Dr Hannah Spaulding

Media technologies change and transform over time, often inspiring widespread discussion and debate--from industry, experts, academics, policy makers, and the public at large. Examining their histories and analysing how they were imagined, developed, deployed, and in some cases discontinued, can help us better understand the close and complicated relationship between media, culture, and society. Looking at the development and discourse of media technologies thus not only reveals important information about the past, but also tells us about the present and the profound impact of media technologies that shape our everyday lives. My research explores the cultural history of media technologies, both those considered successful and those deemed as failures. I have looked at television, cable, home video, and the Picturephone, and am currently developing a project on baby monitors.

The home is often imagined as a site of leisure, safety, privacy, and personal fulfilment. Yet this fantasy is a cultural and historical construction. It serves profound national, political, and economic functions that are often rooted in ideologies of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The actual experiences of home are far more complicated, rarely matching the fantasies projected in media and popular discourse. The critical analysis of gender and domesticity can help unpack the political and ideological underpinnings of domestic fantasies as well as provide a deeper understanding of the actual experiences of home and family in the past and the present. As a media scholar, these perspectives help me illuminate the roles media texts and technologies play in shaping both fantasies of domesticity and the lived experiences of home and domestic life—spaces increasingly filled with and mediated by communication technologies.

Surveillance and surveillance technologies surround us every day—whether through the large CCTV networks that dominate urban spaces or our interactions with social media and our digital devices. My work seeks to understand surveillance by focusing on its history. I trace how surveillance technologies and practices of were integrated into homes and domestic environments, analysing both how they were used and what “problems” their installation promised to solve. My research looks at a range of surveillance technologies that were integrated into the home (e.g. closed-circuit television, two-way cable, baby monitors) and examines how their capacity for policing and surveillance was often laundered through their presentation as instruments of care and protection. Though historical, my work draws connections between the past and present, as contemporary tools of home surveillance are frequently marketed using similar ideas and fantasies.