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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.
... Nevertheless, empirical research complicates this picture, by consistently showing that -notwithstanding their novel functionalities and usefulness in the household -smart technologies, rather than promoting gender equality, add to the bolstering of gender divisions and their respectively ascribed societal roles (e.g. Chambers 2020a, 314;Chen et al. 2024;Dahlgren et al. 2021;Sadowski et al. 2021). ...
... Strategically positioned as desirable companions, today's voice assistants tend to evoke a sense of nostalgia and familiarity with their portrayal as caring female partners (resembling those from the past), helpful in navigating everyday life's challenges (see Kember 2016, 16). Beneath the surface of their advertised domestic virtues, however, these digital devices are instrumental in facilitating, under the guise of carers, the goals of surveillance capitalism (Maalsen and Sadowski 2019;Sadowski et al. 2021;Woods 2018). ...
... Inspired by critical feminist interventions regarding the gendered nature of technology (e.g. Sadowski et al. 2021;Strengers and Kennedy 2020;Wajcman 2010;Woods 2018), and embracing the theorisation of things as vital and agential entities (e.g. Bennett 2004Bennett , 2010, the figuration of the 'wicked vestal' assists in exposing that, by partaking in a subversive endeavour that challenges the conventional narrative of androcentric convenience and motherly guardianship, alternative cultural representations deftly dismantle the widespread image of smart home propagated in the dominant discourse. ...
Drawing on feminist technology studies’ interventions in current
research on smart homes, this article offers an analysis of recent
cultural artifacts that – in contrast to the predominant marketized
narratives infused with androcentricity and biased toward a
reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles – dislocate the
conventional power relations within the technologized domestic
space. The article elaborates an original concept of a ‘wicked
vestal’, which may serve as a heuristic tool to capture the
revisionist dynamics operating within (and partly enabled by) the
technology-imbued home. The article argues, that creative
subversions of the mainstream discourse on smartification offered
by literary/artistic/cinematic products may add nuance to the
existent discussions on smart technologies, offering a glimpse
into the processes of a (dis)harmonious integration of technology
and domesticity, alerting consumers of smart devices to, and
possibly readying them for, the precariousness lurking in an
unpredictable, capitalism-ridden techno-future.
... Smart technologies have already been accommodated and materialized in real homes (Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021), bringing new ways of producing, promoting, consuming, and domesticating technologies (Chambers 2020) and providing better healthcare and social care when they fail to meet pre-asseigned requirements of care work (Cox 2013). ...
... However, such a promise has not always been successfully fulfilled. Recent studies have pointed out that smart home technologies can on the one hand improve gender equality by inviting more males to participate in domestic labor (Strengers and Kennedy 2020, 42) and encouraging the masculine way of caregiving monitoring (Strengers et al. 2019, 5-6;Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021). While on the other hand, these technologies have reinforced or even exacerbated the unequal division of gendered labor (Strengers and Nicholls 2017;Chambers 2020) and the toxic masculinity that inflicts technology-enabled violence on females (Strengers et al. 2019, 8-9;Strengers and Kennedy 2020, 200-201). ...
... As feminist STS scholars suggest, recent smart home design and marketing strategies have reflected the industrial imagination of gender-technology interactions in the domestic sphere. Conventionally targeted at heterosexual families (Phan 2019;Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021), smart home devices are often designed to assist or even automatically accomplish women's care duties, such as laundering, cooking, cleaning, child-caring, and other types of daily and routinized household chores, simulating the imagined housewives or earlier female servants (Phan 2019; Kennedy 2020, chapter 1-2). Moreover, the feminized appearance of smart home devices, especially DVA or smart speakers (Bergen 2016;Phan 2017;Strengers and Kennedy 2020, chapter 1), is leveraging the association between femininity and care to increase consumer acceptance (Bergen 2016;Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2021). ...
