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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 4(4): 385–411
[1367-8779(200112)4:4; 385–411; 020132]

Media homes
Then and now

● Lynn Spigel
University of Southern California, USA

ABSTRACT ● This article synthesizes Spigel’s research on the introduction

of television and new technologies into the home. It looks at changing

conceptions of ‘media households’ over the course of the last 50 years. The ‘home
theater’ represents the media house of the 1950s; the ‘mobile home’ corresponds
to the introduction of portable television in the 1960s; and the ‘smart home’ is
the contemporary model of digital domesticity. The article considers how these
changing models of home incorporate reigning middle class ideologies about
family life for their respective times. ●

KEYWORDS ● home of tomorrow ● home office ● home theater ●

mobile home ● new technology ● nostalgia ● portable TV ● smart home

● suburbs

The energy crisis in California is haunting my house. My computer goes

numb. The cable system whimpers. The alarm system dims and the doors
go pale with fear. Wired for the future, my house regresses to its primitive
state. Like the unplugged HAL of 2001, it sings – without electric – a simple
nursery rhyme in place of the high-tech orchestration it once delivered on
demand. It takes an energy crisis to remember how hard things were when
life was simpler.
While the troubles of a media-reliant media professor are obviously not
all that compelling, the California blackouts do bring to light the intricate
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bond between electronic media and everyday life in the modern/postmodern

Western world. As so many scholars have shown, since the advent of
modern communications media, domesticity has largely been defined by the
transport of data in and out the home. From Edward Bellamy’s pneumonic
tubes in Looking Backward to Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’ to Bill
Gates’s digitally powered Seattle fortress, the media-saturated ‘home of
tomorrow’ is a constituent and recurring theme in modern ideals of
progress. Whether for leisure, labor, or surveillance, the media home is ‘a
whole way of life’ for privileged populations.
What is perhaps less obvious about this whole way of life are the subtle
yet compelling changes in the ways that the ideal media house has been con-
ceptualized through time. In this article, I want to trace shifting articula-
tions between housing and electronic media by looking at three cultural
metaphors through which domesticity and media have been imagined across
the postwar decades.1 Drawing together some of my previous work on tele-
vision and domestic space, the following pages provide a genealogy of ideas
about domesticity in a media saturated world. Focusing especially on the
postwar US context, I propose that the media home has historically been
based on three related – if sometimes incompatible – concepts: theatricality,
mobility, and sentience. These concepts have been central to the increas-
ingly-linked histories of domestic architecture and electronic communi-
cations, and they have materialized in three distinct media housing types:
the ‘home theater’, the ‘mobile home’ and, more recently, the ‘smart home’
of the digital future.

From home theater to mobile home

In the 1950s, when television was hailed as a new ‘entertainment’ and ‘infor-
mation’ medium, two central and often connected conceptual frameworks
were written into its cultural logics and narrative forms. These frameworks,
which I will refer to as ‘theatricality’ and ‘mobility’, were constitutive of vir-
tually all statements about TV, statements generated by the industry, adver-
tisers, policy-makers, artists, critics, and social scientists and engineers.
Theatricality and mobility have not only permeated, but in fact they are gen-
erative of, television’s object and cultural form.
During the period of its early installation after the Second World War,
popular literature, intellectuals, and corporate executives spoke of tele-
vision as both a ‘home theater’ that brought spectator amusements into the
living room, and as a ‘window on the world’ that would imaginatively
transport viewers across the globe. Over the course of the last 50 years,
theatricality and mobility have continued to generate the ways in which we
speak about television and the related technologies of cable, satellites, and
most recently, the internet. Consumer magazines such as Home Theater still
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package television through notions of theatricality, while terms like

‘surfing’ or ‘information superhighway’ serve as the contemporary version
of a much older fantasy about travel to distant locales that telecommuni-
cation has historically offered its publics.
Given the fact that broadcasting was developed in the US for household
uses, it is perhaps no coincidence that theatricality and mobility have also
been central metaphors for the middle class home and bourgeois family (see
Spigel, 1997a). Since Victorian times, the theater was a central organizing
period for domestic architecture and family relations. Architects, plan-book
writers, religious leaders, domestic engineers, women’s magazines, and
books on interior decor variously imagined the bourgeois home as a stage
on which a set of highly conventionalized social roles were played by family
members and guests alike.
This theatrical conception of the home and human subjectivity within
it carried through from the Victorian era to modern housing design. In
her work on modernist architect Adolph Loos, Beatriz Colomina has
shown that the exclusive client-built homes of that genre were organized
around notions of residence based on the performative nature of every-
day life and related notions of visual pleasure (1990, 1992, 1996).
Although presented through mass production economies and designs that
appealed to middle class tastes, the housing designs of the postwar suburb
echoed these earlier modernist homes, emphasizing theatricality and visu-
ality as central structural principles. In this respect, as I have argued pre-
viously, television was the popular activity par excellence through which
the home theater was envisioned (see Spigel, 1992). The arrangement of
television in domestic space was guided by
theatrical principles of set decoration and
optimal audience pleasure, and television
itself was often promoted as a substitute
for theater-going in the public sphere (see
Figure 1).
So, too, in the context of suburban
migration, television was imagined as a
romantic ‘date’. Ads depicted glamorously
dressed couples posed before their TV sets
as if they were out for a night on the town
(see Figure 2).2
While television was thus promoted as an
imaginary night out on the town, this home
theater model just as often appealed to a
nostalgic return to sedentary family values.
Television spectators were typically pic-
Fig 1 tured in the advertising convention of the
‘family circle’ gathered around the living
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room console in sentimental poses (see, for

example, House Beautiful, 1949, p. 1) (see
Figure 3).
In this sense, advertisers promised that
television would negotiate the twin desires
for participation in the public world and
private family lifestyles. TV offered imagin-
ary transport to urban spaces while allow-
ing family members to remain in the safe
space of the suburban home.
To be sure, as I argue elsewhere, these
utopian dreams of television had a more
dystopian counterpart. Sociological studies
showed that
women felt
Fig 2 isolated in
their new
TV homes.
Popular magazines, films, and even tele-
vision programs spoke of women’s sense of
confinement in their home theaters. Men
were portrayed as lazy spectators whose
more industrious wives vied hopelessly for
their attention (see for example, Better
Homes and Gardens, February 1952, p.
154) (see Figure 4).
Meanwhile, women’s magazines warned
about family fights over television programs
and advised parents of the dangers that TV
might pose to children (which included
everything from passive addiction to violent Fig 3

