This dissertation is about the increasing technologization of domestic spaces and the implications for human-technology sociality that are ‘built-into’ ICT-enabled domestic spaces and technologies. Its central focus is the socio-cultural development of the networked home in terms of convergences of and between humans and technologies throughout the twentieth century. The dissertation considers electricity, automobility, and the informationalization of domestic spaces as necessary conditions for the emergence of the contemporary networked home. Acknowledging the broader context of changes in capitalism, the dissertation focuses upon sociotechnical change represented within ordinary and popular visions of domestic spaces that circulated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To this end, it traces the long history of the networked home between 1906 and 2006 in two mass circulation magazines (and in appliance and home industry research materials between 1993 and 2008), and analyzes the advertisements, advice columns, and research reports contained therein. A framework drawn from social studies of technology, theories of the network society, and of consumption is used to address several broad questions: What are the implications of the scripted, built-in, and assumed characteristics of the relationships between humans and technologies in domestic spaces? What do these mean for the ways in which domestic spaces are configured? What lessons for the future of sociality between and among humans and technologies in and around domestic spaces might be taken from prior configurations? The hybrid sociality that is created by combinations of ICTs, domestic spaces and appliances, and human users relies upon ‘built-in’ scripts to function, layers of which – including the competences, skill sets, and preferred uses – become sedimented and help to facilitate the introduction, normalization, and domestication of novel technologies. By understanding how these built-in scripts have worked in technologized homes since 1906, this dissertation is an important step toward a sociological account of the next emerging trend in domestic technologies: those concerned with environmental sustainability. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-10 18:06:17.221

My dissertation emerges from a curiosity about the mundane objects and machines with which we live and it pauses in Britain’s kitchens to ask what we might learn from looking in the fridge. Considered by many to be a rather ordinary and unremarkable appliance, the refrigerator forms a virtually ubiquitous backdrop to routine activities of feeding, provisioning and storing, but rarely is it brought into explicit focus. This study traces the ‘career’ of the mechanical refrigerator and is based upon interviews and archival work in Britain. I unravel intersecting histories and geographies of cooling, discuss a global trade in ice, explore changing understanding of the nature of heat and cold and show how varied ideas and technologies contributed to achieving the creation of artificial cold. The means by which these techniques were translated into the home is central to my discussion and I show how the domestication of refrigeration also played a role in the reconfiguration of associated practices, such as freezing, shopping and eating. I consider the process of normalisation through which refrigerators shifted category from novel products to essential appliances and argue that in many ways the refrigerator has now become integral to the constitution of domestic space. My research follows the lifecourse of the refrigerator and its journeys through multiple sites and spaces, enabling me to analyse diverse refrigerator knowledges and practices from repair shops and recycling facilities to scrap yards and museums, in addition to the home. Although using a refrigerator is frequently dismissed as something ‘self-evident’ or ‘obvious,’ I argue that fridge practices are not innate but learned. I explore ways in which these knowledges travel and pay particular attention to the translation of scientific and technical knowledges into domestic contexts. The ‘reach’ of the domestic refrigerator is considerable and I use one of the more notorious moments in its career, when refrigerators were implicated in global climate change, as a way to show how day to day activities like chilling milk and lettuce can have far-reaching effects at a range of scales.

My dissertation emerges from a curiosity about the mundane objects and machines with which we live and it pauses in Britain’s kitchens to ask what we might learn from looking in the fridge. Considered by many to be a rather ordinary and unremarkable appliance, the refrigerator forms a virtually ubiquitous backdrop to routine activities of feeding, provisioning and storing, but rarely is it brought into explicit focus. This study traces the ‘career’ of the mechanical refrigerator and is based upon interviews and archival work in Britain. I unravel intersecting histories and geographies of cooling, discuss a global trade in ice, explore changing understanding of the nature of heat and cold and show how varied ideas and technologies contributed to achieving the creation of artificial cold. The means by which these techniques were translated into the home is central to my discussion and I show how the domestication of refrigeration also played a role in the reconfiguration of associated practices, such as freezing, shopping and eating. I consider the process of normalisation through which refrigerators shifted category from novel products to essential appliances and argue that in many ways the refrigerator has now become integral to the constitution of domestic space. My research follows the lifecourse of the refrigerator and its journeys through multiple sites and spaces, enabling me to analyse diverse refrigerator knowledges and practices from repair shops and recycling facilities to scrap yards and museums, in addition to the home. Although using a refrigerator is frequently dismissed as something ‘self-evident’ or ‘obvious,’ I argue that fridge practices are not innate but learned. I explore ways in which these knowledges travel and pay particular attention to the translation of scientific and technical knowledges into domestic contexts. The ‘reach’ of the domestic refrigerator is considerable and I use one of the more notorious moments in its career, when refrigerators were implicated in global climate change, as a way to show how day to day activities like chilling milk and lettuce can have far-reaching effects at a range of scales.

