Date of Award

6-1-2023

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology

Keywords

Citizen-Consumer;Governance;Responsibilization;Smart-Home Technology;Surveillance;Surveillant Assemblage

Supervisor

Randy Lippert

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This thesis explored the emergence of smart-home technologies, such as Amazon Ring, and investigated the impact of these technological devices in relation to surveillance, policing, and consumption practices. It asked to answer the overarching question: how is the home, through smart-home tech devices exemplified by Amazon Ring, being attached to the surveillant assemblage? Building on existing theories and concepts, including the surveillant assemblage (Ericson and Haggerty, 2000), responsibilization (Garland, 1996), and the citizen-consumer (Cohen, 2003), this thesis posited that the citizen-consumer has become responsibilized by both state agents and private corporations to consume smart-home technologies, and that this has consumption ultimately produced the expansion of the surveillant assemblage and the extension of governing powers for all three actors: the police, private corporations, and the citizen-consumer. Using triangulation as a research strategy (Heale and Forbes, 2013; Moran-Ellis et al., 2010), both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. These methods included deriving descriptive statistics and conducting textual analysis to identify repetitiveness in the words and themes used in the representation and depiction of smart-home technologies. This thesis has made several significant contributions to existing literatures by demonstrating the rapid increase in police access and use of smart-home technology and related data; discerning the citizen-consumer’s escalating role in surveillance engagement; establishing many deleterious effects of increasing device use; and identifying the attachment of new nodes and networks to the surveillant assemblage.

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