This article investigates how the representations of smart home build upon gendered narratives of home as a carescape in the Chinese market on the basis of a qualitative analysis of smart home advertisements in the Chinese market. From a gender-technology perspective, it unveils contradictory narratives of gendered care and domestic carescapes arising from the current smart home industry. On the one hand, these narratives promote gender equality and democratize home by inviting both men and women to engage in technology-mediated care work. While on the other hand, they unfold a socio-technical imaginary that reinforces gender stereotypes of domestic care. These gendered narratives are shaped by the Chinese socio-technical contexts and cultural norms, especially public discourses and cultural traditions of heteronomative family lives and gender norms as well as the gender structure imbalance in the technology industry. This article can offer a nuanced understanding of feminist geographies of home and care in a post-socialist technological context.
... Epp and Velagaleti (2014) found that the care deficit faced by dual-earner parents drives them to outsource caregiving activities. One such outsourcing strategy may involve adopting and experimenting with new communication and coordination technologies (Strengers and Kennedy, 2021;Sadowski et al., 2024). Given their need for flexibility and control, along with their existing technology usage patterns, dual-earner parents are likely to be early adopters of smart home products (Davidoff et al., 2006). ...
... The Smart Safety Care system used as a stimulus in Study 2 directly addresses parental responsibilities, particularly timeconsuming tasks such as monitoring a baby's sleep. The smartification of these daily concerns reduces the burden of such tasks, providing an emancipatory effect (Sadowski et al., 2024). The findings indicate that dual-earner parents especially value the specific features of these systems. ...
Purpose
The objective of this study is to explore the effect of family and message type interactions on the sales of smart home products. The study hypothesizes that dual-earner parents, a prolific segment of consumers, will indicate a greater willingness to pay for smart home products when exposed to characteristics-related marketing messages.
Design/methodology/approach
Two quasi-experimental studies were conducted to test the hypothesis. In collaboration with Samsung Electronics, the studies used different smart home product bundles (Smart Air Care and Smart Safety Care), recruited distinct participant groups (parents of children aged three to five and parents of children aged zero to three) and manipulated different types of benefits-related messages (a user review video and a teaser page).
Findings
In response to smart home product messaging, dual-earner parents exhibited greater willingness to pay when exposed to characteristics-related messages compared to benefits-related messages. This difference was not found among single-earner parents.
Originality/value
Challenging conventional marketing assumptions, the findings demonstrate that benefits-related messages do not universally appeal to smart home product consumers, while characteristics-related messages can increase willingness to pay among the dual-earner segment. The collaboration with Samsung Electronics in a quasi-experimental setting strengthens the external validity of the results, suggesting that marketers should tailor messaging strategies based on the characteristics of customer segments.
... pump technology were almost all middle-aged men, with 76% of the 22 respondents having a technical education (Hyysalo et al. 2013a). This is supported by Australian and Danish studies on smart homes-incorporating appliances such as hybrid and electric heat pumps-which argue that men are more likely to install and/or engage with the energy-monitoring systems (Strengers & Nicholls 2018;Strengers et al. 2021;Aagaard & Madsen 2022). Shirani et al. (2022) give three case studies of women who all expressed a desire for more information about the operation of their heat pumps and other aspects of their smart homes. ...
... gendered interactions with heat pump controls in Wales, with one participant finding the control simple and sharing the operation with her child, whilst others note that their (male) partners usually manage the heating settings and make adjustments. The more constant operation of heat pumps may mean less tinkering and conflict, whilst shifts towards smart heating controls could also see the outsourcing of autonomy (Sadowski et al. 2021). Research is therefore needed on whether heat pumps change existing conflicts within households, and if, as previous research has shown, there continues to be gender bias in thermal control. ...
... Mechlenborg and Gram-Hanssen [41] have called for the inclusion of gender perspectives with more nuanced understandings of gender when conducting energy research, considering how the energy practices and household technologies are shaped. Sadowski et al. [49] argue that the smart home can be understood as a 'Big Mother' which can be understood as 'a system that seeks to enact a commodifiable digital surveillance of the home under the guise of maternal care' [49], and connect that to the development of new markets of data. Companies like Amazon and Google are also deploying smart home technologies, in an attempt at shaping consumer behaviour through the use of data with an offer of convenience, which Huberman [25] perceives as an example of Surveillance Capitalism [62]. ...