rage). In this regard, the home

theater was accompanied by both
utopian visions and middle-class
anxieties about the future of family
life and in particular, the future of
gender and generational relations in
the home (see Spigel, 1992).
Although the home theater con-
tinues to define modes of domestic
Fig 4 architecture and electronic culture,
by the end of the 1950s this
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Spigel ● Media homes 389

metaphor for domesticity and domestic communications began to make way

for a new set of metaphors that pictured the house as a vehicle for trans-
port, or what I am calling a ‘mobile home’. At a time when Americans were
obsessed with the possibility of satellite technologies and outer space travel,
this mobile model of domesticity was especially realized in images that
depicted the home as a rocket.3
Richard T. Foster’s Carrousel House is a good example of the new look
in space-age media houses (see Figure 5).
Pictured in the pages of
Look magazine, this round
glass home was essentially a
giant viewmaster that rotated
360 degrees on a cast concrete
base. At the push of a button,
the residents could see a ‘cin-
eramic view of the New
England countryside’ in 48
minutes, as the drama of
nature passed slowly by. As
Fig 5 Foster boasted: ‘We can change
our view as easily as we change
the channel of our TV set.’
Meanwhile, in its photo-
layout, Look mixed this
metaphor of home-as-theater with the then emergent metaphor of satellite
design. Claiming that the Carrousel House
had a ‘spaceship look’, Look displayed the
home as if it were a UFO, hovering like an
alien in a lonely orange landscape (27 May
1969, pp. 32–4).
While this spinning saucer was clearly out
of the price range of most of Look’s readers,
a few simple home improvements could
retool ordinary homes for the future. Ads
for all sorts of household products – from
new ‘space-age porches’ to the astronaut-
endorsed breakfast drink Tang – showed
consumers how to sweep away the tacky
remnants of 1950s domesticity and make
way for decor that gestured toward the
planets. Women’s magazines advertised
remodeling kits that allowed residents to
add new ‘space-age porches’ to their ranch- Fig 6
style homes, while recipes for ‘blast off
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burgers’ or space-age cakes decorated cooking columns of home magazines

(see Figure 6).
While obviously a marketing gimmick devised to make people buy new
domestic trappings, the gimmick was probably effective because it tied what
is typically devalorized as ‘feminine’, decorative, trivial pursuits to the so-
called ‘higher’, ‘masculine’ goals of national supremacy and citizenship. In
other words, this new and improved family home validated itself through
appeals to progress; no longer a place of insular stasis, the home was now
a motor for change. This new space-age imagery
must have been particularly appealing in the
midst of the widespread attacks on the suburbs
that were increasingly launched by both intellec-
tual and popular culture. Books such as The Split-
Level Trap (Gordon, et al. 1960) and The Crack
in the Picture Window (Keats, 1956) described
the new suburbs as unwelcoming, conformer-ori-
ented, stressful places packed with tribes of neu-
rotic housewives and beleaguered, unloved men
(see Figure 7).
In this context, the new imagery of space-age
domesticity signaled a break with the past. Mim-
icking the ideals of Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’, and
especially his emphasis on space travel as a sign
of ultimate national progress, the space-age home
Fig 7
gave private life a public purpose. Most import-
ant to this space-age home was the display of new
technologies, and in particular, television’s
newest object form, the portable receiver (See Figures 8 and 9).

Fig 8 Fig 9
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From living room console to portable TV

With the advent of transistors in the late 1950s,

television sets sprouted wheels. As Sony’s
‘Drive-in Television’ suggests, the new mini-
portables were advertised through metaphors of
transport (Life, 6 June 1967, p. 103). Advertis-
ers insisted that unlike the old console models,
the new portable sets would transport viewers
to exciting, even ‘taboo’, spaces outside the con-
fines of 1950s domesticity.4 Indeed, portability
opened up a whole new set of cultural fantasies
about television and the pleasure to be derived
from watching TV – fantasies based on the
imaginary possibility of leaving, rather than
Fig 10 staying, home.
At the most basic level, the move away from
domestic enclosures was written onto television
technology itself. Names like the General Elec-
tric ‘Adventurer’, the Zenith ‘Jetliner’, and the RCA ‘Globe Trotter’ spoke
to the new emphasis on active leisure and imaginary travel away from home.
And rather than the older woodgrained furniture models, numerous manu-
facturers designed portable cabinets to look like luggage (see Figure 11).
Other ads boasted that mini-portables could be taken outside – not only
in cars, but also to the beach, to barbecues, or to picnics.
The stress on mobility made portable
television (or at least the fantasies sur-
rounding it) quite different from its 1950s
console predecessors. While early adver-
tising promised viewers that TV would
strengthen family ties by bringing the
theater into the living room, represen-
tations of portable receivers inverted this
logic. Rather than incorporating views of
public entertainment into the home, now
television promised to take the interior
world outdoors. In this regard, we might
say that what Raymond Williams referred
to as communication technology’s capac-
ity for mobile privatization – its promise
to link the private family home with the
modern industrial city – was now
inverted into a related ideal of privatized Fig 11
mobility.
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Williams (1975), we can recall, developed the concept of mobile privati-

