Book Description

"Smart homes are domestic spaces outfitted with networked technology made by brands like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. However, Silicon Valley purveyors are not the only important actors in smart home development. Appliance makers, logistics companies, health and wellness conglomerates, insurance companies, and security franchises are all betting on the smart home in an economy that puts a premium on data. Together, major players in the smart home space have successfully attracted the attention and pocketbooks of millions of households by touting the virtues of ambient, networked technologies as an upgrade to modern domestic life. If industry predictions hold, nearly half of American houses will be "smart" by 2024. Yet, what it means to be "smart" is still unsettled. Threshold asks and answers the question: How do smart homes communicate cultural values about the role of technology in the 21st century? Answering this question is time-sensitive, as the coming years will determine how smart homes are configured, who has access to them, and what they mean to their owners, policy makers, technology companies, and others invested in these domestic digital platforms. The consequences of these decisions are significant because they impact both smart home residents and society at large. At present, much of the research on smart homes caters either to industry experts or scientists and engineers. This literature often describes or evaluates the technical capacities of the smart home or focuses on user interface and design. Instead, Heather Woods argues, we need a sustained cultural analysis of smart homes that considers the socio-technical variables-gender, class, income disparity, race, criminal justice, the housing market, and the future of both labor and domesticity-that give the smart home meaning. Threshold takes up this challenge from a rhetorical perspective, arguing that smart homes are lived, material embodiments of the digital cultures in which they are imagined, built, and used. Those considerations, more often than not, are relegated to secondary considerations, when in truth they are the most pervasive and consequential factors affecting anyone participating in a smart home ecosystem. Woods argues that smart homes are spatial manifestations of a phenomenon called living in digitality, a cultural condition whereby users engage with technology at every moment of every day. Using extensive fieldwork at smart homes throughout the USA, Woods traces how smart homes urge ubiquitous computing as a normalized, daily practice, readying domestic spaces and their occupants for an increasingly transactional digital future that is largely controlled by corporate interests. Threshold advances knowledge in three ways, by: (1) Offering definitional tools for identifying and evaluating immersive technologies, including but not limited to the smart home (2) Identifying three distinct configurations of the smart home according to their domestic and technological functions (3) Demonstrating the productive capacity of smart homes (and smart devices) to influence social life The book highlights the rhetorical force of smart domesticity for rhetorical scholars, digital humanists, political scientists, critical theorists, policy makers, and residents or prospective residents of smart homes. Ultimately, Threshold serves as a toolkit for recognizing and responding to the persistent encroachment of digital technologies in all parts of our lives"--