... Mechlenborg and Gram-Hanssen [41] have called for the inclusion of gender perspectives with more nuanced understandings of gender when conducting energy research, considering how the energy practices and household technologies are shaped. Sadowski et al. [49] argue that the smart home can be understood as a 'Big Mother' which can be understood as 'a system that seeks to enact a commodifiable digital surveillance of the home under the guise of maternal care' [49], and connect that to the development of new markets of data. Companies like Amazon and Google are also deploying smart home technologies, in an attempt at shaping consumer behaviour through the use of data with an offer of convenience, which Huberman [25] perceives as an example of Surveillance Capitalism [62]. ...
The introduction of smart home technologies shifts the social relationships in the home by replacing parts of the home assemblage with digital components. This article makes two contributions, first it analyses the influence of panopticons of convenience, which it conceptualises as ‘The acceptance of additional surveillance upon one’s life for the purpose of acquiring actual or presumed convenience’ in smart homes. Second, through an empirical expert interview study it identifies several examples of how intentions and imple- mentations of smart home technologies facilitate behaviours that cause or reinforce inequalities in the home. These examples are then used to understand how the panopticons of convenience contribute to the abjection of the less tech-savvy residents of these homes and to reflect on how these technologies shape energy consumption in the home.
... In scholarly literature, such support has not conventionally been considered as a form of digital labour: this term has largely been applied to paid, unpaid, or underpaid online activity, platform-mediated 'gig' work, and formal employment within the digital media industries (Jarrett, 2022). More recently, digital labour has been expanded to encompass-often highly gendered-domestic digital labour (e.g., Sadowski et al., 2021), particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the digital labour of digital mentoring has not yet been accounted for. ...
This paper presents findings from a national-scale project that worked with disadvantaged communities across Australia to examine digital inclusion in low-income families and the role of social infrastructure (e.g., schools, libraries, charities, government services) in supporting digital participation. Drawing on data collected in interviews and community workshops in an outer urban community with significant socioeconomic challenges, we illuminate the digital labour of community sector workers who routinely act as digital mentors. These workers support family members who often lack access to digital devices and services along with the requisite skills to use digital technologies to perform everyday tasks, such as helping families to contact telecommunications providers, access government apps, and apply for jobs or rental leases online. In light of our results, our study extends the concept of digital labour to include work undertaken in the service and advocacy of digital inclusion in community contexts. Specifically, we articulate the activities, challenges, frustrations, and costs (in time and resources) that characterise digital inclusion support of low-income families, often beyond role expectations. In doing this, we seek to expand understandings of digital labour both as a category and concept. Overall, the paper demonstrates that digital inclusion initiatives must not only accommodate the intersecting socio-cultural needs of low-income families, but include appropriate support and resourcing for community workers performing critical digital mentoring work.
... Secondly, privacy and data security have received a great deal of attention because the devices can give companies access to data, e.g., from conversations, that formized nature of voice assistants (e.g. Goulden 2019; Pridmore et al. 2019;Sadowski et al. 2021), but few studies to date have focused on the development process of voice assistants (Strüver 2023a;b). By qualitatively inquiring into the procedures of the APCs and competitors' experiences of working with Alexa technologies, it becomes possible to shed light on the inner workings of the sociotechnical relationships and dependencies that underlie Alexa. ...
For about a decade, Amazon's Alexa was a pioneer in automatic speech processing ; now, however, new Large Language Models (LLMs) are posing challenges for Amazon. One attempt to confront these challenges is by integrating technologies developed for Alexa by university research teams in the Alexa Prize Competitions (APCs). This chapter examines how participants in these contests deal with the conditions set and the resources provided by Amazon for the competition, and offers a snapshot of the practical development processes of the voice assistant at a time of technological transition. It then outlines some of the path dependencies, risks, benefits, and aspects of structuration that are encountered by the participants in their attempts to innovate Alexa.
