855325

research-article2019
SOC0010.1177/0038038519855325SociologyHine

Article

Sociology
2020, Vol. 54(1) 22­–36
Strategies for Reflexive © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038519855325
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Silence and Emotion

Christine Hine
University of Surrey, UK

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.

Keywords
autoethnography, dataveillance, emotion, ethnography, infrastructure, Internet of Things,
reflexivity, silence

An Autoethnographic Preamble
An elderly woman – my mum – is living alone with dementia, supported by an array of carers
and by us, her three adult children: two living close by and a third who lives 200 miles away.
Carers visit in the week, we two siblings who live locally make alternate visits at the weekend,
and periodic phone calls from our other sibling to check everything is OK never quite hear the
whole story. We two local siblings are emotionally close, but have an increasingly fractured
relationship with the third, exacerbated by distance. We all share worries that things can’t go on

Corresponding author:
Christine Hine, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK.
Email: c.hine@surrey.ac.uk
Hine 23

as they are much longer. The house, owned by my parents since the 1950s, lacks basic amenities
expected of the modern age, like warmth. It’s cold in winter, and turning a gas fire on, or
remembering not to turn heaters controlled by timers off, is becoming increasingly difficult for
mum to manage but still she insists that nothing need change. She always hated change, but
now that she has lost the capacity to learn, change is terrifying and always resisted. Without
warning the rest of us, one sibling swoops in for a week-long stay, sends mum to stay with her
sister, and has central heating installed. The intention might have been good but the emotional
fallout is huge. Angry emails are exchanged. With this unilateral act lines have been crossed –
the line between the fiction that we’re all in this together and the brutal fact that we siblings are
not in any way a team – the line between mum being a decision-maker and a decided-about. But
whatever we feel, however bad the fallout, we’re still tied together. Nobody in this set up can
walk off on a decisive huff. Life goes on in the regular routine – dementia smooths Mum’s
anger at the disruption to her house and within weeks she’s not quite sure any more what the
issue was.

In a short time we’re back to the same messy, dysfunctional support team set up. But we’re not
the same. The temperature of the house has become a new feature in the family relationships,
thanks to the heating system. The new boiler hangs in the kitchen. Just next door high on the
wall in the hallway, a smart thermostatic controller is mounted, controlled by an app on the
smartphone of the sibling 200 miles away. Before, when I visited and the house temperature felt
wrong I could do something about it – open a window, turn on a gas fire, but now I can’t. The
controller sits there mute, a blank shiny black plaque. The house feels incredibly hot when I
visit. For a woman who has never lived in a centrally heated house and won’t change her usual
practice of wearing five layers at all times, this is quite a change to cope with. Mum grumbles.
I drag a chair across the hall and climb onto it, standing on tiptoe. I poke at the shiny black
plaque and the display lights up. 26°. Smaller numbers on either side, coloured lights
indicating… I don’t know what. I poke the display and 26 changes to 25.5, 25, 24.5… have I
actually changed the setting? I come back for a look later in the visit and it’s back to 26°. Mum
hasn’t mentioned the heat again so I leave it. Next visit, there’s no doubt the house strikes chill
as soon as you step inside. A hand on the radiators confirms, no heating at all. Mum is
unperturbed. I repeat the process of drag chair, climb, poke. Again, the display lights up – 26°.
Surely not. I phone my sibling. The house is cold. They check their phone – it’s set at 26°, that’s
right. No, really, I insist, it is freezing cold. No heating at all. After they give me a speech about
how I must expect that the heating will go on and off throughout the day because that’s how
thermostats work, I insist again, it is cold. They recheck – actually the controller is offline. I
crawl under the settee in the sitting room and restart the router. The boiler fires into action and
the radiators begin to warm up.

Introduction
Smart homes1 are increasingly becoming a mundane reality, as Internet-connected
meters, thermostats and switches have become commonly available and smartphones
and voice-connected devices proliferate. The autoethnographic fragment above cap-
tures several features of contemporary smart home technologies enabled by the Internet
of Things2 that are deserving of closer investigation. In particular, the fragment high-
lights significant silences within the simplistic story of empowerment and control that
tends to permeate public discourse around smart home technologies. The official story,
24 Sociology 54(1)