zation in order to explain television’s rise as a technology and cultural form.
In this context, he uses the idea of mobile privatization to describe the inher-
ent paradox entailed in two contradictory yet intimately connected modes
of modern social life: geographic mobility (realized through technologies of
communication and transportation) and privatization (realized through
domestic architecture and community planning). He locates the roots of this
paradox in the changes wrought by the industrial revolution. After indus-
trialization, people no longer experience a rooted existence in small agri-
cultural communities. Instead, in a society organized around large urban
centers, people live in a highly mobile world where communities are joined
together through transportation and communication systems. At the same
time, since industrialization, there has been an increased emphasis on the
ideology of privacy, an ideology that materialized in the private family
home. Nevertheless, the private family has always depended on the public
sphere for funding, maintenance, and information about the world. Broad-
casting, Williams argues, serves as the resolution to this contradiction
insofar as it brings a picture of the outside world into the private home. It
gives people a sense of traveling to distant places and having access to
information and entertainment in the public sphere, even as they receive this
in the confines of their own domestic interiors.
In the 1960s, the paradox of mobile privatization that Williams described
still structured the statements that people made about television. However,
the inversion I refer to as ‘privatized mobility’ characterized a peculiar shift
of emphasis. Rather than experiencing the domicile as a window on the
world that brought public life indoors, the resident experienced the home
as a vehicular form, a mode of transport in and of itself that allowed people
to take private life outdoors.
In fact, privatized mobility extended beyond the case of television per se;
it was written into architectural styles and decorative practices. New
‘indoor–outdoor’ products boasted of their ability to transform domesticity
(and the civilizing customs it implied) into rustic, outdoor lifestyles. In 1966,
Ladies Home Journal included an article on a new line of sleeping bags that
allowed for an ‘indoor camp-out’. The Journal told readers that the sleep-
ing bags were ‘an adventure for the whole family. . . . The ideal campsite,
of course, the floor’. The accompanying photograph to this indoor–outdoor
fantasy was a domestic scene in which two children nestled up next to each
other in their bandanna-patterned sleeping bags while ‘Dad’, lying in his
own bag, watched a miniature portable TV.5
In tune with this indoor–outdoor aesthetic, ads for television sets pro-
moted the ability of TV to merge domestic space with the landscape. In the
early 1960s, Motorola’s advertising campaign for hi-fi, table, and portable
models featured brilliantly-rendered upper class homes that incorporated
dramatic landscapes into the living room. Sporting the slogan, ‘Fresh from
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Motorola’, the ads depicted the home as a nature retreat. A 1963 ad shows
a house made entirely of glass and shaped like a perisphere (Life, 29 March
1963, pp. 40–1). The glass home functions as a series of views through
which we see hillsides, an ocean, and two large rocks near the shore. The
seaside motif continues thematically into the interior space as a rock for-
mation occupies the center of the living room where it forms a kind of altar
for a TV set. Steps of flagstone and vegetation lead up to a hi-fi/TV console
(see Figure 12).
Other ads in this ‘Fresh from Motorola’
series depict the activity of television watching
as a kind of outdoor sport. A 1963 ad shows a
portable receiver in a dome-shaped pool house
(Life, 25 January 1963, pp. 64–5). Placed at the
edge of the pool, the portable set is tuned to an
exercise program that pictures a female figure
stretching her body. Meanwhile, in the fore-
ground of the ad, a woman dressed in a leotard
imitates the action on screen. This ad for the
portable model thus carries the Motorola series
to its logical extreme. Portability allows the
woman literally to carry her television pleasures
Fig 12 outside the home where she becomes an active,
rather than a passive, viewer. Her body, just as
the receiver itself, is placed in motion (see
Figure 13).
In ads such as these, portability is more
than a technological contraption: it serves
to define not only the receiver but also the
experience of television spectatorship itself.
Portability is thus portrayed as a concep-
tual design for living – a mode of experi-
ence – that became the dominant model for
television culture in the 1960s. Distinct
from the sedentary domestic culture of the
1950s, and the passive model of spectator-
ship implied by the ‘home theater’,
portable TV assumed an active viewer, a
mobile subject. As Zenith proclaimed in
1964, portables were ‘for people on the go’
(Life, 15 May 1964, pp. 54–5). Advertisers
promised that the new ‘mini-portables’
were lightweight companions for nature
hikes, boat rides, and all sorts of rustic Fig 13
pleasures. Some manufacturers even sold
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their sets with special ‘weather-resistant’

attachments such as sunshields (see Figure
14).
Thus, whereas the early cultural expec-
tations for television and its live production
practices emphasized the ability of TV to
simulate the experience of ‘being at the
theater’, the 1960s model of portability
emphasized television’s ability to simulate
adventures in the great outdoors.
Despite the promise of exotic outdoor fun,
it seems unlikely that actual consumers took
these advertisements literally. Nor does it
seem likely that people assumed advertisers
Fig 14 intended them to do so. In fact, in 1963
House Beautiful reported that ‘research has
shown that for whatever reasons, portables
are seldom moved’.6 From this point of view,
it seems most probable that advertisers assumed that the public wanted the
fantasy (as opposed to the actual possibility) of being somewhere else while
watching TV at home.
In this sense, such sales come-ons evoked what Margaret Morse (1990)
has called television’s capacity to ‘derealize’ space. Morse argues that tele-
vision is one of several postwar phenomena that encourage people to experi-
ence the lived environment in a state of distraction so that they are no longer
‘present’ in the material spaces they occupy (she uses the shopping mall and
the freeway as additional examples). Ads for portable television promoted
this derealization of space as an ideal state of consciousness, as a highly plea-
surable form of experience. Even if most people actually watched their
portable receivers at home, the ads supplied a new kind of ‘psychical reality’
for television, giving the public a fantasy of TV-watching as an active, and
markedly non-domesticated, mode of experience that took place in an
imaginary space, outside the material contours of the home.

Liberated viewers

Representations of the ‘mobile home’ and the fantasies of portability it con-

tained were predicated on a new set of gender and generational relations
that were tied to the ‘movements’ of the day, especially the sexual ‘revol-
ution’. Advertisers often represented their imaginary television outings as
social relations apart from the family unit; and they displayed television in
scenes that evoked youth culture and/or sex out of wedlock.
For example, a 1965 ad for the Zenith ‘Voyager’ shows a group of
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Spigel ● Media homes 395

young people gathered on a beach at night, barely dressed and watching

TV as the tide comes in (Life, 17 September, p. 67). In that same year,
RCA-Victor claimed its ‘Sportabout’ portable was just right ‘for the action
crowd’. The ad shows a young man
and woman on motor scooters,
with 19-inch portables rigged onto
the back of each bike (Life, 30
April, p. 20). By 1968, Toshiba pro-
moted its line of portables with a
boat full of ‘hipsters’ (Life, 26
November, p. M2) (see Figure 15).
Sony’s 1967 ad campaign for its 5-
inch mini-portable took this ‘swing-
ing youth’ ethos to its provocative
extreme. One ad in the campaign
promotes the Sony ‘Sun Set’ model
Fig 15 by showing people watching it in a
nudist colony. Calling it the ‘Sony
for Sun-Lovers’, the ad includes 12
naked men and women watching the
mini-portable while resting in tall
grass that hides the more private parts of their anatomy. Sony thus encour-
aged consumers to imagine the activity of watching TV as an erotic, and
emphatically non-familial, pastime. Of course, as with these ads more gener-
ally, Sony was quick to remind people of the convertible nature of this
fantasy, telling readers: ‘there’s nothing to stop you from going indoors and
watching the Sun Set after the sun goes down’ (Life, 14 July 1967, p. 61)
(see Figure 16).
In cases such as this, the move away from
family life that was built into the symbolic
apparatus of portability was accompanied by
new images of male and female viewers quite
different from the moms and dads of the 1950s
home theater. The representation of gender
roles in promotional materials for television
underwent a marked shift, even if these ads pre-
served the middle class family as a dominant
design for living.
Representations of female viewers embraced
the ethos of liberated lifestyles. While Sony’s
nudist colony was the most extreme example of
the marketing of the sexual revolution, other
ads also incorporated new sensibilities about Fig 16
the social and economic equality of women. Ads
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for portable TV especially resonated with

