Stephen J. Neville

en

Stephen J. Neville is a Research Associate at the Infoscape Lab and a SSHRC-funded PhD student in the joint-program of Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities in Toronto, Canada. His master’s research on privacy and surveillance issues of smart speaker technology was awarded the 2019 Beaverbrook Prize by the Canadian Communication Association. Working at the intersection of media, sound, and surveillance studies, his research has been published in Surveillance & Society, Convergence, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.  

research

research expositions

  • Aural Expectations of Home: An Autoethnography of the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker (2021) author(s): Stephen J. Neville published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    The paper conducts an autoethnographic case study of the Amazon Echo smart speaker to explore problems of acoustical privacy at home. A gap in surveillance research is addressed by treating smart speakers as private social media platforms that connect users to sound, devices, and home environments. The concept of aural expectations of home is developed which expresses how dwellers live with and through sound. The paper argues that problems of acoustical boundary control in the domestic sphere not only help understand the communicative and socially connective aspects of smart speakers, but also illuminate surveillance issues as one’s sonic habits at home are rendered as data under the purview of corporations.
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