... The number of platform labour studies has expanded greatly of late, with a smaller stream of literature adopting a social reproduction perspective. Notions like the 'digital housewife' (Jarrett, 2015) and the 'Big Mother' (Sadowski et al., 2024) address recent techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction in the domestic space, while short-term rental platforms like Airbnb increase social reproduction needs within the household (Roelofsen and Goyette, 2022). Regarding online gig work, family members play a central role in making workers ready for work (e.g., Posada, 2022), which amplifies the overlap between productive and domestic spaces of social reproduction, bringing about a feminisation of work, as the work increasingly resembles traditional forms of precarious work done by women (Casilli et al., 2023). ...
Platformised services allow affluent others to socially reproduce themselves while reinforcing the barriers to reproduction for migrant workers. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with male migrant food couriers attempting to make a living in Helsinki, the article examines how the social reproduction of migrant platform workers’ labour power is shaped in the interstices between food delivery platforms and bordering processes. Through the notion of life's work, the article analyses how the couriers construct their lives around gig work, highlighting their agency in handling their life, labour and legal status. The argument put forth is that migrant platform workers’ social reproduction is not merely barred but reshaped in the intersection between, on the one hand, being subjected to the labour platform and welfare state bordering and, on the other, the subjective efforts through which migrants manage their life-making practices, revealing a mutual but contentious interdependence between labour platforms and migrant workers. The article enhances current understanding of the structural factors impacting migrant workers beyond just the platform itself, around which struggles emerge and which enable the extractive operations of platform capital.
... Incluso el concepto es perceptible en los estudios de la familia transnacional; con madres que supervisan la alimentación de los hijos (Madianou, 2012), gestionan el manejo del dinero de estos (Uy-Tioco, 2007), llaman a casa para saber si hijas e hijos se encuentran a determinada hora en casa (Chib et al., 2014) o para despertarles por la mañana, ayudarles en las tareas y hasta determinar el tipo de juegos de video que utilizan (Madianou y Miller, 2011). En torno a este fenómeno, Sadowski et al. (2021) proponen en su investigación el concepto de Big Mother (en relación con el Big Brother), que plantea que la tecnologización de la vida en el hogar es una carga que asumen las madres, otorgándoles aún mayor responsabilidad. ...
This research aimed to learn how mothers use smartphones, in the city of Valparaíso —the main Chilean port city. In a context of high penetration of mobile devices, the lack of empirical studies that delve into the use and appropriation of mobile technologies and their impact and influence in mothers’ daily life motivated this research work. The research design was based on a qualitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, exploratory, and descriptive study. Five focus groups were conducted in the city of Valparaíso, along with five semi-structured interviews with participants selected from the focus groups. Fieldwork was carried out between October and December 2019 and January 2020, in the context of the mobilizations under the so-called "social outbreak," with a conspicuous representation of feminist groups. Content analysis was performed with its findings aligned to the data gathered in the focus groups between October and December 2019. The main finding of the study shows prevalent presence of mobile phones in all the stages of upbringing and mother-child relationship, even before birth and early pregnancy stages.
... The inherent biases in smart meter deployment reflect priorities that often favor utility companies over consumers. Sadowski et al. discuss how smart meters embed logics of control and marketization, often at the expense of consumer privacy and welfare [89]. AMI collects detailed energy usage data, raising concerns about data misuse and profit-driven motives that do not benefit consumers, particularly those who cannot easily modify their consumption patterns [90]. ...
