivated by a desire to colonise the home as a site for platform capitalism. We conclude by highlighting the potential for resistance in this space and ask whether the homogenisation of domestic life attempted by these interventions is not fundamentally contradictory, in denying the very qualities that give family its value.
Although aspirations for the ‘smart home’ have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that drive social and spatial change, suggests we need to revise the smart home. From increased leisure time to increased energy efficiency – the smart home has promised, and frequently failed to deliver its utopian promises. First, this paper argues the smart home can be conceptualized as an assemblage of social, economic, political and technological apparatuses. Thinking about the smart home as assemblage allows us to see the network of relationships which constitute it, the work they do in the world, and the subsequent possibilities of becoming. Second, the paper offers innovative methodologies for researching the smart home that draws on the agentive capacities of ‘smart’ technologies. Such unpacking is critical to understand the work and possibilities of the smart home. The methodologies are productive for thinking about the future of housing research.
This article examines the figuration of the home automation device Amazon Echo and its digital assistant Alexa. While most readings of gender and digital assistants choose to foreground the figure of the housewife, I argue that Alexa is instead figured on domestic servants. I examine commercials, Amazon customer reviews, and reviews from tech commentators to make the case that the Echo is modeled on an idealized image of domestic service. It is my contention that this vision functions in various ways to reproduce a relation between device/user that mimics the relation between servant/master in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American homes. Significantly, however, the Echo departs from this historical parallel through its aesthetic coding as a native-speaking, educated, white woman. This aestheticization is problematic insofar as it decontextualizes and depoliticizes the historic reality of domestic service. Further, this figuration misrepresents the direction of power between user and devices in a way that makes contending with issues such as surveillance and digital labor increasingly difficult.
Interest and uptake of smart home technologies has been lower than anticipated, particularly among women. Reporting on an academic-industry partnership, we present findings from an ethnographic study with 31 Australian smart home early adopters. The paper analyses these households' experiences in relation to three concepts central to Intel's ambient computing vision for the home: protection, productivity and pleasure, or 'the 3Ps'. We find that protection is a form of caregiving; productivity provides 'small conveniences', energy savings and multi-tasking possibilities; and pleasure is derived from ambient and aesthetic features, and the joy of 'playing around' with tech. Our analysis identifies three design challenges and opportunities for the smart home: internal threats to household protection; feminine desires for the smart home; and increased 'digital housekeeping'. We conclude by suggesting how HCI designers can and should respond to these gendered challenges.
This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: (1) it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, (2) it sells and disseminates this version of smartness, and (3) it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models.
Rapid technological innovations, including the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), introduce a range of uncertainties, opportunities, and risks. While it is not possible to accurately foresee IoT's myriad ramifications, futures and foresight methodologies allow for the exploration of plausible futures and their desirability. Drawing on the futures and foresight literature, the current paper employs a standardised expert elicitation approach to study emerging risk patterns in descriptions of IoT risk scenarios. We surveyed 19 IoT experts between January and February 2018 using an online questionnaire. The submitted scenarios provided expert's perception of evolving IoT risk trajectories and were evaluated using thematic analysis, a method used to identify and report patterns within data. Four common themes were extracted: physical safety; crime and exploitation; loss of control; and social norms and structures. These themes provide suitable analytical tools to contextualise emerging risks and help detecting gaps about security and privacy challenges in the IoT.
Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots-humanoids, androids, and animaloids-are "imagineered" in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether "civil rights" should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the "normal" body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Prior work examining technology usage and maintenance practices in homes describes division of labor in terms of technical expertise. In this paper, we offer a counter-narrative to this explanation for engagement with Ubiquitous Computing. Using feminist theory as an analytic lens, we examine how gender identity work is a determining factor of whether and how people engage with digital technologies in their homes. We present a model of gender & technical identity co-construction.
Traditional housing careers are being re-configured. Home ownership is declining and a parallel increase in renting has lead some commentators to suggest that this is creating a generation of renters. I argue that there is a further significant housing shift that deserves our attention – share housing. Share housing in the twenty-first century is different as evidence shows that people are sharing for longer and across widening age demographics; and that access to and experience of share housing is increasingly mediated by the digital. However, scant attention has been paid to share housing beyond its stereotype as transitional housing for young people between the family home and individual home ownership. Here I provoke geographers to take seriously, ‘Generation Share’ and the digitalised geographies of shared housing.
