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Accepted Paper:
Cat talks to Alexa: narratives on non-humans domesticating household technology
Daria Radchenko
(RANEPA)
Contemporary households are frequently co-habitats and networks of agents of both “natural” and artificial intelligence. The paper will present an analysis of narratives about interaction between pets, plants, household appliances, in which all parties exhibit new properties and forms of agency.
Paper Abstract:
Contemporary households are frequently not just multispecies ecologies but also co-habitats and networks of agents of both “natural” and artificial intelligence. It has been frequently noted how pets are constructed as persons (Austin, Irvine 2020) and how people interact with AI assistants (e.g. Alač et al 2021), but much less research has been done on vernacular conceptualizing of non-humans’ interaction without an intermediatory human.
The paper will present an analysis of narratives about interaction between pets, house plants, household objects (from a robot vacuum cleaner to AI assistants like Siri or Alexa), in which all parties exhibit new properties and forms of agency. Based on interviews, ego-documents and digital ethnography, I’ll consider stable linguistic (Podhovnik 2018) and narrative forms of positioning non-human agents in the network of family connections (e.g., Krylova 2023). I’ll specifically focus on texts about the domestication of technology through the mediation of animals, forms of humanizing non-humans by detecting or constructing their emotional lives and formulating new forms of family bonds, ties and hierarchies by introducing non-humans to the family network.