Reconstruction 8.3 (2008)
Return to Contents»
Heckman, Davin. A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 214 pp. ISBN: 0822341581 (pbk).
<1> In A Small World, Heckman traces the evolution of the smart house, starting with the narratives of futurism inherent in the influx of electrical appliances into the early twentieth century, through the competing futuristic visions of the "house of tomorrow"in Disney's EPCOT and Celebration, into the introduction of computers and new technologies of home control in the 1980s, culminating in the latest version of the smart house characterized by a high level of media saturation. The contemporary smart home, Heckman argues, culminates in the Perfect Day, "an attempt to institutionalize everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice...[which] offers a posthuman solution" to the struggles of life in a consumer world "by which traditional ethical considerations can be avoided and pleasure can be pursued" (17).
<2> Central to this argument is Heckman's "model of cultural development that can be broken down into three eras of domesticity, characterized by space, time, and information" (10). Homes are important as defining spaces because they are more than simple areas where people live; they are also socializing and normative institutions with inherent middle class connotations. The introduction of electrical appliances altered the conception of the home by turning it from a site of masculine relaxation into an arena centered around female work. By focusing on the maximization of household labor in the form of appliances designed to make cooking, cleaning, and other household tasks faster and more efficient, this technology led to the "industrialization of the home" around the principles of scientific management and "the adoption of an entire set of relationships to labor, knowledge, production, and ethical concerns" (28-29) centered around the manipulation of time. Information, in the form of consumption-oriented mass media, is the third major factor in the evolution of the smart home. The current smart home incorporates media into such a large number of its components that the house itself can be read as an example of new media.
<3> Indeed, this influx of information is important primarily for plunging the contemporary smart home into the realm of narrative. Homes in general tell a story about their inhabitants (including the aforementioned gender and class connotations), and the smart house is particularly invested in narratives of consumption due to its media-centric construction. The influx of television after WWII introduced this consumption orientation which continued with such products as the internet refrigerator (allowing the user to remotely buy food), rfid tag-embedded merchandise (allowing the smart house to inventory and suggest uses for the items present), and pay-per-use washing machines (allowing manufacturers to extend the cycle of commerce indefinitely by requiring reoccurring payment well beyond standard purchase and payment dates). This mediated consumption is at the heart of the contemporary smart home and brings about the Perfect Day, because it becomes the language by which we see the world. The Perfect Day sets the parameters for what constitutes "perfect" based on preferred patterns of consumption and then forces users to see others and the world at large in its own terms only, hiding difference, removing emotion, and invalidating connection with other actual humans...thus removing us from humanity.
<4> While consumption is the prime smart house narrative, it is not the only one in operation. Throughout their development, smart houses and smart technology in general were traditionally based on futurism and were, as a result, necessarily spectacular in appearance. During many of its earliest iterations (including displays at the 1939 Worlds Fair, Disneyland's Home of Tomorrow, and in sales pitches for a variety of household appliances), "smart" was defined as futuristic, particularly in the technology's ability to perform automated tasks and personalize its operation for individual users. Furthermore, this automation also entailed a narrative of surveillance of its contents and occupants. If a smart house is to provide maximum personalization and automation, it has to maintain a strict surveillance over its its contents; it must know exactly what food is stored in the kitchen in order to automatically order groceries, just like it must know who is in the house in order to personalize music, art, or television choices. When this surveillance is tied into consumer culture (as in the automatic ordering of groceries), customization turns into enforcement/control of (in this instance) particular purchasing patterns. If smart houses ever want to become "homes," however, they have to be not spectacular and ultimately, Heckman argues, become "lifestyle technologies"; that is, they have to integrate themselves into the daily existences of their inhabitants and become invisible (or at least minimalist) in terms of interface, aesthetics, and environment. The spectacular technology and its controlling aspects still exist, but they resides underneath a layer of hegemonic mass acceptance akin to Stuart Hall's conception of "common-sense."
<5> Overall, Heckman's A Small World provides a clear history and cogent theorization of the smart house, from its earliest futuristic visions to the present day media-saturated model. Furthermore, by analyzing the current smart home as an example of new media, Heckman's implications grow from simply covering automation in the home to providing a framework for understanding contemporary media distribution and consumption in general. Indeed, this gives A Small World a tremendous realm of applicability across and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries; because the Perfect Day is in the end a mediated narrative of lifestyle, Heckman's study works as well for Culture Studies, new media critics, narrative theorists, and many social science disciplines as it would for those who study material culture
<6> Theoretically, A Small World achieves its breadth of scope by incorporating a tremendous array of critical approaches, including Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis, a complement of culture studies theories (from myth/symbol through postmodernism), and a philosophical analysis of the struggle between humanism and posthumanism. While this breathtaking range of theory does lead to some fairly dense moments (particularly in the final chapter, whose phenomenology and humanism/posthumanism discussions might require multiple read-throughs), Heckman manages to tie the wealth of approaches together into a coherent theoretical narrative that is as fascinating as it is far-reaching; his inversion of de Certeau to explain contemporary media's appropriation of the products of marginal culture is particularly clever.
<7> While Heckman views smart houses through a variety of theoretical lenses, A Small World ultimately relies on theories based on metaphors of conflict. By placing neoliberal capitalist consumption as the guiding force behind smart houses specifically and media in general, an analysis results where "everyday life is experienced as life in avoidance of institutional control" (154) and where the only allowable "forms of 'diversity'" are those "which do not conflict with neoliberal capitalist practices" (156). This focus on technology as an adjunct to the culture industry necessarily precludes (and refutes) the possibility for transcendent and emancipatory uses of technology (such as open source software). Furthermore, as consumers, the best option for battling the control of neoliberal capitalism is "a simple assertion of humanity—our right to live, love, eat, reproduce, speak, and die without enriching a middle-man, gatekeeper, racketeer, or landlord" (149). Heckman contrasts the Perfect Day with everyday life, but it is unclear exactly of what that life consists, other than those basic essential human functions. Furthermore, he also asserts that "even the perfectly mediated experience is, in the end, a mismatch with the sociality that we hope would prevail in a perfect world" (160), but there is no direct evidence that media and sociality are necessarily mutually exclusive.
<8> These minor quibbles aside, A Small World is an amazing accomplishment. Heckman has, aside from completing what will surely be hailed as a landmark study in the history of smart houses, manages to integrate a wide range of theories into a coherent and substantial narrative of the struggle of technology to integrate itself into the lives of consumers. This book has direct relevance beyond those studying automation and home technology, and is a vital read for anyone concerned with the incorporation of new media into contemporary culture.
Mike DuBose
Return to Top»