as captured in the Hive smart home platform’s ‘Control your home from your phone’
advertising jingle, presumes a single person unproblematically acting on behalf of a
household with coherent wishes and a transparently functioning and faultless device.
However, the experiences related above suggest that the smart technology does not
simply enable and it does not so much reflect the wishes of a pre-existing household as
bring that construct into being. In this autoethnographic fragment we are not a cohesive
household; we are a messy, fractured, just-about-getting-by, involuntary collective. The
smart technology disrupts relationships and occasions questioning of things we took for
granted about who did what and where, shifting us into a different form of collective.
The flow of data entails also a moral shift in the balance of responsibilities across the
collective and it influences our judgement. We clash over the relative worth of the sen-
sory evidence of the person on the spot versus the digital display, disputing who can
sense ‘too hot’ and ‘too cold’ and determine the appropriate action. However, only when
the technology fails does much of this become apparent. The re-ordering of relation-
ships that the technology occasions is largely unspoken, most of the time. Also silent in
my account, now I reflect on it, is any sense of flows of data. Whatever data might be
flowing between and beyond the plaque on the wall and my sibling’s smartphone, I
thought nothing about it in the moment, and only started to consider when I sat down to
write and reflect for this article.
The Internet of Things and the proliferation of smart technologies in the home
undoubtedly have significant repercussions for the experience of domestic life and in
turn raise the kind of profound question about re-ordering of social relations that sociol-
ogy habitually addresses. Sociologists are well placed to consider what this way of living
entails for those who are living it, and what new forms of emotion, relationship and
identity might be emerging, as they have done for previous generations of digital tech-
nologies (see, for example, Bakardjieva, 2005; Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). Generating
the kind of rich and detailed insights necessary to fuel such an informed sociological
analysis does, however, pose some interesting methodological challenges. Many aspects
of these technologies remain opaque in operation and ‘users’ (and indeed sociologists)
can often only guess at what decision-making processes and data flows are going on
behind the scenes. In fact, the term ‘user’ becomes somewhat problematic, since those
affected by a technology such as a smart home may largely forget on an everyday basis
that their environment is being mediated in this way. Some members of the household
may have made an active choice to welcome the technology, while others are more pas-
sive or even unconscious co-habitants with it. The technology participates in the parcel-
ling out of responsibilities – the moral economy of the household (Silverstone et al.,
1992) – in insidious, often unspoken fashion.
Smart technologies operate through sending and receiving data, much of it travelling
without the conscious intervention of the owners of the technology. There have been
numerous calls for ethnographic attention to the experience of smart technologies
focused particularly on the cultures of big data, datafication and dataveillance that they
inhabit.3 As boyd and Crawford (2012) argued, it is important not to take claims for the
significance of big data at face value, simply by extrapolation from purported qualities
of the technology alone. While digital technologies may seem to have transformed a
Hine 25

broad array of cultural spheres, an inherent schism with a pre-big data age should not be
assumed (Boellstorff, 2013). For example, much of the experience of self-tracking and
the resulting digital data is very mundane and deserves to be examined for what it is
(Pink et al., 2017) rather than immediately assuming we should view it as dataveillance.
In similar vein, Couldry and Powell (2014: 1) argue that the ‘emerging cultures of data
collection deserve to be examined in a way that foregrounds the agency and reflexivity
of individual actors as well as the variable ways in which power and participation are
constructed and enacted’. Various forms of agency in response to perceived computa-
tional surveillance are enacted (Knapp, 2016), and these deserve to be investigated
ethnographically rather than beginning, and remaining, with an assumption that the
qualities of the technology are such that dataveillance, and loss of agency, are inevitable
consequences. As researchers interested in sociological dimensions of smart technolo-
gies, we may be pre-armed with sensitivity to data flows and dataveillance and con-
scious of new forms of data capitalism emerging under the guise of personalization and
consumer control. We may, however, need to accept that such issues may not be fore-
grounded at all in the meaning-making processes that surround smart technologies as
they become embedded in our everyday lives.
Armed with this intention to take the technology as it emerges in context, an ethnogra-
pher focusing on smart technologies as they become embedded in everyday life will
encounter intransigent silences and diverse understandings. This article discusses ethno-
graphic approaches to exploring smart technologies in situ, suggesting that to take seri-
ously the experience of smart technologies in action requires an array of methodological
approaches, many of which may deviate markedly from a forensic understanding of
‘actual’ data flows. While the pervasive and largely invisible yet highly agentic nature of
smart technologies is a new and remarkable situation in some sense, it also maps onto a
methodological dilemma common to all ethnographers: how to put into words what is
largely silent in daily life and how to bring into the foreground that which is the unspoken
background of the everyday. This article therefore focuses on unpacking some aspects of
the role of the ethnographer in the specific case of smart technologies in the home by
drawing on wider ethnographic literature relating to silence, technology and the role of
reflexivity and personal narrative.
The next section of the article maps out an existing set of approaches to exploration
of smart home technologies, highlighting key methodological challenges for research
that aim to capture the lived experience of these technologies. The article then goes on to
explore methodological strategies to address these challenges, focusing on the approach
known as the infrastructural inversion for researching taken-for-granted technologies
and considering how this approach treats silence as a productive focus. The potential of
autoethnographic approaches to enable close examination of otherwise unspoken aspects
of experience is then examined. While not all studies may be autoethnographic, for very
sound methodological reasons, a reflection on the difference between the autoethnogra-
pher’s insights and the kind of accounts generated by methods such as retrospective
interviews or by the data logs recorded by smart technologies themselves, gives a strong
indication of the need for ethnographers to be reflexive about what counts, for their pur-
poses, as data. In conclusion, the article argues for a stress on reflexivity in the conduct
26 Sociology 54(1)