the new sexual freedoms of career girls,
promoted in Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and
the Single Girl (1962). Equating liberation
with sex appeal, they presented slender,
modern-looking women who wore mini-
skirts and other ‘mod’ clothes. As in the
‘Fresh From Motorola’ ad for poolside TV,
advertisers often presented women
engaged in athletic or outdoorsy lifestyles.
And, unlike the ads from the 1950s, which
typically presented family groups and
domestic milieux, these ads often contained
solitary female figures in action poses (see
Figure 17).
The idea of mobility and travel away
Fig 17
from home was also associated with a more
active style of masculinity. By the end of the
1950s, and especially in the early 1960s,
male spectators shed the family-man status
of their early 1950s predecessors. In the
context of the New Frontier’s emphasis on physical fitness and do-gooder
countrymen – as well as the more countercultural romanticization of beat-
niks and playboys – male spectators were often represented as sportsmen,
adventure seekers, or even as in the Toshiba ad discussed earlier, as hipsters.
Other ads balanced this brand of ‘new’ masculinity with the family man
image that had been used more traditionally to market TV. Addressing men
as both husbands and adventure seekers, GE told the male consumer to
‘bring your wife and your wanderlust to your GE Dealer’s’ (Life, 11 June
1965, p. 125).
Despite the imagery of male and female liberation and the movement
away from home, cultural fantasies surrounding portable television were by
no means revolutionary. Anxieties about sexual difference and the power
dynamics between men and women still provided the source material for
representations of television and the activity of watching TV.
This is particularly notable with regard to the way domestic labor and
leisure were represented. Although female spectators were depicted as
upwardly-mobile and less housebound, still the promotional rhetoric sur-
rounding portable TV often reproduced stereotypical housewife roles. In
fact, even the Sony nudist colony ad, with its explicit allusions to sexual
liberation, found it necessary to have one of the female nudes knitting while
watching from her place in the sun. More generally, even while women were
not typically pictured in family scenes, in the few ads that did show family
groups, women spectators tended (like their early 1950s predecessors) to
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Spigel ● Media homes 397

perform child-rearing functions (such as helping the child move the TV) or
else household chores (such as serving snacks).
So, too, even while ads for portable receivers often pictured men as lib-
erated subjects, on the move and in control, other ads portrayed them in
ways that recalled the lazy male spectators of the 1950s home theater. By
the mid-1960s, when the advertising industry increasingly used ironic
humor as a sales strategy, representations of lazy male spectators sometimes
took on sinister tones. In these cases, the male spectator was not simply rep-
resented as a lazy lounger; instead he was shown to be thoroughly humili-
ated and degraded.
Sony was especially brutal in this regard,
especially in its campaign for mini-porta-
bles. A 1965 ad shows an overweight,
balding, large nosed man in polkadot
pajamas who is lying in bed with a 5-inch
‘lightweight’ Sony TV resting on his
stomach. The bold print title caption reads:
‘Tummy Television’, and the copy con-
tinues: ‘The 5-inch Sony [is] for waist sizes
38 to 46’ (Life, 5 March 1965, p. R4).
Several months later, Sony followed up with
an ad for its 4-inch model (see Figure 18).
Visually comparing the smallness of the
set to the largeness of a man’s pot belly, the
ad shows the same male model slumped in
a chair, smoking a cigar, while the mini-TV
Fig 18 sits perched on its handle on the man’s
thighs. Because the TV looks as if it is actu-
ally crawling up the man’s legs, the ad
draws attention not only to his protruding
stomach, but even more provocatively to
his crotch (in fact, the receiver seems headed for his genitals). The humor-
ous juxtaposition of the miniature TV and the man’s anatomy is further
emphasized by the bold face caption which reads ‘Pee Wee Tee Vee’ – a
slogan which, in not too subtle ways, also suggests the diminutive size of
the man’s genitals (at least in comparison to his pot belly). In short, it seems
unlikely that Sony could have intended this ad to be read in any other way
than as a humiliating joke about the male spectator’s out of shape and decid-
edly un-phallic body (Life, 8 October 1965, p. 118; Life, 14 April 1967, p.
108).
Just as miniaturization was imagined in relation to issues of power, the
new technology of remote control was pictured in scenarios that spoke to
questions of male dominion. Marketed as an accessory to portable receivers,
the remote control was often depicted as the ultimate power pack, a device
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that gave viewers (and especially

male viewers) mastery over space
itself. However, in a contrary sense,
the remote was also often associ-
ated with utter human stasis. In this
regard, the remote signified an
ambivalent relation between ‘man’
and ‘machine’. On the one hand, it
allowed the resident dominion over
space; on the other hand, it made
the human body (to use Bau-
Fig 19 drillard’s terms (1983)) completely
‘redundant’.7 Indeed, in more
recent images of high-tech home
theaters, this ambivalence is still at
play. The current day iconography
presents male viewers as ambiguously passive and active, in command (over
space and women), and at the same time entirely sedentary (see Figure 19).

From mobile home to smart home

Today, as mobile telecommunication technologies increasingly define our

everyday lives, the portable culture ushered in at the dawn of the 1960s can
serve an instructive purpose. The dreams of sexual and social liberation that
advertisers promised in that period might in retrospect seem outdated. Yet,
on closer examination, ideals of mobility, freedom, and progress – and
related anxieties about sexual difference and family life – are still central
themes in contemporary visions of domesticity and new digital technologies.
While portable television represented its period’s focus on mobile forms
of domestic leisure, today’s information superhighway is organized around
the merging of work and leisure, the transportation of ‘data’ inside and
outside the home, and the need for the domestic environment to orchestrate
this data into feedback loops (or what might also be called everyday experi-
ence). In relation to this changing emphasis, new metaphors of home
abound.
Today, telecommunications offer not simply mobility, but a new empha-
sis on sentient spaces, or what we now call the ‘smart home’. Filled with
remote control digital technologies, the smart home promises to anticipate
your needs and fulfill them on command. To be sure, the smart home is in
theory consistent with previous ‘homes of tomorrow’, which were similarly
premised on push-button automation and new media (think, for example,
of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, complete with office and enter-
tainment machines in what he called a ‘get on with life room’). But as
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opposed to the older ‘machines for living’, in

