The paper presents research results emerging from the analysis of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) log data. Based on the assumption that media and data, as part of practice, are produced and used cooperatively, the paper discusses how IPA log data can be used to analyze (1) how the IPA systems operate through their connection to platforms and infrastructures, (2) how the dialog systems are designed today and (3) how users integrate them into their everyday social interaction. It also asks in which everyday practical contexts the IPA are placed on the system side and on the user side, and how privacy issues in particular are negotiated. It is argued that, in order to be able to investigate these questions, the technical-institutional and the cultural-theoretical perspective on media, which is common in German media linguistics, has to be complemented by a more fundamental, i.e. social-theoretical and interactionist perspective.
The article takes its starting point with heuristics, according to which agency is not to be seen as something that certain ontological entities stably do or do not possess. Rather, it is assumed that agency, especially in voice-based exchange with smart speaker technology, is a dynamic accomplishment, basically bound to the local (linguistic) practices carried out by or rather involving contributions by participants with unequal resources for participating. Following Hirschauer (2016), we distinguish between levels of activity both on an active-passive spectrum as well as on a proactive-inhibitive spectrum and reconstruct empirically against that background how in particular the smart speaker can appear in different situations and contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of agency relating the observed practices on the one hand and against the background of a broader context of agency as media theory has it on the other, including domestication theory as well as recent smart home technologies and platform logics.
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