of ethnographic studies of the smart home. Such reflexivity entails continually examin-
ing assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon and remaining open both to the
significance of the unspoken and to the ambiguous, shifting nature of the field site itself.

Ethnography and Smart Homes

Ethnography of smart homes has been for a long time envisaged as important to provide
the kind of rich qualitative description that might inform the design of these technolo-
gies (see, for example, Lee et al., 2006) and also to enable interrogation of the processes
of social shaping that lead technologies to be used in ways other than those the design-
ers intended (Harper, 2003). Such ethnography often entails recruiting households for a
series of interviews, tours of the home, video recording of members taking part in eve-
ryday activities, use of cultural probes and shadowing sessions in which the ethnogra-
pher spends time in the household: generating data in which members of the household
reflect verbally on their way of life and the potential or actual role that smart technolo-
gies might play there. Thus, many of the design-focused studies badged as ethnographic
explorations of the smart home focus on what people in the household can say about the
technologies.
Asking people to talk about these technologies can be a very productive way to under-
stand differences in orientation to and experience of the technology. Mennicken and
Huang (2012), for example, carried out qualitative interviews with people who were in
the process of making their homes ‘smart’. The interviews were able to highlight varied
motivations and understandings of the technology and identify a sequence of phases on
the way to achieving a temporary sense of stability in which the technology was deemed
to be working as participants wished. Such interviews may be very useful in highlighting
difference and in identifying the work involved in becoming and living ‘smart’, but they
are not ideally purposed for delivering the kind of nuanced insights suitable for a socio-
logical analysis of a way of living because they focus so directly on one technology taken
in isolation as a topic of discussion.
Questioning this standard approach to a design-focused ethnography, Tolmie et al. (2003)
highlight the merits of considering the unremarkable in domestic ethnography and interro-
gating closely the ways in which technologies may become so thoroughly embedded as to
become ‘invisible in use’ and yet highly consequential for the routines of domestic life.
Extending this reasoning, Crabtree and Tolmie (2016) set out to document the mundane
interactions with objects in their own homes over the course of an ordinary day. Such docu-
mentation turns out to be extremely burdensome on household members, but instructive in
revealing the ‘methodical assemblage of things’ (2016: 1738) that people draw on in unspo-
ken fashion to get everyday life done. The authors use this insight to question the tendency
in other forms of design-focused research to isolate out individual technologies as a focus of
attention. Moving away from design-focused approaches to understanding smart homes, we
might expect a sociologically oriented ethnography to focus even less on relations with the
technology in itself and to be more open to encountering the technology as and when it
manifests itself, both within interactions with other people in the home and in conjunction
with assemblages of things used there. In order to move in this direction, we need to think
Hine 27

more about what it means, in ethnography, to ask people to talk about the phenomenon we
are interested in knowing about, and what to do when such talk does not naturally arise in
everyday interactions.