the smart home, digitization is in command.
The contemporary building industry refers
to the smart home’s digital engine as an ‘inte-
grated system’ that can orchestrate not only
internal tasks (like cooking or even diagnos-
ing the resident’s body fat), but also (through
remotes and telerobotics) the resident’s
relation to the surrounding community
(both local and global).
In client-built homes, the media itself often
provides the epistemological ground upon
which a sense of community is delivered into
residential space. Beatriz Colomina (1992,
Fig 20 1996) traces the mediated domestic environ-
ment back to the modernist designs of Le
Corbusier and his penchant for thinking of
the home (and especially the window) as a
kind of movie camera/projection screen that provided views of the outside
world.8 In more recent postmodern architectural projects, a kind of ironic
play between nature and media informs the design for daily life in postin-
dustrial landscapes. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s design for the
‘Slow House’ is a case in point (see Figure 20).
This Long Island, New York vacation home includes a rear picture
window that captures a view of the landscape. A video camera mounted
above the house depicts the same landscape digitally and transmits it back
to a monitor suspended before the picture window. It will even digitally
transmit the view back to the main residence in the city. Describing the Slow
House, Terence Riley claims it speaks to the architects’ ‘implicit recognition
of the duality of the real and the virtual, emphasizing their relationship to
consumption and possession’.9
Meanwhile, in other speculative
projects, architects are trying to
build virtual homes that turn
mundane aspects of daily life into
fantastic encounters with VR enti-
ties. For example, in an attempt to
demonstrate the impact of new
technologies on the private home,
House Beautiful sponsored Gisue
and Mojgan Hariri’s ‘Digital House
Project’, whose liquid crystal walls
provide surfaces and devices that Fig 21
interact with residents. Among the
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amenities, the Digital House contains a virtual chef from a favorite restau-
rant who pops up in the kitchen to give residents cooking advice (see Figure
21).
A computer generation away from dream kitchens of the mechanical past,
the virtual chef promises not only to help with chores but also to provide
companionship. And just in case the chef is not enough, the home also fea-
tures digital guests who appear in the living room. Taking this virtual visit
in the other direction, Michael Trudgeon and Anthony Kitchener’s ‘Hyper
House Pavilion 5’ transmits a programmed message to neighbors on its elec-
trochromic glass walls. According to Riley, such homes become ‘ “smart
skins” that blur the distinction between the computer and architecture and
perform various functions to assist or enhance daily living’ (Riley, 1999: 13).
From a historical perspective, I would argue, these ‘smart skinned’ homes
of tomorrow develop fantasies about media, mobility, and domesticity that
I have previously discussed in relation to the cultural fantasies surrounding
domestic architecture and portable television in the 1960s. Just as advertis-
ers promised consumers that portable TV would allow them to imagina-
tively liberate themselves from domestic doldrums while remaining in the
safe space of the home, the new ‘smart skinned’ homes of the digital age
negotiate a dual impulse for domesticity on the one hand and the escape
from it on the other. According to Hariri and Hariri, ‘In the Digital House,
the comfort, safety, and stability of home can coexist with the possibility of
flight’ (cited in Riley, 1999: 56). In this sense, the home of tomorrow allows
residents to have it both ways. Nostalgic appeals to domestic comfort and
stability exist alongside a futuristic fantasy of liberation and escape.
It is, however, also apparent that these ‘smart skinned’ homes are not
simply modeled on the modernist fantasy of domestic luxury and leisure,
but they also speak to the parallel modernist fantasy (seen early on in Le
Corbusier) of the merging of home and work. For example, the Slow House
is a complex articulation of labor and leisure as the distance between the
vacation residence and the city is collapsed through the simultaneity of all
experience via digital telecommunications. According to the architects, the
Slow House is a ‘vacation/work space’ designed to provide an ‘escape from
escape, that is, to connect at a moment’s notice back to the sites of anxiety’
in the city.10 This virtual collapse of distance between vacation time and the
workaday world echoes Paul Virilio’s ideas about speed and the compres-
sion of space into time in postmodern daily life. As Virilio claims, the home
is now the ‘last vehicle’, a place experienced less as a private refuge than as
a means of transport taking us – instantaneously – somewhere else. This
vehicular concept of the home – which I have traced back to the portable
culture of the 1960s – is now offered through digital mobile communi-
cations. Or as Hiriri and Hiriri say of the Digital House, a ‘keyboard rather
than car or commuter train take us were we need to go.’11 This is not to say
that privacy no longer matters to the resident. Indeed, in yet another sense,
these ‘terminal’-equipped smart homes are practical examples of Virilio’s
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Spigel ● Media homes 401

