Summary: Smart phones, smart boards, smart homes…. every technology is apparently so darn smart, but how are we keeping up with these gadgets ourselves? Smart technologies are referred to as such because they seem intelligent enough to know about our personal needs, desires, and curiosities and they cater their computational functions to better serve us as individuals. They know us through the data we generate about our lives and appetites, but of course, that means they’re left with a database of info on us, the tasty consumer, to sell to hungry corporations. Dr. Sarah Kember explains what this looks like today with the emergence of the smart home, where ubiquitous computing is rebranded as ambient intelligence, and sold as an invisible but necessary part of domestic life for the future. There is some crazy mic hissing in parts of this piece! // Dr. Sarah Kember is a writer and academic. Her work incorporates new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. She is a Professor in New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. Kember has recently published her first novel, The Optical Effects of Lightning (Wild Wolf Publishing, 2011) having previously written a short story ‘The Mysterious Case of Mr Charles D. Levy’ (Ether Books, 2010) which was a number two bestseller for Ether Books in the summer of 2010. In the same year, Kember also published an experimental piece called ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’ (Culture Machine, Vol. 11) which she is currently developing as a film and transmedia project with a former student on her MA Digital Media (Sebastian Melo). Kember has recently edited an open access electronic book entitled Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) which includes the full text of all of Percival Lowell’s writing on Mars as well as H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds. Kember has co-authored a monograph (with Joanna Zylinska) entitled Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT Press, forthcoming) which is based on a course she teaches to undergraduates and postgraduates at Goldsmiths. Previous publications include: Virtual Anxiety. Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester University Press, 1998); Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 2003) and the co-edited volume Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism (Sage, 2006).