The integration of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) within energy utility systems promises significant improvements in efficiency, service delivery, and sustainability. However, this integration introduces complex ethical and privacy challenges that necessitate thorough examination. This review systematically explores these challenges, employing a comprehensive literature search across multiple databases, including Web of Science and Scopus. Key inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to select relevant studies. This review provides a detailed overview of privacy concerns, data security issues, social acceptance, equity considerations, and regulatory frameworks. This review highlights the need for advanced privacy-preserving techniques, robust Privacy by Design (PbD) strategies, and adaptive regulatory frameworks to address these challenges. Additionally, the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the impact on vulnerable populations are emphasized. Our findings aim to guide future research, policy development, and stakeholder decision-making, ensuring the responsible and equitable deployment of AMI technologies.
... Furthermore, they also note that these technologies may not lead to the desired reduction in labour or energy use that they claim to offer. Sadowski et al. (2021) further argue that the smart home can be seen as Big Mother, perceiving it as a system that promotes surveillance under the guise of maternal care. ...
The technologies of the smart home are often marketed as offering control, comfort and convenience in our living spaces by extending our control of our environment so that it no longer requires our physical presence beyond our body and physical presence. This control is not without ethical challenges: who gains control, who gets to participate in the design of the smart home and what are the consequences? Using a Foucauldian lens, this chapter looks at privately owned homes and modern co-living solutions in order to consider how smart technologies affect the autonomy of smart home residents. Smart homes can be considered panopticons of convenience through the acceptance of added surveillance for the benefit of perceived or actual convenience in the form of less or lighter domestic labour, which actively disempowers passive smart home residents.
... For example, media and communication scholars (Gilmore and Blair, 2024) found assumptions about VR users embedded into documentation and instructional videos, with users framed as able-bodied, with upper-middle-class homes providing ample space for VR setups that are both "convenient and unrealistic" (p. 7). Beyond their use for leisure, these technologies are often viewed as a means of optimizing productivity, as a substitute for goods and services, or as a supplement to the tasks of social reproduction (Sadowski et al., 2021). Huws (2019) describes this as the increasing proliferation of platforms and digital technologies in the home to "fix" the time scarcity of adults who are overworked and exhausted in their paid work. ...
This paper extends previous empirical and theoretical research by applying a critical analysis to the recent discourse of “spatial computing,” a term used by Apple Inc. in the launch of the Apple Vision Pro headset. We focus primarily on advertisements and other official videos used to promote and communicate the value(s) of Apple's inaugural “spatial computer,” and how this spatiality is mediated through the hardware and software of the Apple Vision Pro. With techno-utopian visions of daily life that belie Apple's broader platform politics, we argue that Apple's promotional content reveals sociocultural, embodied, material, spatial, and other imaginaries of extended reality that present Apple's novel mediations and data capture as normal and desirable for users who are framed as affluent, able-bodied tech enthusiasts participating in a digital economy that blurs work and leisure.
... For instance, 11 the data gathering that SARs may undertake in their daily domestic assistance could expose elder end-users to paternalistic interferences by their caregivers (doctors or relatives) to a greater extent than before. Sadowski et al. [42] talk of 'Big Mother' as a system that, under the guise of care, manages, monitors, and marketizes domestic spaces and practices, and in this way controls people by structuring their behaviour and limiting their choices. Furthermore, SARs implementation may place new agents of power in former relational networks of care, which may bring with new modes of subjection to interests alien to the care practice defining ones. ...
