Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures - An Ethnological Study of Networked Domestic Technology and Imaginaries of Pervasive Digitalisation

Digital networked technologies are gradually changing domestic life. Internet connected devices link private and intimate spheres of homes to ungraspable technological infrastructures. More and more network connected digital devices are marketed for domestic settings. The aim of this project is to better understand how domestic digitalisation and imaginaries of ungraspable technological infrastructures are related to social relations and cultural meaning-making in a time of rapid technological change. It studies how people interact with, communicate around and imagine interfaces like screens and voice activated home assistants, and how infrastructures become part of corporate brandscapes and are linked to people’s domestic life.
Through ethnological methods of cultural analysis, the project studies people’s everyday experiences of technologies and imaginaries about infrastructures, and how convenience, comfort, control and integrity is negotiated in homes. It also studies how a selection of infrastructural brandscapes are manifested, and how these relate to people’s imaginaries about digitalisation of their everyday life. Empirically it combines home ethnographies with analyses of infrastructural brandscapes, qualitative questionnaires and interviews with people who can elaborate on what has changed during the last 20 years within the digital industries.