Murray Goulden

University of Nottingham, Horizon Research Institute, Department Member

University of Nottingham, Institute for Science and Society, Department Member

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I'm a sociologist with a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, currently Lecturer at the School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Nottingham. I am conducting a Fellowship on the 'Social Life of the Smart Home', exploring domestic life in the context of Internet of Things technologies, and the political economies they are a part of. My work addresses the role of digital technologies - particularly the Internet of Things - within everyday life: on the changing patterns of life that result, and the implications for governance and design, including in the areas of energy and digital data.

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‘Delete the family’: platform families and the colonisation of the smart home

Information, Communication & Society, 2019

On its surface, the 'smart home' marks an effort to augment everyday domestic life to the benefit... more On its surface, the 'smart home' marks an effort to augment everyday domestic life to the benefit of its members, through the pervasive digital technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Through an analysis of the family-imitating group accounts offered by both Google and Amazon, as part of their smart home ecosystems, this paper identifies a project of constructing a new site for platform capitalism, in the form of the platform family, and its effort to pacify domestic life. The platform family is an engineered simulacra of domesticity, formatted to run on the smart home operating system, serving simultaneously as a vehicle for domestic consumption, and a vehicle for consuming domestic life. Drawing on sociology of the family, we contextualise this by showing how the home has long been a site of struggles between internal and external control. Addressing the reconfiguration of membership possibilities within the platform family, we show how it seeks to intervene in domestic life, by reshaping family's material possibilities and normativities. Looking past the technologies to the social forms they imbue reveals a project that is ultimately motivated by a desire to colonise the home as a site for platform capitalism. We conclude by highlighting the potential for resistance in this space and ask whether the homogenisation of domestic life attempted by these interventions is not fundamentally contradictory, in denying the very qualities that give family its value.

Murray Goulden

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