How the transportal home creates care transcending distance

Lecture by Daniel Miller, Professor of Anthropology at University College London. The lecture is presented by the research project Spaces of Danish Welfare as part of the international conference Spaces of Welfare. 

The smartphone is not just a device which we use but has become a place within which we live. Often when we appear to be sitting in one place, perhaps with other people, we have actually gone back to our smartphone home where we are busy being entertained, communicating with other people or working.

We use the term The Transportal Home to describe this, because as well as being a home it is also a place from which we can portal to other people’s smartphone homes. One effect of this development has become the possibility of Care Transcending Distance.

We use the smartphone to create regimes of care, for example, WhatsApp groups to organise the care of frail parents. This transcends distance since it is similar whether the parent is living in the same town or another country. The rise of Covid-19 made this feature of care transcending distance through the screen a global phenomenon. As time goes on we gain a better sense of both the new possibilities but also the limitations of the transportal home as care transcending distance.

About Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written and edited forty-one books, including A Theory of Shopping (1998), Social Media in an English Village (2016), How the World Changed Social Media (with 8 others, UCL 2016) and The Comfort Of People (2017). He was the director of the Why We Post Project (2012-2017) and is currently the director of the ASSA project Smartphone and Smart Ageing (2017-2022).

On 6th May 2021 he will be publishing The Global Smartphone (with 10 others) and Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland, (with Pauline Garvey). Both are available as free downloads from UCL Press. On the same day the ASSA team will launch a free online university course about the anthropology of smartphones on the FutureLearn platform.