Paper short abstract:

We explore digital voice assistants in older people’s smart homes. Combining the STS concept of infrastructure and a cultural anthropological view on voice, we study ethnographically how older people use DVA’s and with what effects for experiences of the home and its sonic-affective environment.

Paper long abstract:

Digital voice assistants (DVA’s) have been celebrated as a breakthrough in health- and eldercare. Corporate discourses emphasize DVA’s as practical assistants, and figure the voice as instrumental means, a sound object, to achieve certain ends. We see voice-based interactions as infrastructures to open up their ethico-political, ontological, and affective dimensions - how they create sonic-affective environments, and in/voice-abilities.

Combining the STS concept of infrastructure and a cultural anthropological view on voice, we study ethnographically how older people use DVA’s and with what effects for experiences of the home and its sonic-affective environment. Based on this, we see voice-based interactions with DVA’s as infrastructural in the sense that that they link the realms of the technical, cultural and sociopolitical to the level of the individual, creating sites where shared discourses, values, and affect are made manifest in and contested through embodied, social and material practice.

The use of DVA’s result in changes in the affective environments of the home, such as by creating uncertainty, harshness and intervening in cultural and temporal vocal gestures and norms. Moreover, the ability of DVA’s to make voices travel as data beyond the material confines of the home, renders its boundaries more permeable. As a 'porous home', the smart home presents experiences of disempowerment both towards technology and the management of the privacy of the home. We propose to see DVA's and other smarthome technologies as agential in infrastructuring Voices, Homes, and Healthcare, and explore effects of these processes of Infrastructuring in practice.