In recent years, networked devices have taken an ever tighter hold of people's everyday lives. The tech companies are frantically competing to grab people's attention and secure a place in their daily routines. In this short paper, I elaborat further a key finding from an analysis of Finnish press coverage on Google Glass between 2012 and 2015. The concept of pre-domestication is used to discuss the ways in which we are invited and persuaded by the media discourse to integrate ourselves in the carefully orchestrated digital environment. It is shown how the news coverage deprives potential new users of digital technology a chance to evaluate the underpinnings of the device, the attachments to data harvesting, and the practices of hooking attention. In the paper, the implications of contemporary computational imaginaries as (re)produced and circulated in the mainstream media are reflected, thereby shedding light on and opening possibilities to criticize the politics of mediated pre-domestication.
By the end of 2010s, networked digital technologies have become fundamentally
intertwined in people’s everyday lives and interactions. Still, as recent studies have
demonstrated, people lack understanding of their digital environment. For example, they are
not aware of what data are harvested on them, with whom the data are shared, and how
the data are used [
In this paper, I use the concept of pre-domestication to discuss how technology
becomes part of people’s daily routines and environments. With pre-domestication I refer
to the phase in technology adoption that takes place before people get to domesticate
and appropriate new technology more concretely into their everyday. Studying
appropriation of technology through media representations has been in the margins of
domestication theory (e.g. [
I use as an example the mediated pre-domestication of Google Glass, a wearable
miniature computer actively developed by Google 2012–2015. The paper presents and
further elaborates the key finding from an extensive discursive narratological analysisi
on the meaning making opportunities Finnish news readers were offered regarding the
new device and the implicated technosocial order. In a previous publication [
In the Finnish press, the leading role in the pre-domesticating saga of Google Glass
was cast to Google itself together with the supporters of its techno-optimistic rhetoric.
The only occasion when Google Glass was presented in terms of its technological
infrastructure was when US Congress members approached Google to learn more about
the privacy implications of the new product [
Besides these few news items, the Finnish press did not approach Project Glass as
part of the technological infrastructure created by Google. Hence, in the
pre-domestication of Google Glass it was disregarded that Google has become a taken-for-granted
part of the everyday in a global scale, Google.com being the most visited website in the
world [
In the news, the company’s motivation to develop a head-mounted device was not
discussed. There reigned a silence over Google’s openly expressed ambition to push
the boundaries as far as possible. As Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt put it back in
2010, company’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it. In other
words, Finnish readers were not alerted to the fact that the company is interested in
taking surveillance, control, and manipulation as far as the public and politicians will
let it [
In addition, the new product was not linked as a continuation to Google’s
investments in recent years. As it is, the acquisitions and investments that include drones,
robot cars, home smart devices, and machine learning [
In the press coverage, Google was offered space to present how Glass solves
problems of the everyday. The new device was promoted as a solution to the anti-sociality
caused by extensive use of smartphones [
My conclusion is that the way the Finnish press pre-domesticated Google Glass
promoted the normalization of an ideology according to which corporations can hide both
the technical specifics and the underlying political economy of their devices (see also
[
In the process of digitalization, infrastructures of social life have become increasingly inconspicuous. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to perceive how power works with regard to technologically mediated connections, ownership, and everyday routines. The results of my analysis support this inconspicuousness and give reason to direct critical attention to the ways in which the mediated pre-domestication cultivates ‘infrastructural ignorance’. Indeed, I find it crucial to expose and contemplate the intertwinements of the structuring of our everyday by the digital, its simultaneously allencompassing role and taken-for-grantedness in public discussion. My analysis demonstrated the importance of articulating the ideological aspects of mediated pre-domestication. It underlined the need to ask questions that are bypassed in public discourse in order to enable reflection on the persuasions of the digital.
i My data consist of 283 news items on Google Glass published in 21 Finnish publications between 2012, ranging from the first news item on Google Glass published in Finland until January 2015 when Google announced that the development is stopped until further notice. Half of the publications are specialized in technology and electronics, and the other half consists of morning newspapers, tabloids, online news publications, and online news from television and radio channels. The majority (4/5) of news on Google Glass were published on technology and electronics publications. Publications and number of news items on Google Glass in the brackets: 3T (2), Aamulehti (2), Digitoday (60), Elektroniikkalehti (2), Helsingin Sanomat (6), Iltalehti (5), Ilta- Sanomat (10), It-viikko (12), Kaleva (4), MBnet (5), MikroPC (15), Mobiili.fi (25), MPC (25), MTV3 (13), Taloussanomat (4), Tekniikka & Talous (16), Tietokone (11), Tietoviikko (51), Turun Sanomat (1), Uusi Suomi (2), Yle (1) ja YleX (10).