Can Your TV Do That?: Surveillance, Smart TVs, and the Value of Privacy

• In Event: Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – I

Abstract

From its inception, television has been discursively and technologically entwined with surveillance. Early discourses of TV as a “window on the world” were often reversed into anxieties that TV could also serve as a “window on the home,” threatening a panoptic disciplinary gaze. The current imbrication of television and Web 2.0 technology, however, presents a different configuration of surveillance, spectatorship, and power. This paper argues that Smart TV technology serves to domesticate surveillance by transforming the relationship between television and its user-spectators. Analyzing advertising and industrial discourse elucidates the central role of television in rewriting the gendered meaning and value of privacy.
Advertisements for Smart TV technologies sell the domestic benefits of television’s surveillant capabilities, which become tools for women to ensure the well-being of the family through constant tracking and control. One commercial depicts anxious parents using their TV to check a live video feed of their sleeping baby. In others, the webcam built into a new Samsung Smart TV allows a little girl to Skype with her grandmother, while a smartphone app empowers a beleaguered mother to control her son’s media consumption remotely. Privacy policies may be legally obliged to disclose more information than commercials, yet they work hard rhetorically to construct a similarly privileged user empowered by her exposure to surveillance. By considering how popular and industrial discourses both engage and obfuscate the political ramifications of surveillance, this paper examines the tension between privacy, interactivity, and control as the values of television technology and its users.

Author

• Cara Nash Dickason, Northwestern University