Symmetrifying Smart Home

This paper investigates how the current domestic application of the Internet of Things (IoT), called “smart home,” changes the socio-phenomenological meaning of place-making. It describes a smart home as a topological continuum that could unfold lots of functional spaces—those optimized for a varie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sungyong Ahn
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Simon Dawes, Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines (CHCSC), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) 2021-09-01
Series:Media Theory
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Online Access:https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/911
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Summary:This paper investigates how the current domestic application of the Internet of Things (IoT), called “smart home,” changes the socio-phenomenological meaning of place-making. It describes a smart home as a topological continuum that could unfold lots of functional spaces—those optimized for a variety of predictable user behaviors and intentions, such as going to bed, working out, and energy-saving—according to how software applications redeploy its embedded sensors and actuators into certain algorithmic orders. This continuum once buried under people’s daily routines is constantly re-excavated in a smart home and re-differentiated into the new service domains of the IoT. This paper develops a topological framework to analyze the new form of media power behind this perpetual place-binding of smart spaces, which I term topological power. For this goal, it borrows Bernhard Riemann and Henri Poincaré’s mathematical thinking of manifold, or multiplicity, beneath the geometric structure of space.
ISSN:2557-826X