The development of social assistive robots for supporting healthcare provision faces a lack of an ethical approach that adequately addresses the normatively relevant challenges regarding its deployment. Current ethical reflection is primarily informed by an individual-centered perspective focused on robots’ implications for their end-users and thereby limited to the dyadic human–robot interaction sphere. Considering that this is tightly correlated to the restricted understanding of core ethical concepts upon which reflection stands, this paper delves into the concept of freedom from a philosophical perspective to unfold its full normative breadth for a critical assessment of technological development. By bringing to the fore the political-structural dimension of freedom and, in turn, elaborating the political dimension of technology, the undertaken philosophical approach discloses freedom as a transversal ethical concept for a normative reflection on technology. Thereby, it broadens the scope of ethical attention beyond the sphere of human–robot interaction and turns attention to the so far overlooked structural dimension of human–robot relations. Drawing on conceptions of freedom as non-domination, among others, the paper approaches social assistive robotics and reexamines the terrain of relevant issues for its development. Since freedom is one major issue upon which current concerns revolve, the undertaken analysis substantially enriches the ongoing ethical discussion on social assistive robotics’ implications for human freedom. In this way, this work contributes to going beyond the current individual-centered ethical perspective by laying conceptual grounds for a comprehensive ethical approach to social assistive robotics’ development.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
Objective
This article explores the potential implications of domestic artificial intelligence (AI) systems in everyday households for chore distribution, family surveillance, and the (re)valuation of interpersonal communication.
Background
We differentiate between three types of domestic AI systems based on the social roles they are promised to fulfill: domestic AI as a home maintainer, a guardian, and a companion.
Method
We contrasted the findings from empirical studies with discourse on the development of these domestic AI systems to establish how scholarly research differ from the promises of developers when it comes to the social implications of domestic AI.
Results
We noticed that for each social role of domestic AI, scholarly research nuances the promises of developers. First, domestic AI as a home maintainer can lead to subtle shifts in the gender division of household chores and introduce new forms of control through digital housekeeping. Second, when domestic AI acts as a guardian, it may reshape intimate surveillance practices, blurring the line between care and control. Finally, as a companion, domestic AI might shape or be shaped by existing household dynamics.
Conclusion
Our analysis shows that domestic AI systems should be interpreted in a larger vision for the future for the household, where implementations of domestic AI fit the norms and values embedded in our households. Therefore, we should reflect on (a) what roles we introduce or reconfigure by introducing domestic AI, (b) what “price” we want to pay to deploy domestic AI, and (c) to what extent automation through domestic AI aligns with household values and norms.
Implications
We direct our focus toward researchers, urging them to look beyond deterministic views and effectively examine everyday negotiations, adoption, and the extent to which the domestic AI systems align with the norms and needs of family members. Moreover, we argue for policymakers and practice to shift from a technical perspective on domestic AI to a relational one. Regulation and services supporting families should focus on the social roles that domestic AI plays in the household.
There is broad recognition today that there is a link between the crisis of social reproduction and the housing problem. But their precise relationship is not always clear. This paper is an attempt to clarify their connection. Housing, this paper argues, is not merely the location or container of the crisis of social reproduction. Rather, there are elements of the contemporary housing system which intensify and shape the crisis of social reproduction. Drawing on feminist political economy and critical housing research, this paper identifies four major pathways by which the housing system exacerbates the crisis of social reproduction: depletion, disruption, redomestication, and recommodification. It also considers housing as a site for repoliticising social reproduction. Ultimately, the paper argues that a complete account of the housing question cannot ignore social reproduction as a political‐economic process.
This chapter proposes a novel Machine Learning-based Framework for Human Activity Recognition tailored to address the complexities and challenges inherent in accurately identifying and categorizing human activities from sensor data. ML-HARF integrates advanced machine learning algorithms with a comprehensive data preprocessing pipeline to extract meaningful features from raw sensor data. Leveraging a diverse array of sensor modalities, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers-HARF captures rich spatiotemporal patterns characteristic of human activities. The framework employs a hierarchical classification approach, wherein low-level features are initially extracted and subsequently aggregated to infer higher-level activity labels.ML-HARF outperforms other methods in extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, attaining state-of-the-art accuracy rates in a variety of activity recognition tasks In real-world applications like sports analytics, healthcare monitoring and human-computer interaction systems, the framework's efficiency and scalability are also demonstrated.
