Smart home devices and online platforms with home-related services are changing what it means to be at home. The former removes the friction of ‘being at home’, and the latter ‘commodifies’ our home. While this may detach ourselves from the house itself, the home becomes much more than just a place to live and we are more deeply embedding ourselves in ‘being at home’.
The rise of smart home technologies (smart speakers and TVs, domestic robots, but also platforms like Airbnb) are changing our relationship to our home. On the surface, these technologies seem to distance us from our homes by transforming them into neutral objects, commodities or ‘houses’: Airbnb transforms the home into a “commodity” to rent out, cooking platforms transform home-cooked meals into products, and domestic robots and personal assistants remove the friction associated with maintaining a home. However, at the same time, these technologies can also increase the value we attach to ‘being at home’ and embed us and our homes in a “glocal” context.Smart home devices like domestic robots and personal assistants, instead of merely detaching us from our homes by removing friction, also transform our idea of ‘being at home’. If we bring our personal assistants (e.g. Alexa, Siri) with us everywhere we move to, we become detached from the house itself, but we bring along the familiarity of being at home at all times. Instead of having to re-root ourselves when we move, or developing a relationship to our house, we have partly enshrined the meaning of being at home in the technology we use. Hence, while a frictionless home seems to distance us from the house itself, we regain something of the familiarity of “being at home” which is partly lost in the modern age of rapid urbanization. Bringing Alexa or Siri with us could make us feel at home in any house or hotel. Furthermore, this meaningfulness of smart home devices is all about the functioning software inside of the hardware, which is why the battle for the hub is not actually about hardware devices. Indeed, Amazon is bringing Alexa to everything from TVs to smart speakers. Besides smart home devices carrying software, our homes are also being transformed by online platforms. In a sense, these platforms are breaking down the walls of the home: the house becomes more than a place to live in, as we rent it out (e.g. Airbnb), turn activities of the home into c products (e.g. cooking), and share tools and other services. Again, instead of simply turning the home into a commodity, we hereby also more deeply root our home in a “glocal” context. For example, while these platforms are global, meaning anyone far from our neighborhood can use them, they are also local, as everything about the home remains bound to its location (e.g. the distribution of food, the welcoming of tourists, the sharing of tools with neighbors). All in all, while smart home technology and online platforms “disembed” us from the house itself, they also embed us more deeply in being at home (similar to how work has become more mobile and rooted in the technology we use), as the home becomes much more than just a space to live.