Ethnography and Silence

A key starting point for an ethnographer of technology who is interested in silence is the
notion of the infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994; Bowker and Star, 2000). As an
analytic stance, infrastructural inversion seeks to counter the tendency of infrastructural
technologies to become taken-for-granted and instead draws the infrastructure into the
analytic foreground of the study. Because, by their nature, infrastructures are designed
not to be noticed, the ethnographer must make special efforts to uncover their silences
and to highlight the forms of visible and invisible work that bring them into being and
sustain them in operation (Star and Strauss, 1999). Foregrounding the infrastructure,
analytically speaking, allows the examination of otherwise unnoticed or naturalized
forms of marginalization, exclusion and inequality (Star, 1991). One stance to take on
ethnography of the smart home, would therefore be to operate the infrastructural inver-
sion. By bringing the technology into the foreground of the study and exploring the sets
of social relations that operate around and through it, we may be able to expose its oth-
erwise unexamined consequences. As an analytic stance the infrastructural inversion
offers a powerful resource to orient our attention. Taken as a recipe for the actual conduct
of ethnographic fieldwork, however, it would offer some significant drawbacks and
potentially lead us into the same set of limitations caused by artificially isolating particu-
lar technologies for our attention as outlined in the design-focused ethnographies of
smart homes discussed above. If ethnographic fieldwork aims, as Olivier de Sardan
(2016: 22) outlines, to produce ‘in situ, contextualised, transversal knowledge, account-
ing for the “actors’ point of view”, everyday representations and practices, and their
indigenous significance’, then the infrastructural inversion as a methodological strategy
would run in the opposite direction precisely by attempting to overturn the tendency
from the actors’ viewpoint for the infrastructure to disappear. Foregrounding the infra-
structure analytically may be a powerful device, but that should not be at the expense of
attending to the actors’ experiences as they both attend to and ignore these technologies
and combine them with others in assembling the routine business of their lives.
For some insight on this concern about a potential lack of fit between the analytic
foregrounding operated by the infrastructural inversion and the ethnographer’s interest in
the everyday experience from the actor’s perspective, it is useful to turn to a literature
focused specifically on ethnography and silence, to explore the epistemological ramifi-
cations of studying silence in its own right as opposed to making attempts to breach
silence and encourage actors to verbalize the otherwise unspoken. Hirschauer (2006)
argues that ethnographers are always putting into words (or encouraging others to put
into words) that which is unspoken, in that ‘the social’ is inherently silent and only
brought into words through the ethnographer’s actions. Breaching silence, in this sense,
is what ethnographers do. There are, however, more targeted approaches to silence that
look specifically at the tendency of actors in the setting not to speak directly to the issues
28 Sociology 54(1)

that concern the ethnographer. The actors’ agenda is not our agenda, and they will not
necessarily tend of their own volition to speak about the topic that we wish to explore.
For this reason, as Olivier de Sardan (2016) argues, fieldwork combines the immersive
and observational with the active solicitation of discourses in the interview. For Olivier
de Sardan, the interview is an artful process of transforming the questions on the ethnog-
rapher’s mind into questions that are meaningful in the terms of the interviewee.
Ethnographers do, therefore, breach silences in some purposive ways and this will
inevitably be a part of an exploration of the infrastructural qualities of smart home tech-
nologies. There are also, however, ways to appreciate silence in its own right. Scott
(2018) argues that there are many different forms of silence, and non-voicing in itself can
be a meaningful social action. Pagis (2010) explains that it has become commonplace to
think of silence as oppressive and to think of the experience of those being silenced, but
there is also an approach to sociology of silence that sees silence as potentially constitu-
tive and meaningful without necessarily being negative. Through ethnography of a medi-
tation room – a setting where silence is a norm and yet a level of intersubjective
understanding is nonetheless achieved – an insight into the constitutive nature of silence
is arrived at by Pagis (2010).
In a similar vein, the notion of silence not as a negative or lack, but in itself a feature
of the setting to be taken seriously played a key role in the ethnography of the operating
theatre that Gardezi et al. (2009) conducted. This ethnography was characterized by use
of an immersive familiarity with the setting to identify and closely examine instances of
silence where there seems to be an ‘unresolved or unarticulated’ (2009: 1392) issue
rather than silences as instances of comfortably getting on with the job. These were then
further sub-divided into three categories:

(1) absence of communication, made evident by prior actions or communication; (2) lack of
response to a direct address by another, or responding with silence to another’s question or
directive; and (3) aspects of delivery that blur the lines between speech and silence, such as
speaking quietly, timidly or hesitantly. (2009: 1393)

