Imagining the thoughtful home: Google Nest and logics of domestic recording

ABSTRACT

The Google Nest home security system offers an array of cameras, sensors, and Internet-connected devices to allow homeowners to monitor and record the exterior and interior of their home and automate various functions of heating and cooling, lights, and other appliances through smartphone application control panels. This article analyzes how Google has worked to construct an imaginary around Nest through advertising and company blog posts from 2015 to 2021. Extending the extractive economies of Google’s search engine and other products to understand Nest cameras, we analyze how Google has positioned Nest as a device for both control and convenience within the home. Control suggests to homeowners that this system gives them greater capacity to secure their home, but only if they are willing to constantly engage the Nest system and allow Google to extract data from the home automatically. Convenience suggests that Nest allows easy, automated, and passive recording to capture things that happen within the home throughout the day. Through this analysis, we demonstrate how imaginaries around emergent smart home technologies purposefully mask the ways they give companies like Google the ability to extract data from the home.

KEYWORDS:

• Google
• Nest
• surveillance
• domestication
• imaginary
• recording

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carla White

Carla White ([email protected]) is a Graduate student in Clemson University’s Department of Communication.

James N. Gilmore

James N. Gilmore ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of media and technology studies in Clemson University’s Department of Communication. He researches the cultural politics of technologies, especially digital platforms, wearables, and infrastructures.