Personalization and the Smart Home: questioning techno-hedonist imaginaries

Abstract

Smart home futures predicted and promoted in the discourses and practices of industry increasingly figure forms of automated decision making (ADM) into existing narratives of technological solutionism. This article interrogates how these narratives are constituted, the futures they imagine, predict and promote, and how people and households are presented within these futures. Our discussion is based on a content analysis of technology industry reports. The reports emphasize that the key to business success in the future is to use ADM to instantly satisfy individual preferences and to tailor products and services to the “market of one.” While the role of AI and algorithms in the creation of personalized media—particularly social media feeds—has garnered attention for its role in increasing political divisiveness around the world, less attention has been paid to the consequences of this individualized logic when applied and recreated in the design and installation of automated smart home technology. The technology sector’s emphasis on personalization treats the household as an individual self-motivated decision-making entity, despite the home being a complex socio-material assemblage shaped by constantly negotiated power differentials, such as by age, gender, and species. Thus, the discourse of “personalization” underpinning the imagination of emerging technology for the home and the individualized conception of human behavior which underpins it, lead to significant oversights when situated in the complexity of domestic life. Further we argue that this risks embedding an alienated understanding of human behavior—techno-hedonism—into ADM systems. We discuss how a persona of the techno-hedonist underlies visions of the personalized smart home, and its potential consequences through three interrelated concepts: convenience, control, and choice.