The Digital Future of Hospitality

Dr. Lindsay Anne Balfour is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, where she works in the Postdigital Intimacies research cluster. She is the author of Hospitality in a Time of Terror: Strangers at the Gate (2017) and the forthcoming collection Femtech: Intersectional Interventions in Women's Digital Health (Palgrave, 2023).

This book asks how an unconditional welcome to strangers is both challenged and made possible by new digital technologies, machine learning, and human-computer interaction (HCI).  It argues that the digital - the advancement of data, the proliferation of machines (embodied or not) in our homes and on our screens, and the millions of lines of code that organize and predict our lives - is not the absence of hospitality but rather the beginning, though not without its challenges. While such an ethic remains more important than ever, The Digital Future of Hospitality updates this enduring philosophical imperative for digital times. Through the lens of cultural studies, intersectional feminism, and posthumanism, this book reanimates hospitality in relation to a series of digital texts that are relevant to the twenty-first century and beyond - android figures on television, virtual domestic assistants, home- and ride-sharing apps, wearable devices, and a renewed cultural obsession with viruses and immunity.

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Digital Future of Hospitality.- Chapter 2: Surrogates, Androids and the Digital Host Body.-Chapter 3: Violence, Gendered Labour, and the Hospitality of the Digital Domestic.- Chapter 4: Sharing Spaces: Stranger Encounters in the Gig Economy.- Chapter 5: Embodied Computing and the Digital Intimacy of Wearable Technologies.- Chapter 6: Conclusion: Eating the Other and Hacking Hospitality.