thoughts on surveillance in the postmodern city. As Virillio (1991) argues,

whereas the modern city excluded ‘others’ through physical boundaries and
gates, the postmodern city uses electronic terminals and screens that
monitor – and thus secure – the boundary between insiders and outsiders,
home and not home.
The speculative plans for the as yet unbuilt Digital House are also
premised on a new articulation of time and space. According to the archi-
tect’s promotional video, the house ‘reflects [the] changing configuration of
family, work, play, communication, and virtual and actual reality’. In this
space, residents are figured as compatible machines, ready to ‘work’ or ‘play’
when keyed into the home’s display screens. In line with this logic, the ‘tran-
sient spaces’ (or hallways into and out of the home) are constructed in such
a way as to make a valuable use of time. The architects claim that the hall-
ways’ liquid crystal walls provide an interactive environment where ‘inhab-
its can unplug themselves as they move from the virtual to the actual world’.
In the Digital House, these transient spaces are ‘an opportunity for height-
ened awareness’.12 Meanwhile, even sleep is transformed into usable time.
The bedrooms are equipped with dream recording devices, ready to provide
a transcript of nighttime mysteries. The ultimate paradox, then, is that the
postmodern luxury home has become the ultimate work terminal – a place
where the resident is in a perpetually interactive state of preparedness –
never allowed to simply ‘waste time’. Another smart home in New York
City (this one actually constructed) takes this virtual work ethic to its logical
extreme. Built for a couple who are both currency traders on Wall Street,
the New York city Lipsitz/Jones apartment has six screens throughout the
house on which the stock exchange is constantly present. Designed essen-
tially as a residential ‘trading floor’, the home even allows residents to
receive stock reports from the video screen in the master bathroom.
To be sure, these smart homes for the rich are the product of a deeply
‘theoretical’ play with boundaries between privacy and publicness. Their
merger of natural, built, and virtual environments is often distinctly ironic.
Given this, such homes depend upon what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls a
particular taste ‘habitus’ associated with degrees of cultural and economic
capital. In other words, the home’s imagined residents presumably share the
architect’s aesthete disposition toward daily life – a disposition which
delights in ironic twists on form and function, the mediated and natural
environment, the social and the virtual, work and leisure, master and
servant, art and kitsch, and so many binaries which have informed ‘homes
of tomorrow’ in the past. Yet, while the houses described above are clearly
‘art houses’ intended for the rich, the future of domesticity is (as it was in
the past) also on the minds of corporations that want to sell gadgets to more
publics of middle class and middlebrow taste.
In the middlebrow mindset of corporate giants, the smart house is still
depicted as a toy for the wealthy, but available – with some price cuts – to
the average middle class consumer. And while the speculative projects and
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client-built homes described above are clearly extreme in design, the main-
stream builders and building publications emphasize more traditional sub-
urban architectural styles and furnishings. Indeed, packaging the digital
future in terms of the baby boom era past is the preferred strategy for seduc-
ing prospective middle class consumers.
In his 1995 bestseller book, The Road Ahead, Microsoft guru Bill Gates
describes his own smart house, which was then being built in Seattle,
Washington. Written with the obvious intent to persuade the reader to adopt
his version of the future, Gates’s book outlines his plan for a high-tech home
that turns out to be a curious blend of nostalgia for the past and fantastic
visions of tomorrow. In his chapter, ‘Plugged in at Home’, Gates boasts of
the unparalleled wonders of his fully computer-controlled dream house.
‘First thing, as you come in,’ he writes, ‘you’ll be presented with an elec-
tronic pin to clip onto your clothes. The pin will connect you up to the elec-
tronic services of the house’ (1995: 250). These services include an elaborate
home theater system, internet hookups everywhere, computerized lighting,
climate control, security, and other home service systems. Meanwhile, each
room contains information screens that display on demand a digital archive
of famous paintings, historical photographs, music, and other such ‘data’.
In the ultimate move toward portability, entertainment and information will
follow residents around the house as they move from room to room.
Yet, despite these high-tech schemes, Gates nevertheless attempts to con-
serve a vision of home from the baby boom past. He continually reminds
us that his home is above all to be a comfortable, relaxing, and pleasant
space for the family and their guests. The desire for pleasure and comfort,
he adds, ‘aren’t very different from those of people who could afford adven-
turous houses in the past’ (1995: 248). Through such rhetoric, Gates famil-
iarizes new technologies; he appeals to the average reader by showing how
computers will provide continuity with, as opposed to radical departures
from, more traditional middle class lifestyles.
Moreover, Gates resurrects the pastoral ideal as a way to root his futur-
istic dreams in something more familiar. He writes: ‘Like almost anybody
building a house, I want mine to be in harmony with the land it sits on.’ He
promises that his house is built not only of ‘silicon and software’ but also
of more traditional materials like ‘wood. . .and stone’. At one point, he even
recalls his unsuccessful plan to hide his wall of 24 video monitors behind
woodgrained patterns that flash on the screens. Speaking about the house
that Gates describes in The Road Ahead, Adi Shamir Zion (1998) com-
ments, ‘Strangely enough, as the electronic technology becomes less dimen-
sional, the architecture expresses nostalgia, not for the authenticity of
material per se but for the look and feel of the “natural” ’. Further critiquing
Gates’s house, Zion reminds us that despite its array of new technologies
‘the Gates house reverts back to the pre-modern house’. More specifically,
Zion claims that Gates’s view of technology as an unobtrusive servant and
loyal companion has much in common with the way the master viewed the
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servant class in the English country house (1998: 67). In other words,
Gates’s nostalgic return to nature is marked by hierarchies of social position
and class privilege.
Of course, most of us can expect to live in somewhat ‘dumber’ homes
than the one Gates built. Yet, the strange admixture of futurism and nos-
talgia that runs through his prose is also evident in the more middle class
depictions of digital households. In magazines such as Mac Home, Home
Office, and Home PC, readers are shown how to use new mobile technolo-
gies like fax machines, mobile phones, and the internet to conserve – rather
than transform – middle class values of family life and home. In particular,
the maintenance of ‘family values’ revolves around the spatial organization
of the sexes and the need to maintain a division between male and female
roles.
The question of sexual difference particularly manifests in contemporary
representations of both the home office and high-tech home theater. The
basic ingredients of heterosexual family life and consumer values are main-
tained through sentimental portrayals of nuclear families working, playing,
and staying together. So too, the new home theaters recycle the advertising
campaigns from previous decades. For
example, a 1998 ad for the Zenith Pro-900
HDTV projection television is the contem-
porary version of those 1950s ads that
promised romantic dates through the magic
of television (see Figure 22).13
Meanwhile, when promoting the home
office, advertisers often imply that new
technologies can reverse the ‘damage’ done
to families by women’s liberation, and par-
ticularly by women’s entry into the work-
force. Instead of latch-key kids and frozen
dinners, we see images of female executives
at home, dressed for work yet clearly situ-
ated within the venue of family life and
reproductive labor. As the popular wisdom
tells us, women can now be superwomen
Fig 22
who take care of infants while also making
tele-deals.
Moreover, while men are also advised to
work at home, this particular mode of male
domesticity is not entirely new. Instead, it
recalls similar images in turn-of-the-century men’s magazines that also
advised men to participate in the domestic sphere. As Margaret Marsh
(1990) argues, these magazines suggested that men’s participation in the
family might help to ease their sense of powerlessness in the increasingly
bureaucratized workforce. In addition, she argues, the advice literature of
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that time emphasized men’s roles as ‘chum’ to the children, stressing men’s
participation in family leisure and play. Contemporary images of smart
homes tend to portray men in similar recreational roles, either playing with
their children on video/computer games or otherwise watching movies in
the home theater. Some ads even combine the family man image with
adventurous masculinity. For example, Micron Electronics advertises its
travelogue software by showing a middle class dad in his home office, going
deep sea diving via computer while his little girl plays at his side (see Figure
23).14 As in the ads for portable television,
this ad allows for a fantasy of escape from
home, even as it promotes masculine
domesticity and middle class family life-
styles. Moreover, in keeping with the
current climate of the ‘digital divide’, all of
the consumer magazines I have looked at
portray almost exclusively white families in
distinctly middle class domestic settings.
Thus, while the high-tech industry often
promotes the smart home as a new and
radical mode of social organization, there is
nevertheless a high degree of nostalgia for the
past in the discourses on new technologies.
This is perhaps most strongly pronounced in
the most recent manifestation of mobile tele-
communications technologies: the robot.
One such advertised product is the
Fig 23
‘CareBot’ made by Gecko Systems.
Although now only in its ‘Model T stage’,
Gecko promises that in the future this ‘per-
sonal servant’ will vacuum your rug, water
your plants, serve you a beer, and even follow ‘junior around, playing games
with him, answering his questions . . . reminding him to stay out of places
he’s not supposed to go’. Clearly hoping to attract aging baby boomers,
Gecko even promises that if you purchase a second CareBot it can be a com-
panion for Grandma. ‘It reminds her when to take her medicine’, monitors
her heartbeat, and calls her doctor if there is a problem.’15 Even more
recently, the Massachusetts based iRobot Corporation released plans to
market the first off-the-shelf internet telerobot at the cost of US$3500. Like
the CareBot, iRobot can do numerous domestic chores. As Wired magazine
recently reported, it can ‘pester your kids, check up on sick pets’, and
provide ‘senior care’ for your parents. Moreover, because iRobot can be
controlled through the internet, it is possible to do all this at a distance,
while at work or away on travel.
Despite their futuristic promises, the Carebot and iRobot sound like wish-
fulfillments of boomer-generation science fiction, recalling at once such
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lovable (and laughable) household servants as Forbidden Planet’s ‘Robbie

