Lauren McCarthy’s project LAUREN is a unique investigation into how letting telepresence devices surveil and control people in their homes affects their interactions and behaviors. Having a presence in your home, even a distant one or an electronic one, has a drastic effect on one’s behavior. People tend to change their behaviors to be more conforming when they feel that they are being watched. McCarthy describes in the interview with Hrag Vartanian how initially the people whom she is surveilling perform for her. McCarthy’s project forces us to question the value of the convenience surveillance technology provides us. Is the convenience worth the cost of our control and our privacy?

Telepresence technology has a myriad of utilitarian applications in our homes. It can be extremely helpful to ask a home assistant like Alexa to look something up for you, add something to your shopping list, play a specific song, etc. However, McCarthy points out that they invade the home, “the first site of cultural education… where we learn to be a person.” Furthermore, she claims that “by allowing these devices in, we outsource the formation of our identity to a virtual assistant whose values are programmed by a small, homogeneous group of developers” (McCarthy 10). McCarthy is saying that as these virtual assistants help to streamline our lives in the home, we slowly begin to change in response to the conveniences these devices provide. All in all, the Lauren project forces us to acknowledge the fact that telepresence can cause changes in human behavior, and if this technology is going to be further embraced and developed, then society needs to start being more critical about how it invades our privacy and shapes our lives.