Visibility and security in the smart home

Abstract

Smart home, media and security systems intervene in the territory and boundaries of the home in a variety of ways. Among these are the capacity to watch the home from afar, and to record these observations over time, as well as using the home as a site of performance for those on the outside. In this paper, we map the meanings of the smart home and explore the tensions between security and visibility, adopting a cultural history and cultural analysis methodological approach. We make a contribution to the literature on the smart home, highlighting its connection to longer trajectories of media and cultural change, and to understanding the contemporary formations of technologised surveillance, with attention to practices that emerged in response to COVID-19. We focus on two aspects of our model of domestic smartification: Ludics (devices and systems for play or entertainment) and exteriorities (security and communication interfaces that remotely monitor and expose the home). We focus on these aspects relating them to ideas of haunting and the uncanny to explore the implications of making what was previously hidden visible and manipulable to others.

Keywords

Automation boundaries domestic smartification haunting home media security smart home surveillance uncanny visibility

Introduction

Smart home devices, security systems and media manifest a longstanding cultural tension between domestic visibility and security. These technologies provide the ability to see into the home from afar, to participate in new forms of mediated creativity and play, and to share these with networked publics. At the same time, they set limits on access to the home and establish new practices of mediated security and surveillance. In this paper, we aim to expose and understand this tension, which we suggest is part of a longer term history of the cultural appropriation of the trope of the home as uncanny, which re-emerges in the reconfiguration of the home as ‘smart’.

The trope of the uninvited non-human home visitor is an old one. The core premise of a home under threat by a supernatural force, or worse, the home itself as a threat, is behind a plethora of written tales and filmic depictions throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. According to John Tibbetts, author of The Gothic Imagination, the haunted house summons and ‘plays on our collective notion of home as a safe space’ (Kurutz, 2012). Bhaba (1997) reminds us that the experience of the home as uncanny or unhomely is as much about the dislocation of home as a result of historical migrations and cultural relocations as it is about intrusions into the home as an enclosed site of domestic life. During the COVID-19 pandemic new kinds of domestic dislocations came to the fore as people came to spend the majority of their time in the home, which was simultaneously the site of everyday activity, work and leisure.

We locate this tension between visibility and security of the home within two distinctive processes of smartification in our broader project of mapping the construction of the smart home (Chesher and Humphry, 2019). The first process we refer to as ludics – the playful and welcome crossings over the threshold of domestic space – a process integral to the application of a wide array of responsive networked technologies in the smart home using video conferencing software, networked games, smart toys, video sharing apps and voice assistants. The second process relates to exteriorities – the use of technologies and practices to protect the boundaries of the home and distinguish legitimate from illegitimate actors and actions, such as remotely commanded or automated door and window alarms, motion detectors and cameras. The concepts of ‘the uncanny’ and the related notion of ‘haunting’, are examined to develop our understanding of the role of smart technologies of automation in producing the simultaneously pleasurable and dangerous experiences of domestic boundary transgressions.

In examining these processes, we make a contribution to the literature on the smart home, highlighting its connection to longer trajectories of media and cultural change. We also make a contribution to understanding the contemporary formations of technologised spectacle and surveillance, with attention to the media practices that have converged in and around the home in response to COVID-19. In our analysis of the implications of these changes for the transformation of home and its meanings, we make cross-cultural connections in recognition of home as a multifarious, complex, dynamic and culturally specific concept (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Mallett, 2004; Saunders and Williams, 1988). Methodologically we have adopted a cultural history (Burke, 2008) and cultural analysis approach (Bennett and Frowe, 2008). We treat smart home technologies as material culture that can be examined alongside their documentation, advertising and representations in popular culture. Most of our research was carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we have incorporated some more recent research undertaken between March 2020 and February 2021 to support our analysis of the impact of this event on the construction and experience of the smart home. We situate our approach within key literature on the smart home, with particular reference to research on networked media and regimes of visibility, surveillance scholarship, and ideas of the uncanny and hauntings. We introduce our model of domestic smartification, extending existing models of media domestication (Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone et al., 1992), and explain what is significant about a processual account of the smart home through a media lens. In the remaining article, we focus on the two key processes of domestic smartification – ludics and exteriorities – and incorporate examples that engage with changes to the dynamics of the smart home during COVID-19.

The boundaries of home and domestic visibility

Ideas about the home are often universalised, reflecting histories that are evident in ‘broadly white Western conceptions of home’ (Mallett, 2004). However, configurations of homes are always culturally specific. In legal terms in Australia, a property is defined by a property line, established by a professional surveyor and documented in land titles registries. But this line is associated with other meanings, as it marks the threshold of the inside and the outside. On the inside are the private domains of the household, with associations of family, reproduction and security. On the outside are the neighbouring private and public space. Tort and criminal law in Australia dictate that anyone who encroaches on private property becomes a trespasser as soon as they are asked to leave (State Library of New South Wales, 2020). Such laws are supported by non-human actors that block entry, such as walls and fences, and those that regulate entry, such as lockable windows and doors, as well as social conventions, police and neighbours.

