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Making Domestic Technology Meaningful INARI AALTOJÄRVI Making Domestic Technology Meaningful From purification to emotions ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of the Board of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Tampere, for public discussion in the Auditorium A1 of the Main Building, Kalevantie 4, Tampere, on October 17th, 2014, at 12 o’clock. UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE INARI AALTOJÄRVI Making Domestic Technology Meaningful From purification to emotions Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1968 Tampere University Press Tampere 2014 ACADEMIC DISSERTATION University of Tampere School of Social Sciences and Humanities Finland Copyright ©2014 Tampere University Press and the author Cover design by Mikko Reinikka Distributor: [email protected] http://granum.uta.fi Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1968 Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis 1454 ISBN 978-951-44-9554-0 (print) ISBN 978-951-44-9555-7 (pdf) ISSN-L 1455-1616 ISSN 1456-954X ISSN 1455-1616 http://tampub.uta.fi Suomen Yliopistopaino Oy – Juvenes Print 441 729 Tampere 2014 Painotuote Acknowledgements I have been fortunate to have financial, academic and mental help and support from numerous people and projects throughout this study. First and foremost, I want to thank my supervisors, Ilkka Arminen and Jari Aro, for their constructive criticism and faith in my work. You have both taught me how to become a researcher. Besides offering your expertise, you also took time to get to know me and my working methods so that our collaboration was fluent. In addition, Ilkka is the one to thank (or blame) for starting my academic career, for he also supervised my master's thesis at the University of Tampere and suggested I might want to apply for the graduate school and start off doctoral studies. Thank you! This research has also greatly benefited from the comments of the pre-examiners, Terhi-Anna Wilska (Jyväskylä University) and Ian Woodward (Griffith University, Australia). Further, my colleague Virve Peteri was kind enough to read through and offer insightful points on the manuscript. I also want thank my proofreader Johanna Tiitinen, whose precise and thorough work on my language made many of my arguments more understandable and condensed. I have received financial support from many quarters to pursue this study. Naturally, without this, the whole project would not have seen the light in the first place. To begin with, I attended UCIT – Doctoral Program in User-Centered Information Technology (University of Tampere) – for four years, and alongside funding, received helpful comments from many of my fellow students in its seminars. Furthermore, I was very fortunate to carry out a part of this work at the University of Lancaster (the UK, Department of Sociology): this visit was funded by the project URBA – the Future Concepts of Urban Housing – at the Aalto University (Helsinki). During my visit to the UK, I was supervised by Dr Elizabeth Shove. Her input, academic knowledge and wisdom are clearly visible in this study. For example, Elizabeth opened the whole world of material culture research for me and taught me systematic academic thinking and writing. Finally, I have taken part in the project CONTURB – Creating meaningful continuities between urban dwellers, technologies and environments in planning (University of Tampere, School of Management). Thank you Ilari Karppi, Ari Jokinen, and Helena Leino for restoring my faith in academic collaboration. Alongside your inventiveness and expertise, you have proved that academic research does not have to be boring or too serious. It has been great fun and an absolute privilege to work with you! I have attended two academic seminars where I have received useful feedback from both their attendants and their leaders. First is the yearly seminar for postgraduate students in sociology at the University of Tampere, led by Dr Ilkka Arminen. Apart from valuable comments on my study, this seminar gave me collegial support, and many participants shared their academic route with me, with all its attendant joys and sorrows. Although my subject of research was quite different from those of the other attendants, I felt an internal part of the group and believe I was truly able to talk about even the hardest issues involved in working with the doctoral thesis. You people know who you are, and hopefully I have succeeded in supporting you in return. Second, I have presented the manuscripts of the chapters in this research in the multidisciplinary seminar of science, technology and gender at the University of Tampere. In this seminar, I had an opportunity to get many valuable remarks from the other disciplines important in my research. Thank you all! There are numerous academic and non-academic people that I consider my friends and who have given me strength to carry on with the research at difficult times. Sometimes they have offered me strictly academic advice, but at other times they have just been there for me. Mia Petänen, Anu Lehtiö, Riikka Homanen, Marjo Kolehmainen, Miia Lähde, Saara Särmä, Jussi