In the blog post Catching the vibe Martina Huynh reflects on the idea of social awareness based on the LAUREN art project. In this project artist and programmer Lauren Lee McCarthy developed a series of smart devices, including a security camera, smart speaker and smart power socket, that are operated by the artist herself at a distance instead of an automated computer system. This meant that she is always observing the participant’s life in case the user want to call out a command or activate something based on the habits of the users. In this case McCarthy emulates the property of social awareness because she always has to read the room to make sure that the inhabitant stays comfortable.
She couples this artwork mainly to the property of social awareness in creatures and how observing and keeping others in mind — in this case the inhabitants of the houses — can be ‘learned’ to perform the right actions to set the right tone. In this case the connection to autism was also very relevant since this is an actual case in humans where one also has to consciously learn these patterns, while everybody otherwise expects this to come naturally.
But there were some some other aspects that I missed in the post that were also very applicable to this work. For instance Huynh noted the fact that participants often forgot they were really watched and got “comfortable treating her in a similar way to conventional objects.” This really is not all too surprising. We have service workers all the time around us, sometimes in our homes but certainly in public places like universities, government buildings and businesses who do manual and/or emotional labour and who we’d barely notice. The same can be said about the workers overseas we've outsourced the fabrication of our goods to in conditions that are far from ideal. Also technological services like social media or smart home appliances are very much reliant on human labour to create training data to train AI-models, look at gruesome images for content moderation — as can be seen in a documentary like The Cleaners — or to review audio queries for smart home appliances. This already lead to controversy in 2019 when, according to ARS Technica, recordings were leaked of Google employees listening to your smart speaker queries from their Google Home Assistant.
This brings me to the main aspect that I missed. In terms of technology usage: we’ve often — albeit unconsciously — already accepted that we care more about the convenience than the privacy impact of a product we use. We already involve many technological services in our lives from which we know that every usage statistic and input we give it is used to get to know us and to capture us in user profiles, which is automatically used to influence your behaviour and sell you more products. And as we saw in the Google Home controversy but also the fact that Tesla employees shared highly sensitive videos filmed by the cameras of customer-owned Tesla vehicles tech companies are already able to monitor their microphones and cameras we voluntarily put into our home. It is therefore no surprise that the participants in the LAUREN project don’t treat the artists’s observing smart home appliances as regular object, because they already are.