The dominant Australian model of the home is grounded in a Western property system that displaced and dispossessed Indigenous Australian relationships to land and home (Crabtree, 2013). As Morphy (2007) argues, categories used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics do not accommodate Indigenous systems of kinship and dwelling, which diverge from the dominant Western model. Saunders and Williams (1988) argue that the contemporary Anglo Saxon home has been subject to multiple imperatives towards privacy, privatism and privatisation. First, with the values of privacy there is a growing belief that the home should be free of state surveillance and external influence, they argue. Second, there has been an increasing orientation towards privatism – home-centredness and withdrawal from the surrounding community. Third, they point out that there are tendencies towards privatisation, with previously collective practices subject to private consumption, such as policing, public transport, healthcare, entertainment, and streetscaping.

However, the boundary between inside and outside has always been permeable. The home has been conditionally open to face-to-face entry of outsiders such as guests, salespeople, government officials and police with search warrants. Derrida argues that the principle of hospitality, opening the home to others, is customary in most cultures, but is always qualified by mechanisms of border control and closure (Derrida 2005: 6). From the 1800s in the global north, what are now traditional media such as newspapers, radio, television, and particularly the telephone, brought the outside into the home. For the most part, householders came to embrace personal communication and commercial and government media for entertainment and information. The take-up of the telephone in different countries was accompanied by feelings of being intruded upon, ‘leading to a massive inflation of social availability, and a sense of never being alone’ (Rymarczuk, 2016: 40). In each medium, it took some time to negotiate the norms and institutions that gave conditional access to the private sphere. From making a phone call to the regulation and classification of media, there have been rituals, protocols and permissions that developed in recognition that the threshold to the private domain was being crossed.

Definitions of the home across cultures typically involve parallel negotiations over divisions between public and private. Ronald (2009) argues that in industrially modernised Japan, transformations in domestic space and meanings of home ‘both mirror and contrast...those found in Western countries’ (p. 559). The Japanese word for the physical house is the same as that for family. Family is understood as composed of succeeding generations rather than as a nuclear unit in the present; thus the home plays a vital role in preserving the continuity of the family defined in terms of ‘the eternal home’ (Ronald, 2009: 558). In the context of population decline and mass urbanisation, with younger generations relocating to city centres, this has given rise to a phenomenon known as akiya or ‘ghost homes’ where rural homes across Japan are left vacant and unoccupied without being sold or tenanted. In 2018, 13.7% of all properties in Japan were registered as ‘akiya’, with countryside villages especially impacted to the extent that their existence is threatened (Shibata, 2019).

The boundary between the home’s inside and outside (in Japan known as the ‘uchi-soto’ axis [Ronald, 2009]) is similarly socially and culturally shaped, influenced by technological as well as economic trends. As we have argued, the inverse of the desire to restrict access to the inside of the home is a conditional willingness to open up interiors to the outside. A fascination in representing and imagining the interiors of homes is apparent in Western European culture at least since the Renaissance. Aynsley and Grant (2006) argue that media representations of domestic culture emerged in Europe between 1400 and 1750. The interior was more clearly defined from 1650 to 1900, when images of domestic spaces became increasingly ubiquitous. In the 17th century, more than five million Dutch paintings of domestic interiors were produced (Aynsley and Grant 2006). The growth of newspapers saw domestic imagery in mass production. In the early 20th century, flash photography exposed the interiors of homes, most famously in the ‘muck-raking’ images of Jacob Ries that exposed the lives of the underclass, provoking activism that led to social reforms (Alland, 1993).

Cinema and television exposed or simulated interiors even more explicitly, from the glamorous to the mundane and in genres from social realism to documentaries and sitcoms. The popularity of TV programs such as the UK reality television series Grand Designs, in which privileged families battle to build their dream home, is indicative of the circulation of desire and the expression of taste in exposing property interiors. Selling homes on property websites involves increasingly elaborate media campaigns, featuring videos with high production values and even drone shots and immersive virtual reality experiences. Vendors make significant efforts to display their home in its best light, renting furniture and staging the property with designer touches. Real estate websites have become popular as a form of entertainment in themselves, even for those with no intention or capacity to buy – a practice known as ‘property porn’ (Botterill, 2013).The attraction of inspecting actual real estate without an intention to buy is partly because the home is opened up and exposed for sale.

Users of the early domestic internet often welcomed crossing the thresholds of domestic space. An early example of internet-mediated domestic visibility was the cam-girls phenomenon between 1998 and 2003, when young women such as Jennifer Ringley and Teri Senft installed webcams in their private spaces and opened the images to the public. Where home is usually a space of being ‘backstage’, these arrangements brought women onto a public stage with consciousness of self-presentation and the risks of self-disclosure (Senft, 2008). Technology also served to create its own backstage areas in domestic settings. In a Japanese context, the uptake of the mobile phone by young people in the 1990s, especially teenage girls, helped to create new kinds of private spaces that were not possible within their highly regulated home and school lives, thus transforming and opening up the spatial boundaries of the home, making it ‘highly porous to discretionary communication’ (Ito, 2005:138).

