Threat, fixable or opportunity? Contested smart home futures in the German social media debate

Abstract

The idea of the ‘smart home’ envisions futures of a transformed day-to-day life. However, contrary to the glossy visions of the smart home industry, the public discourse in Germany is marked by skepticism due to concerns about data protection, security risks and state surveillance. This paper seeks to illustrate how certain social groups imagine the smart home and how fears and promises related to the digitalized home shape the public social media debate in Germany. We advance the analysis of smart energy futures with a novel methodological approach which combines quantitative network analysis with qualitative discourse analysis. We apply our approach to the online discourse around ‘#smarthome’ on Twitter and related media spaces in Germany in 2018 and 2019, which unveils the contested German smart home imaginaries.We identify five discourse coalitions that constitute shared understandings and perceptions of smart home futures in the social media sphere in Germany: Threat, Hackable, Useless, Fixable and Opportunity. Those discourse coalitions form around specific storylines that reveal partly opposing perspectives and competing ideas on what smart home systems might or should entail for society. Our empirical analyses reveal that in Germany, the envisioned smart home is highly contested and public discourse on social media is dominated by actors who critically interrogate the promises and prospects of smart home futures.