Ojajärvi, Merja Vedenjuoksu, Antti Koivumäki, Kitte Klemettilä, Mia Bergius, and Piia Karkkola, I salute you, my friends! A big thank you should also be directed to the interviewees of this study. I was, and still am, surprised at how warmly I was welcomed into your homes and lives. The interviews were not strictly talks about domestic appliances, but you really shared your thoughts and lives with me, and for this, I am grateful and feel privileged. The everyday life and the home are in the background of all my work. As the anthropologist Daniel Miller has reminded us: "Most of what matters to people takes place behind closed doors." Thank you, Tero, for sharing the everyday life with me. Thank you, Toivo and Salli, for reminding me every now and again what really is important, as you did not care at all whether or not I was doing this study. You are my world. Finally, I thank and dedicate this research to my parents, Pekka and Tarja Aaltojärvi. Because of you, I was a sociologist before I even knew such a discipline existed. You taught me to listen, observe, think, contemplate, and question. In addition, you have showed me an example of taking the side of the underdog and having ideologies. These are the characteristics of a good sociologist, and because of you, I had those tendencies when entering the academic world. You have always had faith in me, and this faith has opened the world for me. The words are not enough to thank you properly. Puukkoja ja halleja! In Tampere, 8 July 2014 Inari Aaltojärvi Abstract Modern homes are full of various domestic appliances and technological infrastructure. These technical objects could be said to cohabit with us, affecting our everyday routines, social roles, identities, emotional experiences, and our relationships with family members and other people. This research focuses on how people categorise and ascribe meanings to everyday domestic devices and in what kinds of contexts and frames this ascribing happens. My aim is to show that technological objects are not only purely functional devices, but that they form a larger part of our mundane lives and are intertwined with social relationships, emotions, and cultural categories and contexts. Furthermore, I consider how the design of future technologies such as smart homes and smart technologies could benefit from such social scientific knowledge of material culture. This study belongs to the fields of material culture studies and sociological science and technology studies (STS). The empirical data consists of 20 in-depth interviews with heterosexual couples. The main theoretical – and at the same time analytical – concepts explored in this study are those of purification and hybridisation (Latour 1993), the notion of home, and material culture. Bruno Latour (1993) writes about "purification" and "hybridization". The former term refers to a clear distinction between nature/science and society/self, while the latter describes the hybrid mixtures of objects and subjects; nature and sociality. Purification and hybridisation form the analytical thread of this study, which concludes that the process of making meaning of domestic technology follows the continuum between purification and hybridisation. The first analytical chapter of the study addresses the purification of technology and shows how people try to keep technologies in the "right" place in the normative order of things and people. It is argued that the purification is a culturally and socially preferable attitude toward domestic appliances, which stems from the technological threats conveyed by the media. When people purify technology, they talk about domestic appliances as "just technology", as something that has lower value than humanity and sociality. This “just talk” is used to position technology under human control. Moreover, people use three "discourses of control" that are part of purification in order to soften and manage the threat of technology: control of money and technical features; control of energy (sustainable development); and control of time (activity demand). People use these discourses to put the technical objects in their right place, but also to maintain and express the ethical and moral self, compared with other, less responsible consumers. The second analytical chapter explores the contradictory but co-existing process in purification, that is, the process of hybridisation. This chapter shows how the interviewees’ social relationships and associations with other important people influence the meanings of domestic technologies. Domestic appliances are discussed by using a "conjugal we", which means that the partner and her/his actions are actively reflected upon as the interviewee ascribes meanings to domestic technologies. In the analysis, the interviewees’ accounts, which were used to describe their own and their partners’ actions concerning domestic appliances, illustrated the sociological concept of the gift and its tenet of reciprocity. In a nutshell, the interviewees attempted to balance their actions in such manner that a family member’s act is returned by another act, or at least acknowledged and appreciated.
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