In the 2010s, YouTubers and social media influencers began producing short videos and images that opened their everyday experiences, including those inside the home, in some cases to very large audiences. Using regular posts of video set pieces, YouTubers exposed their consumption practices and everyday lives in bedrooms, lounge rooms, kitchens and throughout the house. Unlike traditional cinematic celebrities, whose private lives were only revealed in very staged ways, YouTube microcelebrities and ‘Instafamous’ influencers provided more intimate and regular access to the private sphere which Jerslev (2016) argues helps to establish and maintain their status as authentic and accessible.

In these selective examples, the enhanced domestic visibility enabled by new kinds of media does so through a process of opening up, and recalibration, of the home’s boundaries, which is in turn, connected to how societies are spatially defined and delineated at different scales. As Morley explains, ‘one of the central functions of communication systems is to articulate different spaces (the public and the private, the national and the international), and, necessarily, in doing so, to transgress boundaries’ (2000: 87). In the COVID-19 era, rules and practices in relation to the boundary of the home were intensified, as the outside came to represent risk of infection, while the inside represented sanctuary and a point of connection beyond the home, but also confinement during periods of lockdown or self-isolation.

Domestic smartification

Smart home technologies are globally distributed mass-produced commodities that incorporate dominant conceptions of their users and the domestic spaces they inhabit (Seberger, 2021). These systems emerge in the context of longer standing patterns in defining the private and public spheres mediated by media and communication technologies. An important contribution to our understanding of home as a mediated interface between social spheres derives from media domestication studies. These studies started with an examination of the role and meaning of television in the domestic space in the 1990s and were later applied to computers and the internet (Lally, 2020; Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone et al., 1992; Silverstone and Haddon, 1996).

The theory of domestication explains the way that adoption of media into the household is an interactive and dynamic process, countering ideas about the passive process of technological diffusion to the masses. In this theory, meanings and uses of technology are not fixed but are negotiated and constructed over time, with synergies to theories such as Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) (Pinch and Bijker, 1984) and the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) (Williams and Edge, 1996). The domestication model originally proposed by Silverstone et al. (1992) consisted of four stages that took place over a period of time from when a technology is acquired and brought into the home (appropriation), to the integration of the technology into the space, aesthetics, practices and routines of the home (objectification), to the incorporation of the technology into the users’ sense of self and domestic context and finally, the migration or conversion of household practices to other people and groups, influencing the use and innovation of that product.

The model has been applied to new kinds of digital technologies in and beyond the home (Berker et al., 2006). For example, it has been used to examine smart toys (Brito et al., 2018), smartphones (De Reuver et al., 2016), social media (Matassi et al., 2019) and mobile media (Hartmann, 2013). The model has also been complemented with new concepts such as ‘polymedia’, ‘dis-domestication’, ‘de-familiarization’ and ‘mediated mobilism’ (Hartmann, 2013; Madianou and Miller, 2013). Extra stages have been incorporated, for example, the stage prior to the introduction of technologies in the home, known as ‘pre-domestication’ (Saariketo, 2018; Silverstone and Haddon, 1996).

The model of domestic smartification we have proposed extends upon these theories of domestication. As with media domestication, domestic smartification involves the process of bringing things home, crossing and negotiating a variety of physical and social boundaries such as public/private, formal/informal, inside/outside, and leisure/work. Rather than a process tied to the life cycle of a technology (starting from the point of entry into a household or person’s life), we see domestic smartification as a longer term set of processes involving the hypermediation of the home’s territories and times, which can be studied historically and empirically, as well as cross-culturally. We recognise that there are many social actors involved in shaping the smart home, and although householders are highly significant in this process, designers, manufacturers, advertisers, films, literature and other popular culture discourses also perform determining roles.

We identify four processes at play in domestic smartification. These are: ludics, which describes the transformation of routines, spaces and boundaries for play and entertainment; exteriorities which is the use of technologies and practices to protect the boundaries of the home (we have also referred to this as securities); automation, which describes the use of technological systems to eliminate human agency and command, in which agency is enhanced by putting devices in the home on call, summoning an event or changed condition. In this paper, we focus primarily on ludics and exteriorities because of the ways that these two processes reveal the dynamic of visibility and security which has been subject to transformation over the long history of mediated technologies for the home.

Central to our model of domestic smartification is the concept of ‘the uncanny’ and the related notion of ‘haunting’, both integral to definitions of the home across cultures and contexts. From Freud, we know that uncanniness is at the core of definitions of the home. In his famous essay The Uncanny, he explains how the German word heimlich, or homely in English, contains the opposing meanings of familiar, intimate and pleasant as well as secret and dangerous (van Alphen, 1991). For Buse and Stott (1999: 9), ‘the familiar and the secure is always haunted by the strange and unfamiliar, while the unfamiliar often has a troubling familiarity about it’. In developing his sociology of hauntings, Gordon (2008) draws attention to the way that hauntings function not just to signal an absence but to produce new kinds of realities in the present. Hauntings, spectres and ghosts have been used as key analytical tools in writings such as Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx, and even bringing about a ‘spectral turn’ in cultural criticism in the 1990s (Blanco and Peeren, 2013). Surveillance technologies, of watching and monitoring, and the physical/material mediums that support these acts are closely associated with hauntings and feelings of the uncanny. According to Blanco and Peeren (2013: 2), spectrality ‘evoke[s] an etymological link to visibility and vision to that which is both looked at (as fascinating spectacle) and looking (in the sense of examining)’.

