In the Fun House: Visions of Information Technology in the Domestic Sphere

i%is paper examines the marketing and advertising of information technologies in the domestic sphere by examining a number of new publications aimed at the home market. By considering representations of the new “wired” households imaged in sources like HomePC and FamilvPC, I explore the ways in which these magazines call into play a number of other cultural discourses about home, family and gender and question whether these new stories of the domestic cyberfuture are really so new afer all. Looking at these newly developing images can help us understand how popular discourses, while managing cultural anxieties about technology, also construct specific subject positions along gendered and familial lines. Such an understanding is the first step in challenging visions of the future which reproduce power hierarchies familiar from the past. Finally, this project , by examining popular representations of new technologies, offers a way to add a new level of specificity and detail to the often ungrounded theorimtions of cyberspace which proliferate today. Pat Cadigan’s award-winning cyberpunk novel, Svnners, unwinds in a post-apocalyptic, postfordist, postmodern Los Angeles, an LA which is informationobsessed and informationdriven, a society complete with half-way houses for the “incurably informed”. Taking a cue from similar narratives, Frederic Jameson and other cultural theorists of the postmodem condition have positioned cyberpunk as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” Following from Jameson, Scott Bukatman, in his recent Terminal Identities, maintains that Were is simply no overstating the importance of science fiction to the current cultural moment, a moment that sees itself as science fiction . . . Science fiction remains the genre that has represented the most sustained attempt to identify and narrate the ambiguities that mark the technological contours of contemporary culture.” While I would certainly agree that science fiction in general and cyberpunk in particular provide the cultural theorist with rich sites for tracing the various ambivalences and tensions surrounding contemporary technological advances, I wonder to what degree the present moment does indeed see “itself as science fiction.” In this paper, I want to present part of a project which began as an attempt to step back from the sexier terrain of cyberpunk, VR, and Mondo to examine some other, seemingly more mundane, ways in which new information technologies are being imagined in relation to everyday life, particularly in the domestic sphere. In other words, I want to turn away from the chrome and sizzle of cyborgs, Doom, and Howard Rheingold to explore a burgeoning range of discourses concerned with the marketing and use of new technologies in the home and to ask how this less glamorized set of narratives connects up with wider cultural fantasies and ambiguities surrounding life in the information age. As it is currently structured my larger project has three parts: part one tracks a range of popular discourses addressing the place of information technology in the home, looking at both the utopic and dystopic aspects of these cultural conversations; part two will be framed around an ethnographic study of home PC use; and, finally, the thiid section will suggest how studying the domestic installment of digital technologies can lend new nuances to cultural theory’s understandings of the dawning information age, particularly as it relates to gender. This paper will focus primarily on part one of the project but begins the work of part three by pointing out ways in which an engagement with the everyday aspects of the digital age might add a new level of specificity to the cultural theorizations of late capitalism.