Domesticating Alexa: The Cultural Biography of Virtual Assistants

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

Abstract

This paper looks at domestic virtual assistant technologies (such as Alexa or Google Home) through cultural studies of robotics, artificial intelligence, STS, and interactionist sociology. While dominant popular and market narratives position virtual assistants as the personified cornerstone of the new smart home, our research considers the practical failure of these assistants from an interactionist standpoint. We argue that there is a difference between the critique of virtual assistants in principle (in terms of the extension of surveillance systems and social control), and the critique of virtual assistants in practice (because they are not necessarily used in a way in which an extension of surveillance argument makes sense). In effect the practical domestication of these technologies effectively alters their meaning and significance and so we must look at processes and practices of domestication. Following Igor Kopytoff’s (1986) “The Cultural Biography of Things”, we consider the domestication process of virtual assistants through phases of appropriation and interaction. In accordance with Kopytoff’s formulation, these artifacts move from being fetishized commodities to being more -then less- agential domestic technologies, by becoming individualized through everyday interactions. The cultural biography would highlight the phases of this “singularization” process and trouble the dominant accounts of virtual assistants’ affordances and roles in the household. The project shows that virtual assistants hover in this process between subject and object, human and machine; neither household subjects nor household objects and in so doing raise interesting questions about interaction, agency and object relations in domestic spaces.

Authors

• Ceyda Yolgormez, Concordia University

• Bart Simon, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada