The cultural context also covers the ordinary rhythms of life: the home, leisure, and tourism, now linked through the Internet of Things and online platforms.
This is a sharp site for the change and systems concepts: each connected device collects data, shifts control to companies, and reshapes the space we live and travel in.
The same tensions recur. Convenience comes at the cost of privacy, entertainment is engineered to hold your attention, and easy access ties you to the platform's power.
The Connected Home
In a smart home, lights, locks, thermostats, cameras, and speakers connect to the internet, often controlled by a virtual assistant via voice.
Appeal is real convenience: heating that warms before you arrive, remote unlocking, self-running routines. For older or disabled people it can aid independence.
Mechanism: each device has sensors, a microphone, or a camera and stays linked to the maker's servers, so it is always on and always listening, sending signals out of the house as normal operation.
The same devices watch the home: usage patterns reveal when a house is empty, and data flows out to the company. That makes everyday surveillance a values and ethics and power tension.
Stakeholders: the household gains comfort; the company gains a continuous record of private life; and outsiders, from hackers to police, may seek the same feeds.
Leisure and the Battle for Attention
Streaming, mobile games, and social feeds now fill leisure that once went to TV, board games, or going out.
In the attention economy, income depends on how long a platform keeps you engaged, so your time and attention become the product sold to advertisers.
Deliberate design tricks: infinite scroll removes stopping points, autoplay starts the next video, streaks punish leaving, and notifications manufacture reasons to return, all tuned to lift time on the app.
Design tuned to be fun can tip into compulsion, hardest for the young to resist (harming sleep, mood, study), a values and ethics concern.
Contested: designers say they make products people enjoy; critics say attention is extracted rather than freely given.
Tourism and the Sharing Economy
In the sharing economy, platforms let people rent out spare rooms, cars, and services directly to travellers via an app.
Trust between strangers is manufactured by a reputation system: guests and hosts rate each other, and public scores decide who gets booked.
The system also disciplines behaviour: one bad run of ratings can drop or remove a listing, so users perform for the system as much as for each other.
Impacts cut both ways: cheaper, wider choice and local income (an economic link), but the power sits with the platform, which sets rules, takes a cut, and controls ratings.
Contested: residents point to rising rents, noise, and flats turned into year-round tourist rentals, while cities struggle to regulate a global platform from outside.
Navigation, Discovery, and Over-tourism
Map and GPS apps guide travellers turn by turn, while a viral geotagged photo shapes where they want to go.
Benefits: easy navigation, discovery beyond guidebooks, and income for small businesses or lesser-known towns that go viral.
Feedback loop: a striking photo does well, the platform shows it to more people, who travel to take the same shot and tag it again, so a local secret becomes a global checklist item in a season.
Funnelling everyone to the same spots causes over-tourism: crowds, rising prices, displaced residents, an environmental context and space link.
Because crowds are steered by distant platforms, those who bear the costs have the least say over the systems that create them.
Weighing Home, Leisure, and Tourism
The pattern rhymes: real convenience, choice, and connection, while data and power shift to platforms. Homes lose privacy and popular places get overwhelmed.
The change concept ends it: evolution of old habits made faster and cheaper, or a transformation in who controls our homes, free time, and travel?
Case study
System: Airbnb, a sharing-economy platform connecting travellers with hosts renting homes and rooms (networks, data, algorithms).
Specifics: founded in 2008, it now lists millions of properties worldwide. Cities have pushed back hard: New York's Local Law 18 (2023) effectively banned most short-term lets, and in 2024 Barcelona announced it would phase out all short-term tourist flats by 2028, blaming them for rising rents.
Impacts and implications: cheaper, varied stays and host income, set against higher rents and lost housing for residents; platforms can spread tourism's gains while straining housing, leaving cities to regulate.
Concepts: power (the platform sets rules and takes a cut while cities fight for control of housing), change, values and ethics and space (who a neighbourhood is for).
Theory of Knowledge
TOK
If a reputation system decides who is trusted enough to host or stay, on what basis do we trust a stranger we have never met?
When digital tools make travel easier, do we experience more of the world, or a version curated for us by platforms?
Active recall
Self review
How have digital systems reshaped everyday home, leisure, and tourism life?
What is a smart home, and what does it trade for its convenience?
What is the attention economy, and why is it a values and ethics concern?
What is the sharing economy, and how does a reputation system give platforms power?
What is geotagging, how can it lead to over-tourism, and is this an evolution or a transformation?
