Strategies for Reflexive Ethnography in the Smart Home: Autoethnography of Silence and Emotion

TLDR

Smart home technologies promise efficiency and control, yet they reshape domestic relationships and introduce new tensions, making their unspoken presence a key focus for ethnographers. The article investigates how ethnography, particularly autoethnography, can illuminate the lived experience of smart home technologies by exploring the nuanced meanings of silence and emotional dimensions. It draws on ethnography of silence, ethnography of infrastructure, and autoethnography to analyze how these technologies become unspoken aspects of everyday life.

Abstract

Smart technologies in the home promise efficiency and control, but this simplistic story obscures their potential to reconfigure relationships and introduce new tensions into domestic contexts. This article explores ethnography as a method to facilitate sociological analysis of smart technologies in the home and develop a grounded understanding of their role in lived experience. The article assembles insights from ethnography of silence, ethnography of infrastructure and autoethnography. While much sociological commentary stresses the dataveillance capacities of such technologies, for ethnographers it is important to remember that our role is to do justice to members’ understandings whether they relate to dataveillance or not. Ethnographers need to address the common tendency for facilitating technologies of this kind to become unspoken aspects of everyday life. Autoethnography offers a route into exploring the nuanced meaning of the silences that the use of smart technologies entails and engaging with emotional dimensions of their use.