The Technology, Culture and Power Speaker Series is a monthly gathering that explores critical insights on the intersections of technology and society. Our monthly gatherings feature leading experts and scholars examining the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality. Join the TCP mailing list here. 

Please join us on January 8 for a lecture and Q&A with Lynn Spigel, the Frances Willard Professor of Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. Her books include TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life; TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television; Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs; and Make Room Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. She has edited numerous books and anthologies, lectured internationally, and has published in a range of interdisciplinary journals. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the ICA Book Fellows Award. She writes and teaches about the history of film, television, and digital media, with a focus on gender, technology, and media's relation to everyday life.

From Midcentury Networked Motel to Smart House: Rhetorics and Practices of Tele-hospitality

This talk explores computer research and design conducted in the 1960s–70s by IBM and motel/hotel chains like  Holiday Inn and Hilton. Through these joint ventures, the hospitality industry developed the first widespread commercial computer networking system in 1965 and designed computers as user-friendly tools that offered safety and convenience. But hotels were also among the first to develop computer tracking and profiling systems that policed  so-called “undesirable” guests and monitored hotel labor, exacerbating the history of racism, sexism, and class privilege in the hotel and travel industries. Finally, I argue, midcentury hotels developed practices and rhetorics of “tele-hospitality,” and in so doing they helped to acclimate publics to the networked environments of contemporary everyday life where digital devices and services ambiguously care for and survey consumers, even in their own homes.