'It's a Small World After All': Smart homes, narrative, and the technology of the perfect day

With the rise of consumer culture, the advent of "postmodernism," and the emergence of the informational economy, the American home has undergone a transformation. From being a site of production, where good citizens are made and middle class values reproduced, to being a site of consumption, where media are consumed and lifestyles adopted; the dream house has been replaced with the "smart home," enriching itself and its users through interactive processes of information exchange.; Embarking on a discussion of industrial developments during the early twentieth century and the introduction of electric appliances and scientific management into the space of the home as a technique of "time management," continuing through the postwar emergence of the digital computer and the advent of electronic household appliances and the space-age "house of tomorrow," and culminating in the automated house of today---the smart home---this dissertation considers the home within the context of lifestyle and consumer narratives.; Building on the tension between agency and control that exist within the walls of the smart home, this project engages existing ethicopolitical debates about lifestyle and consumer culture, posthumanism and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and the utopian/dystopian potential of New Media forms. Considering interactivity as a refinement of disciplinary form, even as it liberates subjects from the constraints of more static media, this dissertation concludes by theorizing the concept of "the Perfect Day," or a technosocial attempt to institutionalize everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice and to remove or avoid undesired ethical impediments to the realization of the self in the consumer world.