Domesticating the “Smarter Than You” Home. Gendered Agency Scripts Embedded in Smart Home Discourses

Abstract

Smart home networked systems promise a mode of comfort, efficiency and convenience that infers the easing of housekeeping chores. They impact on the moral economy of the home in ways we barely understand. Drawing on feminist technology studies and domestication theory, this article investigates how gendered relations are assigned and legitimated in smart home marketing reports and advertisements to enquire whether men and women are invited to participate equally or unequally in smart home technology. This raises questions about how promotional texts might influence and circumscribe domestic adoption. An interpretive content analysis of marketing reports and advertisements explains the pedagogic role of smart scenarios in coaxing and coaching householders to domesticate IoT-operated technology. The concept of “agency script” is employed to explain how smart actions are conveyed and assigned by promotional texts to activate smart home adoption. This enables an enquiry into the values and ideals conveyed in smart home discourses at the commodification stage of domestication and their implications for later stages. We might assume that smart technology democratises the home by fostering gender equality in the organisation of homemaking routines. But a critical study of the narrativization and assignment of smart home agency reveals significant gender disparities.