Digital home technologies and transformation of households

摘要

The basic issue I examine here is whether and how contemporary home life is being transformed with the arrival of new digital technologies.1 As new technologies diffuse into the home, new terminology has begun to emerge as, for example, in smart homes, home automation, digital home, digital living, networked home, home of the future, smart appliances and so on. To simplify the terminology, in this paper, I will use the term "digital home technologies" and smart home technologies interchangeably to describe all of them. Although digital home technologies have developed in different directions because of the types of industry players involved, some common themes underlie these developments. They all seem to point to a great sense of anticipation that home life as we have understood in the past two or three decades will undergo some fundamental changes. It is claimed that some of the changes may be the result of advances at the technological frontier.