„From smart speaker to smart home: The project investigates the domestication of data-intensive sensory media in interaction. It explores how 'intelligent' living environments digitally capture households in terms of language, motor skills and sensory perception.“

Executive Summary

Saving energy, eating sustainable and healthy food, managing remote work and family reproduction, care and domestic work, concerns about non-transparency in data utilization and digital surveillance, about consumer and audience manipulation: Private households serve as key examples of the daily practice of meeting contemporary challenges. These are places, moreover, where digital media are perceived and negotiated both as adding to existing problems and as resources for overcoming them. The private household traditionally plays a central role in research on the domestication (Silverstone et al. 1992) of media.

Digital, networked media are increasingly finding their way into households. This represents a correspondingly increasing challenge to the domestication perspective. As already addressed in the second funding phase from a media linguistic and sociological perspective, this is exemplified by smart speakers and the highly selective utilization they typify: Although such media are also embedded in social interaction and everyday practice, those who wish to exploit the functional potential of voice-controlled assistance systems must also adapt to technologized dialog structures and platform logics; in the process, they are forced to divulge a lot of information about themselves – information that may take on new significance beyond the household in the form of data in exploitation contexts that are opaque to users and defy attempts to influence them.

Assistance systems potentially only come into their own as central interfaces to their fullest possible extent in smart home environments. At the same time, however, the household thereby opens itself up to the outside world far more than before: Whereas in the case of conventional smart speakers, our observation was limited to the perceptual dimension of hearing or listening, camera and monitor- and sensor-based systems and their networking with a variety of stationary and mobile devices and infrastructures result, in extreme cases, to a massive expansion of registrable data. Under certain circumstances, this trend is accompanied by a further attack on of the boundaries of the private sphere. This may be perceived as a violation on the one hand (e.g. in the case of surveillance technology being used to monitor members of a household), but may also be seen as desirable (e.g. from the perspective of security) on the other. An empirical question that remains is the extent to which households are open to such technologies and what consequences, if any, arise for them or can be exploited by them. It remains to be seen how the shift from potentially acoustic to a multimodal form of surveillance will be perceived, accounted for, and shaped by the users. Following on from technical-methodological innovations explored in the second phase, this phase will continue to investigate human-technology dialogs and their integration into social interaction. However, it will expand this area to include the reconstruction of sensory orientations and bodily practices (Mondada 2021) as well as the consideration of sensor-based mechanisms and their technical interfaces in smart homes.

It can be assumed that sensory environments not only change spatial arrangements and social coexistence on the communicative level, but that the entanglement of senses and technical sensoria also generates new modes of the co-articulation of data and practices (Marres 2015). Against this background, this study asks to what extent and how users (can) evaluate and take responsibility for their situated media and data practices with regard to the discursive imperatives referred to at the beginning.