Internet of Torment: The Governance of Smart Home Technologies Against Technology-Facilitated Violence

While smart home technologies (SHTs) are often marketed as solutions to automate household activities, they can be used to cause harm. This thesis examines the emergence of smart home technology-facilitated violence (smart home TFV) in Canada to assess 1) how these Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be misused as technologies of torment and 2) how and why we may want to examine this phenomenon as part of a wider sociotechnical system of human and non-human actors. Using a modified Walkthrough Method (Light, Burgess and Duguay, 2018) and a hybrid theoretical framework of assemblage theory (Kitchin, 2014), actor-network theory (Latour, 1988; Latour, 2005) and multi-scalar analysis (Edwards, 2003), this approach illuminates what may initially be misconstrued as an isolated, one-on-one dispute as a practice that is enabled, mitigated, and ultimately shaped by a variety of contexts and interactions with other components within a complex and heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblage (Kitchin, 2014).