This article analyses visions of everyday life embedded in the 21st-century smart home, specifically the promoted aspiration to generate escalated aesthetic pleasures or ‘pleasance’, attained through automated and connected devices. We explore the likely outcomes and effects of this vision, drawing on our international content analysis of magazine and online articles and semi-structured interview and tours with households who live in smart homes or use automated technologies. Like the industrial revolution of the home, which arguably created ‘more work for mother’ by increasing cleanliness expectations, we show how the smart home is generating new forms of household work and play. These include researching, upgrading, updating, maintaining and integrating smart home technologies and programming pleasance ‘scenes’ for lighting, security and entertainment. We find that most of this household labour (and leisure) is being performed by men, possibly leading to more work for father.
This article develops concepts of what the home is and reflects on smart home technology and the research literature on smart homes in relation to these concepts. The focus is on the aspects of smart home technologies related to energy management within the home (end-uses) and at network or grid level (system). Four aspects of a home are distinguished: a place for security and control, for activity, for relationships and continuity, and for identity and values. These aspects of home are used to discuss approaches to, and ideas of, the smart home, as reflected in the research literature. It is shown that technical and ‘prospective’ research literature focuses on aspects of security and control in the home as well as on activities, whereas research papers that are more conceptual and evaluative are more likely to include questions of relations, values and identities. The paper concludes that a broader understanding of the home in all aspects is needed when conducting research into smart homes. This can be valuable when evaluating how smart home technologies work in real homes, as well as in the more technical and prospective approaches to developing new socio-technical configurations.
When we first entered homes to study mobile games and home automation, we envisaged our projects would focus on humans and various modes of interaction and co-presence. Yet as our research progressed, it became clear that in many homes, humans and their pets are intimately entangled in various forms of digitally mediated kinship. In this chapter we consider how this entanglement takes place within the dynamic space of the household, affecting the agencies and spatial organization of the home. This chapter seeks to reflect upon how human and non-human relationality occurs in and around domestic media and the attendant ramifications for how digital visual research is configured and the techniques are deployed. First, we review some of the debates surrounding human-animal relations and look at how the use of pet wearables can generate non-Anthropocentric understandings of care and intimacy. Second, we explore some of the ways that pets become co-involved with humans in touchscreen games, by highlighting the cross-species nature of play, and considering what a ‘more-than-human’ taxonomy of haptic play within the home might look and feel like.
Resonating with the industrial revolution of the home (Schwartz Cowan, 1989), the smart home ‘digital revolution’ reinvigorates promises for convenience. This paper analyses the industry vision for a ‘simple life’, and asks what energy implications it is likely to generate. We draw on an international magazine and online media content analysis of the 21st Century smart home, alongside 10 interviews conducted with Australian smart home industry professionals. The analysis explores the contradiction between complexity and simplicity embedded in smart home industry visions, where an expanded range of devices, services and options are marketed as a way to simplify and enhance everyday practices. A promoted side-benefit is reduced and more efficient energy consumption. We unpack the expectations embodied in this current convenience narrative to show how smart home devices may transform everyday practices in ways which result in increased energy consumption and household labour. The paper concludes by calling for energy research and scholarship which seeks to disrupt the convenience and other smart home narratives.
This review examines several recent books that deal with the impact of automation and robotics on the future of jobs. Most books in this genre predict that the current phase of digital technology will create massive job loss in an unprecedented way, that is, that this wave of automation is different from previous waves. Uniquely digital technology is said to automate professional occupations for the first time. This review critically examines these claims, puncturing some of the hyperbole about automation, robotics and Artificial Intelligence. The review argues for a more nuanced analysis of the politics of technology and provides some critical distance on Silicon Valley's futurist discourse. Only by insisting that futures are always social can public bodies, rather than autonomous markets and endogenous technologies, become central to disentangling, debating and delivering those futures.
What do markets see when they look at people? Information dragnets increasingly yield huge quantities of individual-level data, which are analyzed to sort and slot people into categories of taste, riskiness or worth. These tools deepen the reach of the market and define new strategies of profit-making. We present a new theoretical framework for understanding their development. We argue that (a) modern organizations follow an institutional data imperative to collect as much data as possible; (b) as a result of the analysis and use of this data, individuals accrue a form of capital flowing from their positions as measured by various digital scoring and ranking methods; and (c) the facticity of these scoring methods makes them organizational devices with potentially stratifying effects. They offer firms new opportunities to structure and price offerings to consumers. For individuals, they create classification situations that identify shared life-chances in product and service markets. We discuss the implications of these processes and argue that they tend toward a new economy of moral judgment, where outcomes are experienced as morally deserved positions based on prior good actions and good tastes, as measured and classified by this new infrastructure of data collection and analysis.
