SMART SPEAKERS AND DATA RELATIONS IN FAMILIES WITH YOUNG CHILDREN

Abstract

Due to their internet connectivity and intensive data collection about users and their environments, smart speakers extend the datafication of the domestic environment, while contributing to the normalisation of data relations as an integral part of family everyday life. Our study extends the analysis of the domestication of smart speakers into the domestic context, family relations, practices and imaginaries. In particular, we provide theoretical and empirical insights into the study of datafication as a diverse, situated and embodied experience. In order to analyse the emergent and situated relationships (through and with smart speakers), agencies and power structures mobilised in the domestication of smart speakers, we conceptualise families as communicative figurations comprising actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. Drawing on mixed-method data, our findings show that communicative figurations involve a reconfiguration of power and agency relating both to traditional axes (status, class, gender and age) and new forms of power enabled by the progressive colonisation of the domestic environment by data colonialism. We propose and discuss a typification of households along a continuum of positions in family relationships with data between two opposite poles: data-resistants and data-normalisers. Households can negotiate, resist and oppose datafication practices and imaginaries by mobilising various strategies, discourses, meanings and practices. Ultimately, our theoretical approach and typification allow studying how data practices materialise – and are (partially) accepted, negotiated or rejected – as a specific communicative figuration in each family.