In our model, the uncanny and hauntings are affects invoked through the hypermediation of the home’s borders and interiorities, with the promise of buttressing or transgressing regimes of visibility and security. Making visible that which should not be seen (the repressed) is the basis of this ever-present doubling potential. This is what we call uncanny exteriorities, where that which may have previously been hidden from the outside is made visible and manipulable, to others. The converse of uncanny exteriorities are interior hauntings, where the presence of the other asserts itself in the space of the home. Like uncanny exteriorities, interior hauntings can be technological as well as social, and are closely associated with acts of surveillance and spectacle. They are manifest in a variety of media spaces, examples of which we include in our more detailed examination in the following two sections on the ludics and securities of the smart home.

Ludics in the smart home

While many definitions of the smart home have stressed its use for promoting more efficient management and integration of technology (Reinisch et al., 2011), environmental sustainability (Gabriel and Watson, 2013), and healthcare (Orwat et al., 2008), entertainment is of growing interest to the smart home industry. This section deals with the ludic aspects of the smart home and also explores these in the context of COVID-19, while the following section moves on to address the process of securing exteriorities through new kinds of smart technologies for the home. Ludic elements are being built into smart appliances and applications and are also enhanced through user domestication. There is a strong playful element in the ability to turn the smart lights in the living room into disco or halloween mode, or start up the home theatre with a voice command. Children’s toys and practices of play are a big part of the smart home industry and focus of product development, intersecting with a range of innovation fields including robotics, the internet of things and sensing technologies (Berriman and Mascheroni, 2019). Central to these experiences of entertainment is the use of smart features such as sensing technologies and connectivity to transform the home through purposeful or serendipitous crossings of carefully governed borders within the home (such as between work and play) and beyond the home (such as between inside and outside).

Smart voice assistants

The Google Assistant gives cheeky answers, tells jokes and hosts a quiz show. Amazon Alexa is programmed with a large suite of jokes and easter eggs. Ask Alexa: ‘Tell me a funny joke!’, and the device will respond with one of its innumerable scripted jokes. Stumble across an ‘easter egg’ by asking Alexa a question on a myriad of popular topics ranging from Game of Thrones to pet ownership. When you ask Alexa if she has a pet, she answers: ‘I don’t have any pets. I used to have a few bugs but they kept getting squashed.’ Incorporating a sense of humour into digital assistants is part of a larger design strategy of establishing a ‘persona’ (Nielsen, 2013) that is both comfortable and comforting in the home. Responses operate within narrow limits to avoid political or contentious topics and responses. When we asked Alexa who she voted for, she replied: ‘Quite frankly, I don’t think bots should influence elections’.

This programming is nevertheless haunted by the possibility of transgression or subversion of its narrowly defined scripted parameters. Alexa has been known to laugh creepily at random times (Chokshi, 2018), and to exceed her programmed role as a loyal helper. The potential for danger refers to both real and imagined possibilities of transgression, keying off a history of malevolent, menacing and monstrous robot voices in popular films and literature as we have argued elsewhere (Humphry and Chesher, 2020). Smart voice assistants bring a particularly gendered form of performance into the home, which is programmed rather than recorded. Strengers and Nicholls make the point that smart homes more broadly are gendered in the way that they extend traditionally masculine activities often associated with tinkering practices and digital housekeeping into the domestic space of the home (Strengers and Nicholls, 2018).

Smart toys

Smart toys are big business, with the market expected to grow globally from around US$8000 million in 2019 to US$25,000 million in 2025 (Valuates Reports, 2020). Even Barbie now has a US$300 smart home. The Barbie Hello Dreamhouse can be voice controlled with over a hundred commands. Saying ‘Hello Dreamhouse: let’s have a dance party!’ will turn the house into party mode: the lights flash, music plays, and the stairs convert into a slide. Programmable smart robotic toys such as Sphero and Cozmo move around the home autonomously or by remote control within a designated wireless field. These devices can playfully transform the space of the home defining a ‘magic circle’ (Huizinga, 1949) of influence within a range of sensors and controlled devices.

Because they are networked, smart toys also operate within larger informational fields, enabling interactions and data exchanges beyond the home. Hello Barbie’s smart functionalities of being able to activate a two-way conversation are supported not only by a built in microphone and speaker but also by speech recognition technology and 8000 lines of scripted responses accessed wirelessly through a cloud service (Mertala, 2020). Other playful and nerdy applications are made possible through cloud services such as IFTTT (If This Then That) that integrate home automation devices and other cloud services through applets. Some of these include flashing smart lights when the international space station passes overhead, or playing music from Star Wars when wearers of the Star Wars Forceband toy move their arms.

Indeed, as Berriman and Mascheroni (2019) argue, more than standalone material objects, smart toys operate as part of larger media ecologies that blend toys, media and advertising. Thus, while they may appear to be being played with privately, and even support one-to-one forms of more familiar tangible play (Mertala, 2020), these playful interactions are part of a larger data network or ‘smart home assemblage’ (Maalsen, 2020) in which multiple actors, both human and non-human, are literally at play.

New protocols such as Amazon’s Sidewalk, which are extending wireless data connectivity beyond Bluetooth or WiFi range and into the surrounding streets, are establishing smart home assemblages at the scale of the suburb (Crist, 2020). Networked activities that were once limited to the wireless range within the home can take place in the front and backyard, or surrounding sidewalks and streets. Recognising the radical potential of creating its own proprietary network with its devices regardless of which house they belong to, Amazon claims to be moving towards creating ‘smart neighbourhoods’. In these domains, neighbours might preserve their personal sense of privacy through regular boundary-making routines and technologies equivalent to curtains, blinds and fences, but the private corporate networks formed from smart bridging devices bleed across these bounds, further complicating the already porous public/private spaces around the home.

All of these examples of new kinds of ludic encounters and experiences enable various kinds of boundary crossings that expand access to the home (and its surrounding spaces), and make visible the actions and activities of the home to others outside.

Ludics during the COVID-19 lockdowns

During the COVID-19 pandemic home life, social life and work life came to be mediated with internet technologies, accelerating many of the dynamics of hypermediated domestic visibility. Zoom video conferencing software mediated not only work meetings, but also dinners and musical performances. New rituals of setting Zoom virtual backgrounds to hide the visible signs of domestic life were created (Rayome, 2020), inviting playful comments and ironic reflections on life in lockdown, while also (re)marking the threshold between inside and outside domains. Social tools within multi-user games, such as voice chat established live audiovisual connections with others who were also isolated in their homes (Todd, 2020). Open world video games with rich landscapes and scenery, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2, became a substitute for travel during lockdown (Hazel, 2020).

TikTok attracted young people to show their talents such as dance moves, lip synching and pranks in short videos for a global audience, often captured in domestic spaces. These are only a few examples of the ludic negotiations using digital media during the pandemic, which were used intentionally to playfully transgress the home’s boundaries while keeping the outside at bay.

Exteriorities

Therefore, the delight in the exposure of domestic life to the outside world is constantly challenged by visceral anxieties about the risks of such exposure and the need to affirm the boundedness of the home. Digital technologies themselves are increasingly enrolled in enforcing these boundaries. In fact, for all their playfulness, the most popular and longstanding smart home platform is home security. A Gartner survey found that alarm systems were nearly twice as likely to be installed than other connected home applications, such as home monitoring, automation and health (Gartner, 2017). Alarm systems typically feature sensors such as door and window alarms, motion detectors and cameras to sense breaches of exterior boundaries, or the presence of intruders within the home.

Monitoring, hacking and tracking

Beyond their instrumental effectiveness, these technologies of security are succours for the anxiety of householders about the integrity of their home, property and even sense of self. Any sense of a violation of the home generates unease, or even ontological crisis (Giddens, 1991). The home performs both symbolically and materially as an extension of the self (Marcus, 2006). Unsurprisingly, Mennicken et al. (2014) found that securing ‘peace of mind’ is a major driver for installing home automation. When people are away from their home, they can rely on alarms, and can even monitor the domestic space using their smartphones. When householders are at home, panic buttons can be connected to a private security instant response service, a narrative that is taken to its horrific extreme in the 2002 Hollywood film, The Panic Room, starring Jodi Foster.

Paradoxically, though, some of the very technologies designed to make the home connected and secure make it open to government, criminal and corporate intrusions. The home has never been more exposed. Around the world there is significant government monitoring of domestic activities. With mandatory data retention in Australia, all the online activities of the population are monitored, with anti-terrorism as the justification. This is to say nothing about the secret activities of intelligence services. The sheer scale and scope of NSA snooping on the everyday lives of people made possible by ubiquitous networking was documented in the Snowden revelations (Greenwald, 2014).

The risk of criminal hacking is particularly prevalent in smart home automation systems rushed to market without adequate security features (Meola, 2016). Criminal hackers can surreptitiously turn connected security cameras into surveillance systems. One news story on YouTube features a couple who had the uncanny experience of hearing a voice in their home trying to command their home automation system (Woodruff, 2017). Someone had accessed their interior security webcam, and was watching and listening to them. When the resident tried to command Alexa to turn on the light, the virtual intruder said ‘No, Alexa, turn off the light’. Luckily the intruder was not hostile, and warned the couple that they really should put a password on their device.

Even more commonplace is that many everyday activities of internet users are transparent to corporate monitoring; privacy is traded away in acceptance of terms of service for the sake of staying connected. The corporate practices that Zuboff (2019) refers to as surveillance capitalism involve monitoring people’s social media use, extracting the behavioural surplus from their everyday online activities to offer tailored advertising. Amazon, Google and Facebook build highly tailored profiles of their consumers, giving rise to the uncanny sense that targeted advertising is anticipating our desires almost before we are even aware of them (Schwartz, 2018). The conversational features of smart dolls has led to calls for more scrutiny of products that depend on ‘listening’ into children’s play talk, leading to legal responses. In Germany, regulators banned the My Friend Cayla doll, classifying it as a ‘hidden espionage device’ and urging parents who had purchased one to destroy it (Collins, 2017).

