What Sound Looks Like

This wire dangles near the side door of a friend’s home, which I visited last week when I was on vacation. The home is having significant work done on it, involving the remodeling of all three floors and most of the existing rooms. There’s a main entrance to the home on the first floor, next to the garage, but due to how the property is landscaped, you could find yourself easily following a path up and around to the side of the house. A doorbell makes sense. Why exactly the crew doing the work decided to put the cable hole so far from the door, however, isn’t necessarily clear. Presumably a doorbell is a simple thing, just a dot the size of a finger tip, perhaps with a small frame around it. But perhaps in our time of connected devices, of networked domestic life, of semi-sentient consumer products, the general contractor was planning for a far wider and more talented contraption, something with a camera, something with a speaker-microphone combination — less a side-door welcome than a state-of-the-art surveillance apparatus.