Through this approach the ethnography developed a nuanced sense of the role of silence
in getting work done and maintaining interprofessional distinctions. Silence, here, is
more than an absence.
Taking this stance into the smart home suggests that as much as the ethnographer may
wish to operate an analytic version of the infrastructural inversion and bring the technol-
ogy onto the agenda for discussion, this does not necessarily translate directly into a
methodological strategy. It may be useful methodologically speaking to take account of
the silences that surround smart home technologies and to develop a nuanced under-
standing, through immersion in the setting, of the meaning of these silences, akin to the
role of silence in the operating theatre observed by Gardezi et al. (2009). Extrapolating
to the smart home, the silences of the technology itself also need to be taken into account,
in addition to the silences on the subject of technology among the people in the home –
the behaviours of the technology become as much subjects of interest as the interpreta-
tions of participants. The ethnographer in this setting needs to become attuned to both the
Hine 29

presence and the absence of commentary from participants (and devices) on smart
actions and to be prepared for lack of commentary to have multiple meanings and mani-
festations, just as commentary might. Both participants and devices may choose to draw
attention to actions of the device or remain silent about the action. Participants and
devices develop an intersubjective awareness of one another, we might say, through vari-
ous forms of action and silence. Ethnographically, it is of interest to learn the etiquette of
interaction on both sides.
Yet another form of silence operates in the shift between actual domestic environ-
ments and the advertising rhetoric that surrounds smart home technologies. There is a
tendency for the advertising for smart home products to suggest that the inhabitants of a
household act in harmony as if one individual. The technology offers that individual
‘control’. However, myriad opportunities for disappointment and breakdown are offered
up by the mismatch between the technology’s assumption of a single-minded user and
the complex social interactions of a household. Here, it is the complexity of domestic
social interactions that is potentially silenced. In an ordinary domestic setting, technolo-
gies participate in the performance of identities (Silverstone et al., 1992) through such
mundane acts as who has possession of the remote control, who chooses channels, sets
the thermostat, who wants the doors and windows open or shut. A domestic hierarchy
plays out through the hardware of the home. To an extent this is immediately observable
– sit down to watch television with a family, and you see that dynamic playing out before
your eyes. Smart technologies may tend to obscure the decision making and render the
hierarchy less immediately observable, by separating out the human actions of setting up
technologies and choosing parameters from the technologically mediated consequence.
To return to Gardezi et al.’s (2009) article on silence in the operating theatre in which
they outline that silence may be expressive and strategic – silence is not simply an
absence of sound, but instead a different way of achieving action when viewed against
the backdrop of norms of interaction that build expectations of what might be said and
what is usually said.
Far from being a lively domain of constant debate and negotiation, domestic life may
in fact be characterized by silences, as family members find much of their daily routine
unremarkable and simply get on with doing it. The spoken parts of domestic life are often
precisely about the remarkable. Observing domestic life is, therefore, a case of looking
at the unspoken as Tolmie et al. (2003) argue, for it is here that practices become embed-
ded. Even while silent, members of a household are often interactionally available to one
another as people who are visibly engaged in various kinds of activity, present or absent,
here or there. An ethnographer of domestic life will struggle to work out through mere
observation the ways in which members of a household are meaningful to one another.
Conversations about who knows what about whom and the interpretations placed on
these knowledges will help to unpack the complex layers of these puzzles, just as Geertz’s
(1973) imagined ethnographer struggled to unpack the meaning of the movement of an
eyelid. As smart technologies become part of the existence of the home, we are then chal-
lenged to extend our observations to the actions of the smart technology and the extent
to which these become interactionally meaningful to members of the household (and
vice versa) and where the silences of the smart technologies become meaningful in them-
selves. Observing changing temperatures, opening and closing curtains and levels of
30 Sociology 54(1)

lighting and observing the extent to which these are matters of comment for participants
themselves, become part of the ethnographer’s puzzle.
Silences are contextual. A silence in one place may not preclude speaking about the
same thing elsewhere. If this is true of members of a household who offload about their
experiences at home in other spaces, then even more so it applies to smart technologies
that may be silent in the home about their activities yet speaking elsewhere through flows
of data. The boundaries of the home are permeable – information flows in and out, and
the household is both a site of communication and communicated about. This flow of
data may, however, be more apparent to some members of the household than others,
depending on who mediates with the companies that provide the devices and who pays
the bills. While the advertising rhetoric puts ‘you’ in control, the one being addressed is
largely a single individual who takes the decisions about which technology to have and
where. Even to this person, the notion of data flowing beyond the home may not be fore-
grounded much, if at all. When recently negotiating the details of installation of a new
smart meter in my own home, I confidently navigated various practical questions until
stopped in my tracks by a question about how often I wanted my smart meter to send data
to the power company: hourly, daily or monthly. The question momentarily made visible
an aspect of its functioning beyond what I had glimpsed for the technology. Without a
background to what happens to the data and what it means to my relationship with the
power company I struggled meaningfully to engage with the question.
In the autoethnographic fragment with which I began this piece, there were a number
of forms of silence. The device itself built in some silences, in its lack of transparency
around how to use and set it, what algorithmic decision making was built into it and who
had control of its settings. It is literally silent, in that it makes no noise as it does its work.
Its situation high on a wall, and the tendency for its display to remain blank and black
unless awoken by a poke exacerbated a tendency to be ignored – a helpful tendency
where a forgetful resident needs to be discouraged from fiddling with it, but a less helpful
quality for a carer concerned about the temperature. Silence is to an extent designed into
the device, but other aspects of its silence were qualities of the fractured relationship of
siblings unable to discuss its installation and of the particular set of geographical rela-
tions and responsibilities produced around who lived where and how roles were conse-
quently carved out. Silence, in this context, could mean not being told, being protected,
being in control, being excluded or being marginalized. Silence could mean a smoothing
of friction, or a symptom of a relationship in trouble. The classic methodological response
to the silences surrounding infrastructural technologies is the infrastructural inversion.
Crucially, this does not necessarily have to entail asking participants what is actually
happening or uncovering actual flows of data and algorithmic processes. We need to
bracket the a priori assumption that smart home technologies are about dataveillance, or
control and develop ethnographic approaches that remain open to whatever participants
make of them, even when they do not talk about them.

