The Google Imaginary: Exploring the utopian imaginaries of the Google Home technology in advertisements
Summary
New technologies, what makes people buy them? In todays digital age, we are overwhelmed with
advertisements where tech companies persuade us to buy their product. In this research, I linked this to
the concept of technological imaginary. People’s media fantasies, hopes and expectations are projected
on technologies because we experience human lacks which we believe technology could fill up. I used
Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to analyse Google’s advertisement campaign of the Google
Home to illustrate how media developments originate from a complex interplay between different
factors that determine the actual development of technology. I have analysed Google’s advertisement
campaign on the level of text, discursive practice and social practice. To concretize this, I followed six
phases formulated by Flichy (2007) to explain the construction of technological imaginaries. The
research question was: In what way does Google’s advertisement campaign of the voice-activated
speaker GoogleHome attest technological imaginaries? My main argument was that different factors
determine technological development and this is what De Mul (2002) described as technological
interactionism. My intervention in this was how advertisements play a crucial role in this. The role of
imaginaries in this pictures has too little academic attention and there was no coherent theoretical
framework that integrated imaginaries in media development according to Natale and Balbi (2014). This
research shed light on that.
Building on De Mul’s (2002) explanation of his concept, the results showed three important
findings. In the first place, the analysis revealed that Google portrayed an imaginary world of a helpful,
managing, knowledgeable, controlled and playful Google-assistant. Imperatives and aspects of ordinary
life were frequently used to express this on a linguistic level. In the second place, the results showed
how both deterministic and social actors produced the Google Home. The findings illustrated the shift
from media imaginaries as a ‘utopia’ into an actual physical technology that becomes an ‘ideology’
absorbed in the society. In the third place, advertisements seemed to have a prominent and decisive role
in causing societal change. The portrayed imaginary world of the Google Home changed the interaction
and perception with our homes and other devices.