the Robot’, The Jetsons’ ‘Rosie’, and ‘Robot’ in Lost in Space. (In fact, the
article in Wired even begins by reminding readers of The Jetsons’ futuristic
maid.) On another level, these robots stand in for a nostalgic urge to restore
forms of human nurturing to contemporary households in which single
moms, single dads, or else two-parent workers simply do not have time to
be full-time caretakers. They even alleviate the boomer-generation’s collec-
tive guilt about their aging parents (albeit by replacing love with surveil-
lance). These robots, in other words, are computer-powered versions of an
imaginary 1950s housewife. They simulate the role of a full-time mother
who lives in a suburban dream house and who looks after everyone’s needs.
Perhaps the ultimate example of this highly gendered high-tech home is
to be found in a Disney Channel film, simply called Smart House. The film
begins with a much beleaguered widower dad trying – with minimal luck –
to raise his grade-school daughter Angie and teenage son Ben. A classic com-
puter geek, Ben enters an internet contest and wins a digital dream house.
The motherless family move into the smart house, which is wired to cater
to the family’s every demand. When the kids want fruity yogurt shakes, the
house goes into blender mode. When the kids are bored, they interact with
elaborate video walls that display wondrous far-off places (African safaris,
deserted beaches, and of course Disneyland). When the house is dirty, no
bother. It cleans up on command. Given its rather servile nature, it is perhaps
no surprise that this smart house is explicitly characterized as a woman.
Referred to as PAT (short for Personal Applied Technology) the house not
only has a female name, she also has a female voice and a downloaded fem-
inine consciousness. Indeed, PAT is programmed to be an ideal mother. But,
as in most tales about technology and women, in this film the dream house
soon goes out of control.
The trouble starts when Ben realizes his father has fallen for Sara, the
woman who designed the house and programmed its computer. Jealous of
his father’s mate, Ben decides to reprogram his smart house so that it will
become a ‘perfect’ 1950s mother who will keep Dad contentedly at home –
and away from ‘other’ women. One night, Ben sneaks into the control room
and downloads a slew of 1950s suburban sitcoms into PAT’s main frame.
But rather than the perfect TV mom, the home takes on the persona of the
classic neurotic housewife – a clinging jealous shrew who literally traps her
family inside the walls of her suburban home. Finally, driven mad with
motherhood, PAT’s previously disembodied female voice materializes as an
apron-wearing, high-heeled mother circa 1955. Trapped and panicked, dad
and the kids attempt to escape, but PAT has other plans. Attempting to con-
vince them of the evils lurking in the outside world, she projects images of
Nazis and nuclear war on her interactive video walls. Then, she makes her
final plea, begging her family to love her and never leave home. Desperate,
she begins to multiply herself, filling the house with a zillion evil retro-
mothers, all bent on keeping the family trapped inside.
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With all these story elements in place, Smart House literally turns into
Freud’s uncanny, a castration tale so overstated that prolonged analysis
can only prove an embarrassment. Still, my point in recounting this con-
voluted plot is to highlight the extreme degree of ambivalence and anxiety
surrounding contemporary notions of our housing and media futures. The
film reminds us that even if technology advances, the stories we tell do not
necessarily change. The Disney version replays the classic fears of female
sexuality that run through previous images of media households and
previous stories of technology out of control. So too, as with prior images
of media technologies, the film resolves these fears by returning to ideal-
ized images of consumer values and ‘normative’ sexuality. As I am sure
the reader has already guessed, Disney predictably ends its uncanny tale
with a strong dose of family values. After realizing his smart house is an
unruly woman, Ben finally accepts his father’s more appropriate taste in
girls. In the end, the ‘proper’ family is formed as the father unites with
Sara, the smart home’s programmer, who is now in line to become the ideal
stay-at-home mom. Once again, the basic ingredients of middle class
heterosexual family life are retained even if they are technologically
updated for the digital age. Here as elsewhere, this sense of a future
without change is the reigning paradox at the heart of our contemporary
high-tech world.
As with any texts of popular culture, images of home and promotional
rhetoric for new media should be seen in relation to the wider social and
discursive context in which they take place. Today, that context is comprised
of a changing sexual division of labor, of diasporic and multicultural popu-
lations, and of an increasingly global culture. It is also comprised of a cul-
tural context replete with discussion of new technology, as films such as
Smart House, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Existenz, AI, and many more
endlessly speculate on the future of home, community, and humanity in the
emerging digital age. In the present day context, we might even say that the
genre of science fiction is becoming the new realism. In other words, the
possible worlds of science fiction are now – at least in the popular imagin-
ation – probable.
But, if science fiction is the new realism, like previous modes of realism,
this is basically a bourgeois form that naturalizes a certain view of social
reality while seemlessly editing out other realities. Indeed, the smart home
and its new technologies are marketed to, and consumed mainly by, the
white middle and upper class. According to the 1999 Digital Divide Summit
held by the US Secretary of Commerce, despite signs that upper income
blacks are purchasing home computers, the digital divide between whites
and most minorities continues to grow. In addition, family structure plays
a role. Among all races, classes, and ethnic groups studied, single-parent
households have a lower level of phone and computer ownership, as well as
internet access.16 While, then, I have been talking about the promotional
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rhetoric and architectural practices surrounding new technologies, it is

important to keep in mind the very different way that ‘smart’ lifestyles are
being deployed among the various populations.
In this sense, although I have been mapping various ‘media housing
models’ that have manifested across the postwar decades, it should be clear
that the home theater, the mobile home, and the smart home do not march
in a clear historical timeline, nor do they necessarily imply ‘progress’. These
models for home media are less distinctly teleological in nature than they
are (to use Raymond Williams’ terms) emergent, dominant, and residual dis-
courses through which we imagine domesticity and domestic communi-
cations. Indeed, even as they promise a wondrous future, the smart homes
of today tend to stave off the threat of difference, promising to maintain a
Bill Gates ideal of comfortable consumerism and nuclear family lifestyles
from the baby boom past.
In the end, I think this curious blend of baby boom nostalgia and ‘gee
whiz’ futurism that runs through contemporary discourses on media homes
is actually a disavowal of the present. In other words, nostalgia and futur-
ism are both symptoms of a more prevailing anxiety and confusion about
the contemporary world. This is why I also think it is useful to unpack the
discourses surrounding new media, both then and now. By understanding
the history of ideas about the media house, we might also catch a glimpse
of our ephemeral present – the time that is increasingly spent at home,
online, searching for something – anything – that plugs us back into the
world as it happens, the world in which we live.