Autoethnography and Reflexivity

As argued above, a sensitive attention to the nature of silence and to the interactional
qualities of unspoken relations among household members and between household
Hine 31

members and their smart technologies may be key for the development of a sociologi-
cally oriented ethnography of the smart home. Such access to the nuance of everyday life
lived within a home is certainly possible for an ethnographer, but difficult to develop
over long stretches of time in any other than one’s own home. It seems apt, then, to
deploy autoethnography as a potential strategy within the repertoire of the sociologically
oriented ethnographer of the smart home. Autoethnography is style of writing that con-
nects the author’s reflections on personal experience to broader social, cultural and polit-
ical themes, as articulated notably by Anderson (2006), Ellis (2004), Ellis et al. (2010)
and Reed-Danahay (1997). As a method, as described by Chang (2016), autoethnogra-
phy builds a particular kind of self-narrative that both provides an evocative account of
experience and interrogates that experience for what it tells us about culture. Particularly
notable is the access that autoethnographic reflection gives us to the affective dimensions
of daily life, as the autoethnographer produces a narrative based not just on events but
also on how those events feel emotionally speaking. Autoethnography is by no means
without methodological problems and epistemological shortcomings as Sparkes (2002)
highlights, prone to accusations of self-indulgence and restricted as it is to a very singu-
lar personal perspective. As a component of a methodological strategy, however, it is
arguably particularly well suited to the interrogation of the interactional silences of the
smart home and of their affective qualities. It is also flexible as to the boundaries of the
study – rather than relying on a pre-designated ‘household’, it can respond to the fluctu-
ating patterns of relationships that exist within and extend beyond a house. It can also
remain temporally flexible, allowing for reflection on memory and biographical inci-
dents from the past as well as expectations for the future, as they play a role in present
experience.
Arguably, autoethnography is particularly suited to smart technologies. Digital life is
insidious, personalized and not readily observable from the outside. Understanding digi-
tal technologies, particularly such silently embedded technologies as the Internet of
Things, takes close examination and deep reflection and is not something we can achieve
by scraping and mining, processing and visualizing digital data en masse. Autoethnography
has the capacity to be attentive to the nuances of living a (partially) digital life, looking
at the emotions and affects, the silences and absences and enabling us to be more evoca-
tive (Gergen and Gergen, 2018) in our understanding of digital technologies. In that vein,
a reflexive and evocative autoethnography of smart technologies offers a powerful com-
plement to the existing repertoire of methods to interrogate these technologies. As Hine
(2015) argues, autoethnography can usefully pay a close reflexive attention to the varied
textures of lived experience with digital technologies.
Thinking about how this autoethnographic insight plays out within the experiences of
my mother’s heating controller takes me back to a time that was not happy. The entire
experience was fraught with tension, as we tried to manage the complex set of demands
around keeping our mother safe and content, working out what she could and could not
do and failing to agree as siblings on how to go about it. People living with dementia are
often not compliant and grateful with those trying to help them and mum was no excep-
tion. Adding into the mix a smart heating controller, albeit one intended to remove the
worry of manually controlled heating, was not a source of joy. In those early days of the
heating controller, disappointment and frustration were key emotions, with a stomach
32 Sociology 54(1)

