Smart Home Technologies: Convenience and Control
摘要
The technologies of the smart home are often marketed as offering control, comfort and convenience in our living spaces by extending our control of our environment so that it no longer requires our physical presence beyond our body and physical presence. This control is not without ethical challenges: who gains control, who gets to participate in the design of the smart home and what are the consequences? Using a Foucauldian lens, this chapter looks at privately owned homes and modern co-living solutions in order to consider how smart technologies affect the autonomy of smart home residents. Smart homes can be considered panopticons of convenience through the acceptance of added surveillance for the benefit of perceived or actual convenience in the form of less or lighter domestic labour, which actively disempowers passive smart home residents.