Abstract
Digital Media Studies are driven as much by academic debate as by their constantly changing object of study, digital technology; at least this is the impression one gets when looking at the publications in this field: whenever digital media applications reach the mainstream, they trigger waves of publications. This has been the case, for instance, in Software Studies (see, for example, Berry, 2011; Fuller, 2008), Platform Studies (see, for example, Bogost and Montfort, 2009; Gillespie, 2010), as well studies of social media services like Facebook and Twitter (see, for example, Christensen et al., 2016; Fuchs, 2013; Meikle, 2016). With the rise of the ‘Internet of Things’, Media Studies seems to face its newest development all geared up for ‘the next big thing’. This time, however, books have been published even before the Internet of Things has become mainstream. This article gives an overview over several publications on this topic, thereby aiming to deliver a first sketch of a new and still evolving field. Thus, it is important to start with framing the ‘new media’ those books are referring to when discussing ‘the Internet of Things’.
The term ‘Internet of Things’ denotes objects that have become seamlessly integrated into a digital network. For this, regular things, which could not communicate before, need to be provided with an address; often they also become equipped with sensors that can communicate their status or report on their environment. In short, those things are becoming media. At the moment, networked media-things can already be found in a wide range of consumer devices and home applications from lights and loud speakers to heating systems and surveillance cameras, which all have been connected to smartphones and can be manipulated from outside the home. Other common areas for networked things are transport and health care with both fields making use of motion sensors or web cams in various ways: for monitoring the wellbeing of an ageing person, reporting the amount of traffic on a street, or reading the environment of a driverless car.
Among one of the earliest publications discussing the potential of the Internet of Things is the long-form essay The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling (2014), an American cultural theorist and Science-Fiction writer. The book is a follow-up to Sterling’s ground-breaking book Shaping Things (Sterling, 2005) and is written from a rather critical and dark perspective. For Sterling, the Internet of Things fundamentally changes the agency of things. Networked things ultimately rewire the things’ relationship to the user as the user is becoming used. Already in his first chapter he makes clear that the Internet of Things essentially leads to a house full of ‘smart’ stuff that answers to corporations or states. The second chapter is equally critical. Here, Sterling is discussing the advantage of the ‘The Big Five’: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, who can dictate developments in proprietary networks. His last chapter finally turns to the ‘cultural avant-garde’ of the Internet of Things that has replaced for him the Bourgeoisie: the ‘creative class’ typically made up of users that are on platforms like Uber, Kickstarter, AirBnB or GitHub.
In light of Sterling’s dystopian view of the Internet of Things, Samuel Greengard’s account for MIT Press reads tremendously enthusiastic. The small book published in MIT’s Essential Knowledge Series praises the Internet of Things as a ‘disruptive event’: ‘The future has arrived’ as he notes early on (p. 26). The short book discusses technical aspects of the Internet of Things and their effects and promises a ‘guided tour’ (p. xvi). Topics like the cloud and big data, digital tools, sensors and connections are being introduced. Generally, the book focuses strongly on the potential for business, giving a lot of attention to the Industrial Internet, the effects of the Internet of Things on areas such as health and transport and on Internet standards (chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively). The critique on the subject is reduced to the penultimate chapter which names, among other issues, the problems of the digital divide, the threat of digital distraction, security risks, as well as crime and terrorism in a connected world.
In comparison with Greengard’s business-focused approach, Philip Howard writes his book Pax Technica from a very different perspective discussing the political consequences of the Internet of Things for both governments and citizens (p. 36). The main claim of the book is that the Internet of Things introduces a new sociotechnical system which ushers in the era of ‘pax technica’, in which political power is more technologically constructed than territorially defined (p. 147). In the first two chapters, Howard theorizes an ‘Empire of Connected Things’ and explores the ‘Internet Interregnum’ as an early historical phase of the ‘pax technica’. The book then moves on to discuss the potential of the Internet of Things with many examples, although most of them revolve around the mobile phone and social media. Here, maps, technical developments that lead to this era (such as governing by using digital devices or backing human security by big data) and consequences (such ‘connective actions’ and also the competition of connected networks) are being discussed. The final two chapters focus on the difficulties that technologically constructed politics face, before ending with the more promising potential of the Internet of Things: the role of connected devices for foreign affairs and civic engagement (p. 243). Written in a very approachable manner and for a broad audience, the book refrains from using academic references. This might also be the reason that other academic approaches to civic engagement and social media (for instance, Weller et al., 2014) or technology and society (for instance, Papacharissi, 2014 on affective publics; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013 on Big Data, or Kelty, 2008 on Free Software) are not taken into account. Published at a time when the Internet of Things was just about to become mainstream, this book is one of the earliest to discuss the important political effects of such technological devices. Yet the limitation here is that most of the analysis does not evolve around examples of the Internet of Things, but mostly refers to mobile devices and social media.