My dissertation emerges from a curiosity about the mundane objects and machines with which we live and it pauses in Britain’s kitchens to ask what we might learn from looking in the fridge. Considered by many to be a rather ordinary and unremarkable appliance, the refrigerator forms a virtually ubiquitous backdrop to routine activities of feeding, provisioning and storing, but rarely is it brought into explicit focus. This study traces the ‘career’ of the mechanical refrigerator and is based upon interviews and archival work in Britain. I unravel intersecting histories and geographies of cooling, discuss a global trade in ice, explore changing understanding of the nature of heat and cold and show how varied ideas and technologies contributed to achieving the creation of artificial cold. The means by which these techniques were translated into the home is central to my discussion and I show how the domestication of refrigeration also played a role in the reconfiguration of associated practices, such as freezing, shopping and eating. I consider the process of normalisation through which refrigerators shifted category from novel products to essential appliances and argue that in many ways the refrigerator has now become integral to the constitution of domestic space. My research follows the lifecourse of the refrigerator and its journeys through multiple sites and spaces, enabling me to analyse diverse refrigerator knowledges and practices from repair shops and recycling facilities to scrap yards and museums, in addition to the home. Although using a refrigerator is frequently dismissed as something ‘self-evident’ or ‘obvious,’ I argue that fridge practices are not innate but learned. I explore ways in which these knowledges travel and pay particular attention to the translation of scientific and technical knowledges into domestic contexts. The ‘reach’ of the domestic refrigerator is considerable and I use one of the more notorious moments in its career, when refrigerators were implicated in global climate change, as a way to show how day to day activities like chilling milk and lettuce can have far-reaching effects at a range of scales. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

In the twentieth century, the target market for household technologies was identified and labeled "Mrs. Consumer," and the lifestyle, values, and ideals attributed to her guided household technology marketing throughout the century. Bonnie Fox conducted an investigation into household technology marketing techniques, using advertisements in Ladies Home Journal (LHJ) as her source material. I argue here that, because of the homogenous, mostly-white readership of LHJ, Fox's use of only LHJ advertisements limited some of the conclusions she could draw about Mrs. Consumer's lifestyle, values, and ideals. This thesis studies household technology advertisements in Ebony magazine and current literature about the black American experience to identify the impact of including race in the evaluation of household technology advertising in twentieth century America. In particular, this thesis addresses Mrs. Consumer's extensibility across race; Ebony's household technology advertisements' treatment of segregation, integration, assimilation, and racial pride; and those advertisements' handling of the public opinion that the twentieth century American black family structure was "pathological." This research identifies similarities and differences between the advertisement practices in Ebony and LHJ in those areas of interest, concluding that the black American housewife's home experience was more likely to be divergent from Mrs. Consumer's attributed reality and that Ebony's advertisers tended toward the aspirational when modeling and scripting household technology advertisements. / Master of Science

The term "memory-craft" refers to arts and crafts media where personal memorabilia and journaling are combined and assembled into book form. Examples of memory-crafts include scrapbooks, art journals, and altered books. Traditionally, women have been the primary assemblers of memory-crafts, using this form as a method of autobiography and genealogical archiving. Memory-crafting is often associated with the amateur home-crafter, and while historians have long understood its cultural significance, academia has not properly considered memory-craft as a type of alternative discourse. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of memory-crafting as a non-traditional method of writing, especially among women who use it to record personal and familial narratives. Just as women are usually the primary care-takers of the family, through memory-craft they also become responsible for collecting and preserving memories, which would otherwise become lost. These memories of the everyday--birthday parties, family vacations, and wedding anniversaries--grow to be culturally significant over time. Through the use of domestic technology, which today includes both paper scraps and home computer systems, memory-crafts assist in the interpretation of the present and provide insight into the past. To help explore the connection between domestic technology and memory-crafts, I have organized this study into four themes: history and memory-craft; women and domestic technology; feminist literary autobiography and memoir; and feminism and hypermedia. My approach is a mixture of fictionalized personal narrative and analysis loosely modeled after Writing Machines by N. Katherine Halyes and Alias Olympia by Eunice Lipton. Just as I discuss experimental methods of writing in the form of memory-crafting, I also use an experimental writing technique which gathers from personal memories in the form of a persona named Tess and from the life of my Great Aunt Mamie Veach Dudley. Mamie's journals and letter to her sister document the memories of the Dudleys including a tragic double suicide, which still haunts the Dudleys almost 100 years later. As narrator and storyteller, my stories connect to those documented by Mamie and link the past to the present. Along with Mamie's family records, I consider other memory-related works by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, and Emily Dickinson, and I also examine contemporary memory-crafters such as those constructed by altered book artists Tom Phillips and Judith Margolis. Digital memory-craft is another source of support for my argument, and I look at web groups and bloggers. For example, I discuss the Wish Jar Journal, a weblog written by illustrator Keri Smith, where she journals her life and creative process and often mixes textual and visual elements in her blog posts. Writer and blogger Heather Armstrong from Dooce.com is another case study included in this project as her blog is an example of documenting familial events and memoir. Because of their fragmented formats and narrative elements, hardcopy and digitally-based memory-crafts become artifacts which combine text and visual elements to tell a story and pass on knowledge of the everyday through the mixture of text and domestic technology. Memory-craft construction does not follow conventional writing models. Therefore, this provides opportunity for experimentation by those writers who have traditionally been removed from established rhetorical writing methods.