This book asks how an unconditional welcome to strangers is both challenged and made possible by new digital technologies, machine learning, and human-computer interaction (HCI). It argues that the digital – the advancement of data, the proliferation of machines (embodied or not) in our homes and on our screens, and the millions of lines of code that organize and predict our lives – is not the absence of hospitality but rather the beginning, though not without its challenges. While such an ethic remains more important than ever, The Digital Future of Hospitality updates this enduring philosophical imperative for digital times. Through the lens of cultural studies, intersectional feminism, and posthumanism, this book reanimates hospitality in relation to a series of digital texts that are relevant to the twenty-first century and beyond – android figures on television, virtual domestic assistants, home- and ride-sharing apps, wearable devices, and a renewed cultural obsession with viruses and immunity.
Author(s): Lindsay Anne Balfour
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 142
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Digital Future of Hospitality
Spectral Hospitality
Hospitality Past and Future
Hospitality and Digital Life
Hospitality for a Digital Future
References
Chapter 2: Surrogates, Androids, and the Digital Host Body
Asimov’s Laws and Human-Android Relation
Android Bodies on the Small Screen
Android Bodies as Host for Human Consciousness
Replacement Hosts and the Labour of Hospitality
Android Bodies as Hosts for Gendered and Racialized Violence
The Android Carnivalesque and the Return of the Ghost
References
Chapter 3: Violence, Gendered Labour, and the Hospitality of the Digital Domestic
Why Hospitality? Contextualizing
Contexts: How Siri and Alexa “Work”
Gender, Labour, and Hospitality
Unpaid Labour and Surveillance Capitalism
Gender, Sexual Difference, and Harem Hospitality
References
Chapter 4: Sharing Spaces: Stranger Encounters in the Gig Economy
Giants of the Gig Economy: Airbnb and Uber
The Hospitality of Gig Economies
“Your Ride Has Been Cancelled”: Excluding the Other
Hospitality and Platform Biopolitics
Risky Hospitality: Space and Stranger Intimacies
Conclusion: Affirmations of Hospitality and Biopolitics
References
Chapter 5: Embodied Computing and the Digital Intimacy of Wearable Technologies
FemTech, the World of Wearables and Digital Health
Intersectionality (or Lack Thereof) in Fitness Tracking
Carnal Hospitality: Wearables and the Frontier of Touch
Strange Selves and Excarnation in Wearable Technologies
Conclusion: Hospitality and (the) Posthuman Touch
References
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Eating the Other and Hacking Hospitality
Eating the Other
Hacking Hospitality
References
Index
