Organized by the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies

Date: Thursday, October 6, 2022
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: GSE&IS Room 111
Reception and refreshments to follow in the IS Salon.

“More peace of mind as your loved ones need more care.” This tag line appears in large, bolded letters on Amazon’s website advertising their service, Alexa Together. Described as a “new way to provide support for your loved ones, keeping you together even when you’re apart,” this “caregiving service” requires a subscription and an Amazon Echo device to facilitate the remote support of elderly family members, including control of household devices and increased surveillance opportunities. Using Alexa Together as one example, I consider how the frame of caregiving may be leveraged to “smooth” people’s concerns about privacy and data gathering in voice assistants, and justify intensified surveillance for elder adults and disabled family members as a function of market segmentation. This talk will explore
“caring” as a discursive frame for AI voice assistants that creates targeted opportunities for data extraction in the home, further entangling intimate activities within the home with the big data assemblages that AI urbanism relies on for algorithmic decision making in urban living and governance.

Questions? Email: swood@c2i2.ucla.edu