This article investigates the notion of provenance, questioning traditional conceptions of the archival fonds that link this collective to limited relationships, including that of the individual, family, or organization. Drawing from work that embraces the notion of expanded views of provenance, the paper explores the theoretical and practical implications of tying the contextual boundaries of the archive to functions and activities connected to and serving as evidence of domestic spatial configurations and relationships. In doing so, the article adds to a body of work that queries key concepts used as part of systems of archival control, highlighting new conceptual and theoretical interpretations that bring dynamism, creativity, and flexibility to archival operations as they exist in analog and digital spaces.
This paper presents a case study of smart home technology use in a low-income household, focussing on the paradox within the digital divide of having high digital skills while experiencing social disadvantage. Contextualised within a larger study of digital disadvantage in low-income households, we use an ethnographic case study approach to examine the experiences of a single parent who lives with her son in public housing and uses various smart home and assistive technologies to manage the home environment and their health and disability. Countering macro studies that equate low-income and disability with digital exclusion, we explore the ‘enabling capabilities’ associated with using digital technologies to address disadvantage. Our case study is contextualised against the typical digital inclusion challenges faced by low-income families and draws on Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to addressing social inequalities. The paper highlights the need to support situation-specific digital capability development and flexible technology and social welfare arrangements. Our findings and approach contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how to address digital inequality.
Living with technology often entails work related to management and repair of it. The emerging literature on the work that goes into managing home networks and digital technologies has described it as ‘digital housekeeping’. Within this literature, a single person is often identified as being responsible for the domestic tech work and this is the same person who initiated bringing the technology into the home. However, remaining household members and persons who have been gifted with such technologies are under-researched, despite studies showing them to be vulnerable to skewed power dynamics and technical malfunctions when the responsible person is not around. Applying digital housekeeping as a theoretical lens, this article explores how people identified as ‘non-initiators’, that is, those living with smart home technologies but who did not initiate bringing the technology into their home, deal with malfunctioning devices. Drawing upon interviews with five identified non, this study provides an in-depth exploration of their troubleshooting routines conceptualized as diagnosing, performing, and delegating. Findings suggest that non-initiators also engage in digital housekeeping through troubleshooting, although this work is largely unacknowledged by themselves and others. Moreover, the image of non-initiators as vulnerable is nuanced by highlighting their active participation in the connected home. Non-initiators use smart home devices for daily activities, and they have the knowledge, skills, and resources to draw upon when encountering malfunctions. Furthermore, the non-initiators’ troubleshooting routines are affected by the devices’ materiality, the household’s social dynamics, and to some degree by societal perceptions of technology, age, and gender. This paper contributes to the existing literature on smart homes and digital housekeeping by emphasizing non-initiators’ contribution to digital housekeeping and by highlighting how their agency is asserted in line with their interests and needs.
En este artículo nos proponemos explorar, desde los estudios feministas de la tecnología, los vínculos entre las tecnologías domésticas y el trabajo doméstico remunerado en las sociedades contemporáneas. Si bien en Argentina, y en la región, hay numerosas investigaciones en torno al trabajo doméstico y de cuidados, no existen todavía estudios focalizados en la relación de este con las tecnologías domésticas, las cuales ocupan un lugar fundamental en el desarrollo de las diversas tareas que se realizan dentro del hogar. La indagación sobre las tecnologías domésticas revela que no ahorran mano de obra y tiempo de trabajo, sino que aumentan la productividad y la eficacia del trabajo doméstico remunerado. Asimismo, visibilizan las habilidades y competencias que se necesitan para la producción doméstica, lo cual ha sido infravalorado por los estudios sobre tecnología.
When assessing the impact of technology in a panoramic fashion, the progressivist and nostalgic narratives clearly manifest themselves. On the progressivist side, artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as solving humanity’s problems, potentially even ushering in a post-work society in which wealth and comfort can be taken for granted. As a precondition, AI is understood as outperforming humans, making it suboptimal to hold on to human-focused employment and causing a reinvention of the economy itself or supplementing humans with technology. On the nostalgic side, meanwhile, emphasis is on surveillance and data-driven control as leading to the loss of human agency and autonomy. Such datafication processes are seen as merely entrenching existing patterns of power and discrimination and leading to subjection of humans for the profit of technology companies.
