Posted by I want to start with a confession. When I first started reading about smart refrigerators and connected thermostats, I thought it was just another tech trend. But the more I dug into it, the clearer it became that I was looking at this all wrong. This is not a technology story at all. It is a social stratification story wearing a technology costume, and sociologists have been trying to tell us this for over a decade.
Think about who actually benefits from a connected refrigerator or a smart thermostat. The folks at Sociology Lens made a point back in 2014 that has only become more relevant since: our relationship to connected measuring devices is shaped by our socioeconomic status. If you are comfortable, IoT is a lifestyle upgrade. It is a fun convenience, something that makes your life a little easier and more efficient.
But if you are an hourly worker, the same category of device can become a mechanism of surveillance rather than convenience. You are generating data that management can use to justify decisions about your employment or even your future with the company. That asymmetry is the real story, and I think we do not talk about it enough because IoT marketing is so relentlessly cheerful.
I find the digital divide research on this topic more persuasive than almost anything else in the field. Research published in Policy & Internet argues that IoT promises real social benefits across policy areas including health, transportation, and public safety, but that meaningful attention has to be paid to the skills needed to actually capture those benefits.
A smart blood pressure cuff is only useful if someone has the digital literacy, the stable internet connection, and the time to interpret what it is telling them. Access to the device is not access to its benefits, and conflating the two is, in my opinion, the central mistake in a lot of optimistic IoT commentary. We see a device and assume everyone can use it equally, but that is simply not the case.
Deborah Lupton’s 2020 review in Sociology Compass organizes the field into four themes: techno-utopian imaginaries, risks and harms, lived experiences, and interventions into futures. I find the second and third categories the most honest. The risks and harms category forces us to reckon with the fact that a device designed to make life easier can just as easily make life more surveillance. Lived experience research, meanwhile, tends to surface a much messier reality than the sleek promotional video suggests.
It reveals a world where people quietly disable features, distrust the data, or simply never bother to set the thing up correctly in the first place. Who has time to tinker with settings when they are just trying to get through the day? The answer is likely the people who already have the most privilege and leisure time. It is tempting to see smart home technology as a neutral tool, but the reality is that it amplifies existing social divisions rather than bridging them. A smart home is not just about convenience; it is about who has the power to control the environment and who is controlled by it.
Where I land on all of this is not anti-technology, because that would be a lazy position. I land on skepticism toward the framing that treats IoT adoption as an inevitable and uniformly positive social good. Sociologists studying IoT increasingly focus on ethics and governance questions around data ownership, consent, and algorithmic accountability, and I think that focus is correct. The technology itself is neutral. The distribution of who controls the data, who profits from it, and who is monitored by it is not neutral at all. It is a mirror reflecting back the power structures we already have.
If you found my earlier piece on colonialism and technology diffusion interesting, this topic sits in similar territory. It is a tool marketed as universally beneficial that actually reproduces existing power structures depending on who is holding it. We are not just buying a device; we are buying into a system that might be watching us more closely than we would like.
So, what is the answer? I do not think it is to throw our phones in the river. But we do need to be more critical consumers. We need to demand transparency about data collection and usage from device manufacturers. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to have a public conversation about who gets to benefit from all this supposed “smartness” and who gets left behind or, worse, exploited by it. It is a conversation that is long overdue.
References
Lupton, D. (2020, January 13). The Internet of Things: Social dimensions. Sociology Compass. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/soc4.12770
Van Deursen, A. J. A. M. (2018, February 13). Anything for anyone? A new digital divide in Internet-of-Things skills. Policy & Internet. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/poi3.171
Sociology Lens. (2014, May 1). The Internet of Things: Some implications for sociology. https://www.sociologylens.net/topics/communication-and-media/the-internet-of-things-some-implications-for-sociology/13228