lurching sense of stress each time as I stepped through the front door on a visit to find the
temperature wrong again. I particularly strongly recall being overwhelmed by the heat in
the house one day and opening the back door for a waft of fresh air, only to realize that
the smart heating controller interpreted this as a threat to its control and was fighting
back by turning up the heating. I raged at it that day. Another day, I attempted a manual
reset to turn down the temperature directly on the controller and was infuriated as the
temperature reverted as soon as I turned away. Had I done it wrong, was there an inbuilt
over-ride or was my sibling 200 miles away simply resetting the temperature remotely?
I never knew.
This experience is not readily interpreted in terms of dataveillance: data flows were
occurring, but the experience cannot be fully encompassed by thinking of data alone.
Autoethnography is able to catch and reflect upon the moments of rage and frustration,
and to interpret them in the light of the relationships that they exemplify and sustain, the
identities that they build and the power structures that they embody. My frustration and
rage were borne of a sense of impotence, of my helplessness in the face of the assem-
blage created through my sibling’s actions, and absence and the presence of this implac-
able ‘smart’ technology. My emotions were also suffused with the intransigent ongoing
frustrations and griefs of my mother’s deteriorating condition and the structures of social
care that left us, her children, struggling to cope as we also attempted to fulfil commit-
ments as parents and spouses ourselves.
Writing autoethnographically does not necessarily involve a coherent authorial nar-
rative delivered in a single voice. Just as experience is often fragmented, contradictory
and confusing, so might the autoethnographic voice be. We are not looking to the
autoethnographer to give us the definitive version of what goes on inside their head, any
more than any other methodology can give us direct access to the inner world of partici-
pants. My sibling’s account of the incidents that I described to begin this article would,
unsurprisingly, be very different from my own. Told by them, different silences, differ-
ent emotions and different notions of control would emerge. We can look on autoeth-
nography as an opportunity to suspend the search for a singular authoritative account,
dwell on the complexity of situations as they span location and time and consider their
emotional dimensions. Thinking autoethnographically about a ‘smart technology’ ena-
bled home, we think not about what actual data flows are now occurring but about how
this mode of potentially connected living feels, how we experience the world around us,
our family and our inter-woven activities. Does this feel like control? Do we feel
smarter? Do we feel like the same ‘we’ as before? An autoethnographic approach rejects
a pre-ordered approach to data collection and does not expect to know in advance what
is significant. Movements through the day, and individual moments of connection
become significant in relation to the phenomenon we are interested in as we reflect and
dwell on them. Because we lived them, we do not need to capture them in the moment
– they are as valid as learning experiences whether we document them minutely at the
time or realize only in retrospect that they are shaping meaning making down the line.
Taking seriously Olivier de Sardan’s (2016: 128) warning that the ‘hero of the narrative’
must remain at all times the research topic, and not the researcher, an autoethnographic
perspective has a lot to offer our understanding of the lived experience of smart tech-
nologies, particularly in so far as it allows us closely to examine our uncertainties and
Hine 33

lack of knowledge regarding the digital technologies that surround us and the emotions
that accompany them.

Conclusion
While it is undoubtedly important for some research to take a revelatory and even cam-
paigning stance in relation to data practices, in this article I argue that it is also useful to
maintain some space for an ethnography of meaning making that does not assume that
we already know what these technologies do and instead discovers their qualities along-
side participants. Taking this stance involves stepping aside from the notion that there is
a ‘real’ story to uncover about smart technologies in the home and accepting that some
kinds of meaning making around these technologies may not, as such, focus on data. The
ethnographer of the smart home needs to be critically reflexive about what it might mean
to be smart and about the lived reality of dataveillance. It is questionable whether unveil-
ing the ‘actual’ operations of the technology is ever part of the ethnographer’s role. This
kind of reflexivity entails sustaining a speculative and provisional interest in what smart
homes might turn out to be in any given circumstances, in the face of any apparent cer-
tainty about what this technology in fact does that might be encountered from designers,
marketers, critics of dataveillance and participants themselves.
Autoethnography allows an analysis of the silences and actions of daily life. Reflecting
on the process of arrival of smart technologies in the home gives an insight into the
involvement of various household members, both explicitly and in their absences of
attention. The autoethnographer is well placed to reflect on the affective dimensions of
the lived experience of smart technologies, exploring the emotional response to the tech-
nologies themselves and of the relationships that they mediate with other household
members present and absent. The autoethnographer also develops a nuanced understand-
ing of what silence means as people go about everyday lives suffused with smart tech-
nologies. Studying these experiences in conjunction with the advertising materials and
user manuals published by device providers gives cause for reflection on silences on
their part. Ethnography might well involve drawing on logs of data produced by sensors
and also reflecting on these with participants, but, crucially, the data logs would not be
taken as transparent depictions of what people did but treated as resources for negotiating
understandings of the situation by participants and ethnographers alike. The ethnography
of lived experience of smart home technologies can aim to avoid separating out data
flows, algorithms and material devices as separate things, but focus instead on presences
and silences across the digital and material. This entails never settling on a single story
of what the technology does, but rather developing shifting narratives that look back-
wards and forwards and shape themselves in the context of whatever the present moment
offers.
Ethnography of technology ‘users’ is somewhat problematic in the face of these
forms of ubiquitous computing that were designed as a technology that disappears
(Weiser, 1991). ‘Data subject’ likewise is too clinical, assumes too much, is too much
framed in the vocabulary of the data collectors. As Goulden et al. (2018) argue, what
is often termed ‘personal data’ tracked by sensors in fact becomes interpersonal data as
people puzzle over its meaning, negotiate how to use it appropriately and use it to
34 Sociology 54(1)