Landlord technology—or the systems used by landlords to control and regulate tenant lives, spaces, and data—frequently promises “frictionless” building management and residential experiences. Yet services such as “digital doormen” and virtual property management platforms often create more work for tenants, particularly regarding decreased accessibility for tenants of color whose faces are unrecognized by biased algorithms used to administer building access, and for renters who are unable to or who refuse to use new apps and web portals. There are also “digital butlers” that landlords deploy as a means of attracting and retaining wealthy residents, yet that end up creating increased and often gendered work for those laboring behind the curtains of automation. Even virtual property management tools rely upon outsourced labor and are rife with contradictions and hardships for renters and call center workers alike. With a proposition that new forms of material and affective labor are created by landlord technologies despite promises of frictionless living, this article focuses on the various struggles that workers and tenants face in using, maintaining, refusing, and, at times, organizing against property automation. Based upon collaborative research produced with Landlord Tech Watch, as well as ethnographic accounting of housing and labor struggles in New York City and Cluj, this article introduces friction as a critical analytic useful in assessing the uneven, gendered, and racialized labor formations that landlord technologies require and reproduce despite fictions of frictionless living.
In diesem Artikel wird der Sprachassistent Alexa vor dem Hintergrund des Plattformökosystems Amazons untersucht. Hierzu werden Elemente der Plattform- und Infrastrukturtheorie verwendet, um die Rolle des Assistenten in Relation zu den anderen Plattformen der Firma zu konzeptualisieren. Diese Betrachtung ermöglicht es Alexa zum einen als Daten-, Entwicklungs- und Testinfrastruktur von Künstlicher Intelligenz für Amazon und zum anderen als Komfort-Infrastruktur für Nutzer:innen zu betrachten. Um das Wechselverhältnis dieser beiden Rollen nachzuvollziehen, wird ein iteratives Modell entwickelt, welches den Entwicklungsprozess von Alexa als Technologiekomplex nachvollzieht. Die Erkenntnisse, die in der Genese dieses Modells gewonnen werden können, eignen sich dazu den Sprachassistenten als Plattform und Infrastruktur im Plattformökosystem Amazons zu situieren und herauszuarbeiten, welchen Nutzen der Assistent für Amazon haben kann. Dieses letzte Argument trägt zur Weiterentwicklung des theoretischen Instrumentariums zur Betrachtung von Plattformen bei, als dass es diese als wandelbare relationale Infrastrukturen in einem Plattformökosystem begreift, deren Rollen sich im Laufe der kontinuierlichen Entwicklung verändert.
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 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.
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.
Who benefits from smart technology? Whose interests are served when we trade our personal data for convenience and connectivity?
Smart technology is everywhere: smart umbrellas that light up when rain is in the forecast; smart cars that relieve drivers of the drudgery of driving; smart toothbrushes that send your dental hygiene details to the cloud. Nothing is safe from smartification. In Too Smart, Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff—exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity—is worth it. Who benefits from smart technology?
Sadowski explains how data, once the purview of researchers and policy wonks, has become a form of capital. Smart technology, he argues, is driven by the dual imperatives of digital capitalism: extracting data from, and expanding control over, everything and everybody. He looks at three domains colonized by smart technologies' collection and control systems: the smart self, the smart home, and the smart city. The smart self involves more than self-tracking of steps walked and calories burned; it raises questions about what others do with our data and how they direct our behavior—whether or not we want them to. The smart home collects data about our habits that offer business a window into our domestic spaces. And the smart city, where these systems have space to grow, offers military-grade surveillance capabilities to local authorities.
Technology gets smart from our data. We may enjoy the conveniences we get in return (the refrigerator says we're out of milk!), but, Sadowski argues, smart technology advances the interests of corporate technocratic power—and will continue to do so unless we demand oversight and ownership of our data.
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.
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.