For media scholars interested in learning more about concrete examples of the Internet of Things, Nitesh Dhanjani’s approach might therefore be an interesting alternative – at least for scholars who are not intimidated by the book’s thorough technical analysis. In Abusing the Internet of Things, Dhanjani discusses the risks of six networked applications ripping apart the technical applications of connected lights, electronic locks, baby monitors, smart televisions, connected car securities and programmable sensors. Although written for software engineers, this book also produces excellent material for media studies scholars as it lays bare the difficulties and provides a look at the details of networked devices.
From Dhanjani to Sterling, we find a range of books published about the Internet of Things still in its early days – this could suggest the rise of a promising new research field. When looking at those books, however, it seems surprising that the two of those published with academic presses avoid to refer to ongoing academic debates. Ever since Bill Brown (2001) launched ‘thing theory’, the things have attracted academic attention. Brown’s (2016) newest publication Other Things, which explores the force of things through artistic works, has added to this body of work as has his earlier edited collection Things (Brown, 2004) that included Bruno Latour. In Latour, whose actor–network theory focused explicitly on the agency of nonhuman actors, one could have found another key source to engage with. Even shorter essays by him, like ‘The Berlin Key or how to do words with things’ (Latour, 2000), explore the social role of things. Other references could have been Ian Hodder’s (2012) Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things, which traces our relationship to material things, or Stephen Shaviro’s (2014) The Universe of Things, which discusses the new rise of material thought from a philosophical perspective, exploring things and objects as autonomous entities. It is as if theory has been preparing for the Internet of Things to come, although so far those approaches have been mostly ignored by those writing about it.
Here, Benjamin Bratton’s (2016) voluminous study The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is an exception as it explicitly aims to connect contemporary digital media to academic debates. Although Bratton uses the Internet of Things just as one example among many, the phenomenon that the things around us are becoming media certainly fits the central claim of the book: we live in an age of planetary-scale computation and need to focus anew on the role of technology. This is also why Bratton warns the reader in his first sentence that besides ‘political philosophy’, ‘architectural theory, and software studies’, his book might ‘even [be] science fiction’ (p. xvii). The Stack is divided into three parts: the first explains Bratton’s concept of ‘the stack’ inspired by the layered architecture of the Internet protocol (p. xviii); the second and longest part introduces six different layers – earth, cloud, city, address, interface and the user – which are also linked to one another; the final part provides an account of what this might mean for our future.
The book lays bare contemporary paradoxes, for example, that while data clouds managed by Google or Apple are trying to ignore national territory, it still is decisive from where on earth the user approaches their data in the ‘cloud’. The location of the user decides what can be accessed and what not, while the corporation is beyond territorial boundaries. The chapters on ‘city’ and ‘interface’ are discussing further how physical and informational infrastructure are interwoven. Here, Bratton’s approach looks into the fear that the Internet of Things will turn urban areas into smart neoliberal cities and discusses the politics an interface – two important chapters that end his study of layers. Bratton’s style of writing is versatile, which is why his book might be interesting for media studies scholars working about the Internet of Things although it mentions it only every now and then (the most in-depth discussion can be found on p. 203). Linking technical aspects to political theory, ‘The Stack’ aims to trace new ground – an exploration some media studies scholars may rightly criticize, either because it embraces a big narrative or because this narrative is driven by technological determinism, taking Lawrence Lessig’s (2000) treatise on Code and other laws of Cyberspace to a new level. But while Bratton may be placing too much emphasis on the agency of technology, his book also combines an analysis of a new technology with a more theoretical and academic approach and despite being controversial, this is certainly inspiring.