Smart home technologies also support the extension of work and its monitoring into the home. There is a large body of literature that addresses the role of computer networked technologies in the intensification of work and collapse of work-life boundaries (Crowe and Middleton, 2012; Green, 2003). Researchers of labour processes at the height of the office automation movement in the 1980s identified the dynamic of visible versus invisible labour as central in the design of computer technologies (Suchman, 1995; Star and Strauss, 1999). As networked computers and smartphones enabled work to be further extended into the home, the visibility of paid work in the home is subject to new potentialities of workplace surveillance while also becoming a site of contention and competition with more ‘invisible’ forms of domestic work.

Smart metering

Another controversial kind of intrusion is the smart meter, which is owned and operated by utility companies to digitally monitor the usage of electricity, water or gas and send this information wirelessly to company headquarters. Consumer advocates and activists have publicly resisted the installation of such meters, arguing that such devices are physically and informationally invasive of the private sphere (Strengers, 2013); while others have tried to repackage these devices for personal use (Bogost, 2016). Some believe that the electromagnetic wireless signals are hazardous to the health of residents (Strengers, 2013). Others object to allowing companies to gather detailed information about their energy use, as it is possible to identify the ‘appliance load signatures’ to reveal clues about the nature of everyday domestic activities (Hess, 2014). For example, the distinctive patterns of electricity use by fridges are different from those of kettles or televisions. These data streams may be hacked by malicious actors who could use the information to detect when householders are not at home.

Biosecuritisation

The visceral anxieties around threats external to the home were accentuated in the era of COVID-19, and addressed through hygiene practices at the threshold of the home such as wearing masks, maintaining distance and hand-washing. Securitisation once carried out within the home as a private sphere was extended to the public realm as well – a form of ubiquitous biosecuritisation (Foucault, 2007). Like in a zombie film, anyone could be a biological threat, even inside the home, triggering anxieties particularly for essential workers who were at higher risk of bringing the virus home (Shanafelt et al., 2020). Meanwhile, the networked technologies that seemed to be safe were also subject to intrusion by Zoom bombers, social media hackers, cyberbullies and phishers, undermining the digital as a space for ludic sociality and experimentation.

As Maalsen and Dowling (2020) have shown, techniques of ubiquitous biosecuritisation placed conditions upon the ability to leave home. So, for example, restaurants and cafés in some places were required to register the contact details of patrons using QR codes as part of large-scale contact tracing efforts. Populations were encouraged or coerced into installing government contact tracing apps on their phones that detect connections to other devices. Social distancing and masks were made mandatory non-digital measures of biosafety when travelling outside the home.

Smart domestic technologies played into the tendency towards increased visibility and security by establishing controlled, private, comfortable and entertaining interior spaces, and displacing collective practices of consumption or entertainment in public space. At the same time, the global pandemic brought to the fore how negotiation of the boundaries of the home and the public sphere were not only private matters. They have consequences for others, and are subject to manipulation and reconstruction by a range of actors, events and political contexts.

Histories of control, hauntings and smart automation

An implicit assumption in the home automation discourse, also known as domotics, is that the industrial era home is ‘dumb’ and ‘out of control’. It is fragmented and opaque. It uses too many resources. It is insecure. The control revolution, outlined by Beniger (1986), is premised on delivering a technological solution to the crisis of control brought by industrialisation. So too with the first generation of home automation, which brought us such wonders as kettles, toasters, vacuums and washing machines. Automation imposed a logical frame over the space and time of the home in a technocratic vision that saw the home and the family as a site that could be better engineered through new technologies. Yet, as feminist scholars of work and technology demonstrated, the automated home engineered in new technologies did not eradicate domestic labour, but left many disparities intact. Women still performed the majority of the labour in the home but were ‘disenfranchised from the development of the domestic technology they use(d)’ (Aldrich, 2003:18).

What’s different about the smart home? Technocratic logic still applies, as in previous home automation movements, but advocates of smart automation now envision the labour of the home, including its security, will be taken care of automatically by digital means. Smart home automation amplifies the tensions between the ludics and exteriorities of the home. How do you keep a safe space of exploration? How do you maintain oversight of doors and locks now that their security is embedded in software? Many of the logical and physical tasks of securitisation are delegated into digital infrastructures and software. However, users are expected to constantly configure and regulate their settings. Many of these tasks involve managing automated decision making, employing new digital skills and often taking on more labour. As found by Strengers et al. (2019: 6) in their study of early adopters of smart homes in Australian households, the gains and losses of control from smart automation results in feelings of ambivalence:

Households derived considerable pleasure from using smart devices and living in a smart home, although these were often partially offset by the frustrations and complexities involved in learning to use and maintain smart home technologies.

At the heart of this smartified vision is the ability to remotely monitor and control the home and its boundaries, regardless of the location of the inhabitants and to potentially make these interiorities visible to the outside (in other words, to translate interiorities into exteriorities). These processes are illustrated well in a promotional video for a smart home system Inside Xfinity Home (VoxCreative, 2014). The video profiles an imaginary family’s home automation system that controls internal temperatures, locks doors, turns on lights, arm/disarms internal sensors and films the movements of its inhabitants through multiple wall-mounted and embedded cameras. It shows these systems managed via a single mobile app used by the household’s parents in and out of the home while the kids are able to access more limited features via the smart television and TV remote. For those with programmed authority, the home seems to be rendered visible and controllable by its mobile software interface providing access to the home’s inner workings from anywhere and at any time.

