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.

Speaker: Lynn Spigel, Northwestern University