Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out

by Heather Suzanne Woods Narrated by April Doty

Overview

Smart homes are here-domestic spaces bristling with networked technologies that appear to enhance work, entertainment, logistics, health, and security. But these technologies may also extract a cost in attention, money, and privacy. In Threshold, communication and technology expert Heather Suzanne Woods applies rhetorical theory to answer the urgent question of how swiftly proliferating smart homes alter those who inhabit them.



Building on research into smart homes in the United States, Woods recounts how smart homes arose and predicts the trajectory of their future form. She pulls back the curtain on the technology, probes who is in control, and questions whether a home can be too smart.



Woods suggests a dynamic cultural framework for understanding smart homes that takes into account sociotechnical variables through which smart homes shape human life. Woods's framework reveals how smart homes both reflect social norms about technology as well as whet consumer appetites.



Written for homeowners, policymakers, technology enthusiasts, and scholars, Threshold interweaves critical analysis with matter-of-fact graphics that map relationships between digital tools and social life.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out is compelling, well written, and engaged with a problem of significance to scholars of rhetoric. Dr. Woods’s analysis of smart homes is timely, insightful, and sure to provide a useful toolkit for future analysis.”
—Nathan R. Johnson, author of Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age
 

“Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out is exceptionally timely and likely to be a reference point for at least a decade. The social and cultural impacts of COVID-19 on remote work, domestic life, and suburban flight will be the focus of intense interest. Threshold is unique in the way it weaves shared themes around the ‘smart home’ as a place that is shaping society in both private and public ways.”
—Faber McAlister, former editor of Women’s Studies in Communication
 

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191492407
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/05/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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