Householders might gain an enhanced sense of empowerment through increased domestic visibility and control over the technologies and borders of the home. The video dramatises the affective charge supposedly associated with having embodied and remote command over the home through voice, gestures and handheld devices. Nevertheless, delegating agency to technologies of the smart home is necessarily a loss of some control and a surrendering to that agency. The home itself becomes like a life form, animated by smart gadgets and intelligent systems. Non-human actors associated with the home work in concert with humans, and at other times function autonomously, taking on a degree of active, differentiated agency. Where the walls, windows, taps, lights, insulation and so on have relatively simple affordances, smart home technologies articulate events with greater complexity. As agents, they move beyond conventional artefacts that operate according to background relations and adopt what the post-phenomenologist, Don Ihde described as alterity relations (1990). However, as it is most often men who install and manage smart home technologies, it is they who are positioned as in control, while other householders may in fact experience lack of control of their home: a situation that has even been implicated in the practice of technologically-mediated domestic violence (Bowles, 2018).

Smart home automation is thus haunted by the potential that the home becomes an ‘other’, an uncanny or unheimlich space, in Freud’s terms. Just as it is deeply unsettling to lose your keys or wallet, it is disturbing to have your banking or social media accounts hacked. Each triggers feelings of anxiety that are just under the surface of everyday operation and routines. Making visible that which should not be seen (the repressed) is the basis of this ever-present doubling potential. Smart technologies can in fact amplify the unheimlich qualities of homes through their hypermediation of borders and interiorities, with the promise of either buttressing or transgressing the accepted regimes of visibility and control.

Connections between modern communication technologies and the spiritual world have been found since at least the telegraph, and are ever-present in the term ‘medium’. In 1844, Samuel Morse demonstrated that the telegraph made possible communication with living people who were not physically present. In the context of this marvellous development, the notion that similar technologies might allow communication with the dead seemed quite credible (Sconce, 2000). Only 4 years after Morse’s demonstration of the telegraph, members of the Fox family in Hydesville, New York claimed to be able to communicate with the spiritual world through exchanges of knockings and rappings within their home. The family were able to ask questions, and the house would respond – one knock for yes, and two for no (Waters, 1997). Emerging from this, the spiritualism movement attracted a large number of believers in Europe and the US during the late 19th century, paralleling the emergence of new media technologies. Spiritualists saw invisible phenomena such as magnetism and electricity in metaphysical terms and embraced a range of machines such as mechanical displays, magic lanterns, automata and spirit photography that blurred the boundary between the technical and the mystical (Gutierraz, 2009).

Today’s smart homes are haunted by disappearing pasts, in the old media that lie around gathering dust – memories frozen in discs, albums and old computers that no longer function. Newer smart devices are simultaneously present and absent. Smart devices are designed to make invisible the extensive apparatus and boundary crossings needed to support their operations. The design choice in the voice assistant of a loyal female helper, for instance, is as much about assuaging anxieties associated with its surveillant potential as it is about seeming to address the so-called ‘wife drought’ – the experience of dual income families lacking a dedicated person to manage the household, traditionally the role of the female ‘wife’ (Crabb, 2014; Strengers and Kennedy, 2020). When the infrastructures and people behind feminised devices are exposed, the uncanny effect is akin to revealing the tricks of illusion and sleight of hand behind the magician’s magical acts or the manual moves of the person hiding inside the Hungarian Mechanical Turk, an apparently autonomous chess-playing machine constructed in the 18th century.

The voice of the digital assistant is a contemporary manifestation of a type of haunting presence of another person(ality) in the home. Programmed events like regular timers, shopping orders and reading the news performed by a disembodied voice are suggestive of a kind of magical automation, but much like the Mechanical Turk, this is haunted by a type of forgetting of its material existence which uses up resources, labour and time. Thus, while automation is mostly thought of in instrumental terms to refer to a machine doing a sequence of work tasks without human involvement, it is also referred to and experienced as a ‘force’. Nicholas Carr, reflecting on the excitement of automation’s potential the decade after Ford revolutionised car manufacturing, observed that automation was seen as more ‘a manifestation of progress than a particular mode of operation’ (2014: 35). We identify another meaning of automation which applies particularly to smart homes and is experienced in terms of hauntings: the redistribution of activities (e.g. of play and security) in relation to the home’s boundaries to digitally networked technologies, and by extension, to those who have access to and mastery over these (either inside the household or outside agents with remote control).

Smart homes and surveillance

What can we learn about practices and models of contemporary surveillance from the uncanny exteriorities and interior hauntings of the smart home? Traditional concepts of surveillance have been applied to understanding visibility by the state in public spaces, and its intrusion into the home. The image of Orwell’s Big Brother, famously used by Apple to promote its alternate vision of the future in the launch of Apple Macintosh, is returning in contemporary technoculture. Since the 1980s, concerns about surveillance have shifted onto its digital forms in everyday life (Lyon 2017). These technologies facilitate not only mass surveillance but also modulated control through networks (Deleuze, 1992).

