The Ladies' Home Journal, 'How America Lives' and the Limits of Cultural Diversity

Internet of Torment: The Governance of Smart Home Technologies Against Technology-Facilitated Violence

“…Moreover, almost all the advertisements contain photos of white, presumably middle to upper class women (due to the prices of these technologies). During this time, domestic technology advertising and women's magazines idealized the "white, middleclass family" and were not representative of other minority groups and classes (Walker, 2000).…”

“…the 1950s (Walker, 2000), there are still remnants of this vision today, whether purposefully or subconsciously.…”

“…On a micro scale, this may be misconstrued as a personal inconvenience for certain users. More broadly, this flaw is reflective of macro-scale cultural biases and individual subjectivities as well as meso and macro scale corporate visions or constructions of idealized or 'typical' users, resulting in misunderstandings of real users, as seen in Chapter 2.1 when discussing the idealized white, middle-class family of post-war electric appliance marketing and home journals (Walker, 2000) and misunderstanding of women's labour by male electric appliance designers (Berg, 1999;Cockburn, 1993;Cockburn, 1997). Directly relating this to smart home TFV, it becomes clear how the risk of unintended uses may be blurred when a technology is created with a specific user (as seen in the family-oriented visions of Google discussed in section 5.1.1.)…”