What can queer feminist writing strategies such as parody and irony do to outsmart the sexism of smart objects, environments and materials and open out the new dialecticism of structure and scale, critique and creativity? Drawing on science and technology studies and feminist theory, this book examines the gendering of current and future media technologies such as smart phones, Google glass, robot nurses, tablets and face recognition. Kember argues that there is a tendency to affirm and celebrate the existence of smart and often sexist objects, environments and materials in themselves; to elide writing and other forms of mediation; and to engage in disembodied knowledge practices. Disembodied knowledge practices tend towards a scientism that currently includes physics envy and are also masculinist. Where there is some degree of convergence between masculinist and feminist thinking about objects, environments and materials, there is also divergence, conflict and the possible opening towards a politics of imedia. Presenting a lively manifesto for refiguring imedia, this book forms an often neglected gender critique of developments in smart technologies and will be essential reading for scholars in Communication Studies, Cultural and Media, Science and Technology and Feminism.
Home and automation are not natural partners--one homey and the other cold. Most current automation in the home is packaged in the form of appliances. To better understand the current reality and possible future of living with other types of domestic technology, we went out into the field to conduct need finding interviews among people who have already introduced automation into their homes and kept it there--home automators. We present the lessons learned from these home automators as frameworks and implications for the values that domestic technology should support. In particular, we focus on the satisfaction and meaning that the home automators derived from their projects, especially in connecting to their homes (rather than simply controlling their homes). These results point the way toward other technologies designed for our everyday lives at home.
Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, it is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and “smart” domestic appliances. This book explores the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research p ... More
Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, it is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and “smart” domestic appliances. This book explores the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices which have emerged—both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors’ collaboration, it takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. The authors map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubicomp around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.
This article analyzes recent architectural and product designs for computerized smart homes. The smart home is a sentient space where human subjects and domestic objects speak to one another via intelligent agents and internet connections. This article explores the industrial logic behind this new vision of home (i.e. the links between the hi-tech industry and the building/home appliance industries) and examines the mode of subjectivity the smart home demands. It calls this mode of subjectivity ‘posthuman domesticity’ (a term to explore the way that everyday human experience is orchestrated by telerobotics and intelligent agents). Analyzing architectural designs, advertisements and magazines, the article focuses on how the smart home industry promotes an ideal of ‘conspicuous production’ in which the luxury home is no longer just a site of leisure and consumption, but also the ultimate workplace. It argues that smart homes reconfigure but also reinforce gendered patterns of domestic labor and leisure.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of “spectacles.” Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.
The business of or market for technological expectations has yet to be thoroughly explored by scholars interested in the role of expectations and visions in the emergence of technological innovations. However, intermediaries specialising i n the production, commodification and selling of future-oriented knowledge, have emerged to exert new kinds of influence on the shaping of technology and innovation. We focus on t he work of those specialist forms of consultants known as 'industry analysts' and consid er them as promissory organisations to capture the fact they are successful in mobilising and indeed increasingly organising expectations within procurement and innovation markets. Our aim is to highlight the important role these actors play in shaping technol ogies and in so doing how they typically exhibit complex and highly uneven forms of influence. The paper is organised around a central question: Why are certain kinds of promisso ry behaviour more influential than others? To answer this, we draw from the literature on tech nology expectations on discussions of the 'constitutive' nature of promises, which provides a useful but arguably partial analytical approach for articulating the dynamics and differen ces surrounding product based expectations. We thus supplement our understanding with recent developments in Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Finance where an ambitious theoretical framework is unfolding in relation to the 'performativity of eco nomic theory'. By contrasting different forms of promissory work conducted by industry anal ysts and varying forms of accountability to which this work is subject, we begin to map out a typology that characterises promissory behaviour according to differences in kind and effe ct.
This article compares experiences of surveillance technologies in low-income public housing and affluent gated communities in Phoenix, Arizona. Contrary to the popular discourse of surveillance as ensuring protection from external threats, in practice, both groups feel subjected to undesired individual scrutiny and policing of their behaviors. Nonetheless, key differences exist. First, residents in gated communities possess relative mobility and minimal personal risk compared to those in public housing. Second, in public housing, the underlying logics behind surveillance are toward the enforcement of state laws, whereas in gated communities, they are toward the enforcement of conformity in appearance and behavior. The article argues that the dissonance between popular discourse and discourse of practice about surveillance technologies is representative of deeper social instabilities engendered by neoliberal forms of governance.