Bucher (2012) in her study of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms reworks Foucault’s model of surveillance to explain social media platforms in terms of software architectures that modulate visibility. In her argument, as social connections become measurable and manipulable, visibility becomes desirable and valuable. Other surveillance scholars have similarly tried to explain the changes to models of surveillance in a digitally networked society. Albrechtslund (2008) has proposed the term ‘participatory surveillance’ against Andrejevic’s (2005) more pessimistic ‘lateral surveillance’ to capture the mutual benefits of sharing and co-creating our identities online. While there’s been some very productive reconceptualisation of surveillance in digital cultures there is little attention to surveillance of and in the home and that account for the doubling potential of seeing and being seen. Our model of domestic smartification identifies this dynamic as central in the production of new modalities of surveillance, which we elaborate with reference to the history of domestic media and the ongoing mediation of the physical and symbolic boundaries of the home. We have proposed two concepts – uncanny exteriorities and interior hauntings – to describe the affective charges associated with the translations made by smart devices, media and security systems in relation to the home’s boundaries and regimes of visibility and security.

The tensions between being connected and being exposed are experienced strongly in the family. Threats to the integrity of the home do not necessarily come from outside, as tragically illustrated in the massive increase in domestic violence during the home lockdown measures due to COVID-19 (Kofman and Garfin, 2020). As mentioned earlier, control over home monitoring and automation tends to reflect power dynamics within the home as there is often one ‘guru’ who manages the home automation system (Takayama et al., 2012). Home monitoring can be used for the surreptitious observation of babysitters, cleaners and other domestic workers, as well as members of the family. Within families, access to the administrator privileges of surveillance systems can reinforce differential power relations, potentially subjecting some household members to non-consensual monitoring, scrutiny and control. The assistant functions as both a companion and a surveillance technology that serves corporate interests as much as it fulfils users’ desires. A practice that Andrejevic (2005: 479) refers to as ‘lateral surveillance’ sees householders adopting and internalising the logic of institutional surveillance. Through partnerships between police, households and Amazon Ring technologies, domestic surveillance extends beyond the home to potentially include entire neighbourhoods, expanding already existing racialised policing practices (Egger, 2020). On the other hand, police are using location-based technology to enforce legal protections by the courts by tracking the location of people with domestic violence orders against them, alerting authorities if they come within a certain distance of their estranged partner (Erez and Ibarra, 2006).

The smart home is increasingly subject to surveillance and coercion as it becomes a site of work. Media representations of technology in the home, such as images of women at home successfully juggling work with parenting duties, normalise imperatives of ‘constant connectivity’ and aspirations that women can ‘have it all’ without any change to gendered labour relations (Gregg, 2013). Smartphones and other digital platforms used for work provide new means for organisations to remotely surveil workers at home, monitoring their performance through a range of metrics, including how quickly they respond to emails. At the same time, there are unexpected pleasures associated with the mixing up of work and home, publicity and intimacy. One professional in a study (Humphry, 2014) carried out by one of us on smartphones for work explained the peculiar relish of carrying out teleconferences in her pyjamas. Thus, as well as maintaining and transforming the environment of the home, smart home systems can support domestic routines and manage transitions across life boundaries (Nippert-Eng, 2008).

Conclusion

In our account of the construction of the smart home, which we see as a longer term set of processes involving the hypermediation of the home’s territories and times, we have found that there is no single logic of visibility or of security. Similar technical components are at work in surveillance and in play, control and creativity. Surveillance is multivalent and much of the attraction of smart home technologies is about playing with this recombinatory potential: security systems, smart meters and sensing devices become opportunities for media production and boundary transgressions. Smart media operate with centrifugal and centripetal forces that facilitate flows of people, artefacts and media out of and into the home. At the same time, security apparatuses regulate and block these flows. This provides on the one hand, new potential to rework modes of authority and agency by opening up the home’s interiors to play, public scrutiny and even judgment. On the other hand, a technocratic logic still applies in that automation processes cannot be fully controlled since they produce unanticipated effects and do not necessarily challenge social norms and power relations in domestic life. Command and automation can in fact be forms of disenfranchisement that help impose coercive control over domestic life. We have proposed a model of domestic smartification that addresses the long term processes of media transformation that converge around the paradox of visibility and security. We have argued that the tropes of the uncanny and of hauntings in the home, are expressions of this paradox that have emerged in globalised popular culture, particularly in the reconfiguration of the home as ‘smart’.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Justine Humphry

Author Biographies

Justine Humphry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Justine researches the cultures and politics of smart, mobile and data-driven platforms in everyday life. She has extensively researched mobile communication and homelessness and collaboratively researched mobile apps and antiracism, smart homes and voice assistants, and mobile robots in public space.

Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His recent research has focused on smart technologies in home and urban spaces including the timbre of voice assistants, the politics of smart street furniture, the ethical value of glitchy robots, spatialised mediatisations of real estate promotion, and the cultural anatomy of robots: faces, touch, companionship, eyes, vision and gaze.

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(2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 1st ed. New York: Public Affairs.