Notes

This article is based on two talks I first gave at the School of Architecture at the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln and at the ‘Television: Past, Present and
Futures’ conference, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of
Queensland, Brisbane. It condenses several articles in my book Welcome to the
Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Spigel, 2001).

1 This research is based on an examination of every issue of Life, Ladies Home

Journal, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Better Homes and
Gardens from 1956 to 1970. While Life addressed a family consumer, and
often directly addressed the man of the house, the other magazines were
aimed specifically at women. The readership base for these magazines
included a range of lower to upper-middle class readers, but their represen-
tations of the home often spoke to a middle class dream of luxurious living
rather than representing the lived realities of any one social group. The
magazines all also assumed their reader was white, and ads promoted prod-
ucts in specifically racialized terms. Life contained the greatest number of
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full page ads for portable television during this period, and that is reflected
in this analysis.
However, it should be noted that home magazines often showed portable
and table top models in remodeled rooms, thus associating the mobile tele-
vision with economic mobility and modernization. In House Beautiful, for
example, ads for products from Armstrong floors to Electra-Shelf shelving
often displayed table top and portable models in remodeled rooms designed
for children and teens or remodeled kitchens for women. These ads began
to appear as early as 1957.
2 See, for example, House Beautiful, November 1955, p. 126. For more on
this see Spigel (1992), especially chapter 4.
3 For more on this see Spigel (1997a). These depictions had very different
meanings for white and black America. See my ‘Outer Space and Inner
Cities: The African American Response to NASA’ in Spigel (2001), and see
also Spigel (1997b).
4 For television set manufacturers, the portable television set served the
purpose of product differentiation. In the late 1950s, when almost 80
percent of American homes had one TV set, advertisers searched for new
ways to sell the public on the purchase of a second receiver. In 1960, 13
percent of US households had more than one TV. By 1970 that figure rose
to 33 percent, and in 1972, 44 percent (Lichty and Toppings, 1975: 522).
The first ads I found for portable models were in the mid- to late 1950s,
but campaigns proliferated in the early 1960s. Philco introduced the first
transistorized portable in 1959. It was named the ‘Safari’. While the Safari
sold poorly, the promotion of portable sets was successful. By 1969, almost
twice as many portables were sold as were the older console models. My
calculations are based on the US Bureau of the Census Statistical Abstract
No. 1167 (1970: 729). Because the Statistical Abstract calculates the sales
of portable and table tops together, it is impossible to say from these tables
how many portables alone were sold. Note also that radio served as a pre-
cursor to the visual culture of portability (see Schiffer, 1991).
5 Margaret White, ‘Indoor Camp-out’, Ladies Home Journal, June 1966, pp.
76–7. Note as well that it was in the late 1950s that the term ‘mobile home’
was coined and that the mobile home industry took off (see Jackson, 1985:
262–3. For an interesting historical analysis of the aesthetics of mobile
homes and movable architecture see Douglas Heingartner (2001: 60–5).
6 ‘A Buying Guide for Television Sets’, Good Housekeeping, September 1963,
p. 154.
7 I especially think about these issues with regard to Baudrillard because his
article is itself symptomatic of the cultural logic I have been describing –
namely the shift from theatrical models of home to vehicular models of
home. In this article, Baudrillard argues that the Victorian conception of
home-as-theater is dead and has been replaced by a new idea of home as
spaceship. He argues that this new model of domesticity – or what he calls
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a home ‘in orbit’ – is the product of an information society in which social

relations are thoroughly produced by communication media, initially tele-
vision but now by satellite technologies. Through this figural placement of
the home in orbit, Baudrillard attempts to illustrate how the high-tech world
of telecommunications has transformed not only the material spaces of
private and public spheres, but also human subjectivity itself. Within his
more general theory of simulation, the home he describes is no longer a fixed
place of origin and personal identity; instead it is a terminal which receives
and distributes information.
Despite the fact that Baudrillard often brilliantly captures some of the
more extreme elements of postmodern living conditions, his argument too
easily accepts a great divide between modern and postmodern modalities of
everyday life that he locates in the advent of television and new media. I
argue instead that it is more useful to see these models of home as co-present
in different historical situations – as emergent, residual, and dominant
models of everyday life. In addition, in looking at the actual popular arti-
facts that ushered in these changes, we can see that the transitions are not
smooth, but rife with anxiety, especially over sexual difference. In addition,
we can see that binaries of public/private and male/female are not as oblit-
erated as Baudrillard suggests.
8 Note that Colomina’s main argument is not only about media in the house,
but more centrally that the modern house has been primarily imagined
through media (drawings, photography, magazines, ads, exhibitions,
museum display, films, and now computers and VR).
9 (1999) Exhibition catalogue. The Slow House, the Digital House, Hyper
House Pavilion 5, and the Lipshitz/Jones apartment were all part of this
MOMA exhibition and are detailed in the catalogue.
10 Cited from the exhibition text at the Un-Private House exhibit.
11 Cited from the exhibition text for the Un-Private House exhibit.
12 This statement was part of the exhibition text at the Un-Private House
exhibit.
13 See, for example, Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, September 1998, p.
25.
14 Home PC, April 1996, back cover. Note that there are also numerous ads
and articles that picture men and women working alone in their home
offices, with no other family members present.
15 For a description see Hillary Rettig, ‘Is There a Robot in Your Family’s
Future’, http://www.technocopia.com, 1999. For iRobot see Wired, Sep-
tember 2000, pp. 274–5. Another notable development in robotics is Sony’s
AIBO, a sentient ‘entertainment robot’ dog.
16 US Department of Congress, National Telecommunications and Infor-
mation Administration, ‘Americans in the Information Age: Falling through
the Net’, Report presented at the Digital Divide Summit, 9 December 1999,
and posted at http:www.digitaldivide.gov
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● LYNN SPIGEL teaches at the University of Southern California. She

is author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar
Suburbs (Duke University Press, 2001) and Make Room for TV: Television
and Family Ideals in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Address: School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211, USA. [email: lspigel@cinema.usc.edu] ●