The Google Imaginary: Exploring the utopian imaginaries of the Google Home technology in advertisements

Abstract

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.