reflect on one another’s actions. The many and varied ways of being sensed and sens-
ing presence and the varied forms of co-presence with technologies that do not neces-
sarily involve a conscious usage, need to be examined afresh without assuming that we
have privileged access to what it is that the technology does. Just as researchers become
conscious of the consequences of datafication, so they have to deal with its disappear-
ance into mundanity as simply part of the way life is lived, paralleling Deuze’s (2011:
137) observation about the media that ‘the key challenge of communication and media
studies in the 21st century is, or will be, the disappearance of media’. The disappear-
ance of data in everyday consciousness is both a methodological challenge and a site
of anxiety in the face of commentary on the insidious powers of governments and
monolithic corporations.
Ethnography seeks to take seriously the actor’s perspective, and autoethnography
builds on this through offering a detail of insight into the messiness and contingencies
of that ‘perspective’ and its emotional dimensions that is rarely offered by other forms
of ethnographic data. For study of smart home technologies, autoethnography acts as a
site for examining a flitting back and forth between data consciousness and data igno-
rance, a seeking to know and ignoring of data flows in the context of more immediate
relationships and preoccupations. The approach to autoethnography of smart home
technologies that is described here aligns with the stance of taking a ‘non-digital-centric
approach to the digital’ (Pink et al., 2015: 7) that does not tackle these technologies
head-on, but explores them as they arise among and are embedded within everyday
practices and accepts them as the actors there understand them to be. Such an approach
is squarely in line with the vibrant tradition of ethnography as respectful of the beliefs
of others as we find them. This may provoke, however, a certain anxiety that we may be
somehow letting the perpetrators of dataveillance off the hook by failing to focus our
attention squarely on data flows and power imbalances between the surveilled and the
surveillors. The challenge is to couple a critically oriented infrastructural inversion on
an analytic level with a non-infrastructure-centric ethnography of infrastructure at a
methodological level.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the help of the editor and anonymous referees in refining this article.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. The concept of the smart home, connoting domestic technologies that respond automatically
to the needs of inhabitants, has existed for many decades at least as an aspiration in science
fiction. Smart homes have become more feasible and affordable in the 21st century with the
advent of widely available digital network connections in the home.
2. The Internet of Things denotes the embedding of capacity to send and receive data on the
Internet into everyday items. In a domestic context this allows items such as fridges, heating,
lighting and security systems to transmit data about their status and to respond according to
Hine 35

a set of rules programmed into a decision-making algorithm. This in turn permits the kind of
automated responsiveness expected of a smart home.
3. There is considerable slippage between these terms. The term ‘big data’ refers to the recent
massive increase in the amount of data available for processing, given the explosion in devices
that are able to record and transmit digital data. Dataveillance refers to the tendency of these
devices to occasion new forms of monitoring. Datafication denotes the process through which
everyday activities are reconceived of as comprised of data.

ORCID iD
Christine Hine https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1172-0252

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Christine Hine’s main research centres on the sociology of science and technology with particular
interest in the role of new technologies in the knowledge production process. She also has a major
interest in the development of ethnography in technical settings, and in the use of digital methods
for social research. In particular, she has developed mobile and connective approaches to ethnog-
raphy which combine online and offline social contexts. She is author of Virtual Ethnography
(SAGE, 2000), Systematics as Cyberscience (MIT, 2008), Understanding Qualitative Research:
The Internet (Oxford, 2012) and Ethnography for the Internet (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Date submitted October 2018

Date accepted May 2019