Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT), in real life, constitutes a gigantic network of multiple nodes (by 2020 estimated to number in the tens of billions – p. 9), each with something to contribute to the highly networked whole, but wildly disparate in their function and value. For better and for worse, the exact same can be said about The Internet of Things (the book).
The authors set out to produce an analysis – in large part based on communication theories – of this exponentially expanding technology that soon will become as invisible to us (physically and psychologically) as electricity, through ubiquitous computing. These analyses, where they occur in the book, are highly thought-provoking and offer useful insights for the practice of communication research. However, as with most types of networks and their nodes, the book’s sections – between chapters and within chapters – are highly disparate in what they offer and how they relate to each other. To put it somewhat unkindly (but not unfairly), we are offered a mishmash of communication theory, computer history, informative vignettes, and occasional public policy prescriptions.
The book does try to structure the discussion, dividing the main chapters of IoT into addressing things, speaking things, seeing things, and tracking things – logical and useful as far as it goes. We are shown how users have become ‘addresses’, how IoT can ‘speak’ (literally and figuratively), what it is capable of ‘seeing’ (sensing), and the huge extent to which we are being followed (‘tracked’) individually and collectively. However, the analysis proceeds by way of multiple digressions (history and vignettes) so that the reader has to collect the many pearls strewn about and work at developing the necklace. Chapter 4 (‘Seeing Things’) provides an egregious example of this: 13 pages in the middle devoted exclusively to the historical development of computer vision.
Here are some of the authors’ insights: p. 14 – with IoT, we now have media objects through which we as humans not only communicate, but that themselves are the initiators of data (sensors) and communication (e.g. Alexa, Siri); p. 18 – IoT not only mediates human ideas and thoughts but for the first time also human activity (e.g. Fitbit); pp. 20, 39 – by being networked, the objects in our life ‘become products that are never finished…constantly updated’, that is, instead of offering us stability in our lives, objects connected to the Internet now are destabilizing or at the least, part of the world’s fluid dynamics; p. 31 – IoT ‘extends the surveillance business model…into new domains – domestic, biological, environmental’; p. 119 – ‘…in an IoT environment, meaning is no longer produced only by speakers or authors, and the very meaning of audiences shifts again…a dispersed process that also involves networked sensors and linked databases’ (emphasis in the original); p. 123 – the ubiquity of IoT could lead to an expansion of privacy rights ‘into the “right to be unmonitored”’; p. 125 – ‘in the IoT, humans themselves become [not consciously; author: SL-W] the text that is produced and circulated’.
Other analyses are a bit more problematic. Bunz and Meikle make a distinction between ‘agency’ (a tool is an unthinking agent for human functions and goals, e.g. a knife) and ‘intention’ (where the action emanates from someone actively deciding to do something). They place IoT in the former category. However, the real distinction is not dichotomous but rather entails three possibilities, with an intermediate one being a fully autonomous entity (e.g. IoT) that initiates action without any ‘willful intent’ but also without any human intervention (apart from some original algorithmic programming, that weakens over time with the IoT system recalibrating itself based on trial and error). As in communication theory, IoT – as part of the more general technology called ‘autonomous artificial intelligence’ – also calls into question traditional categories regarding willful activity, with all the legal, philosophical, social, ethical, and political conundrums that this will entail. Indeed, precisely because we are dealing with the Internet of Things (plural), that constantly interact, we can never be sure what the overall system will do once its internal communication reaches critical mass.
Overall, this book does a very good job of describing and especially analyzing the past and present of the IoT phenomenon, even if some elements are hardly mentioned; for example, the IoT of environmental studies with sensors for earthquakes, tsunamis, forest growth, and the like – or the whole world of IoT clothing. At only 125 pages of text, the book could easily have been somewhat longer in order to more comprehensively describe the full panoply of IoT elements and their social impact. This might well be a result of the publisher’s word/page restrictions (as part of the Digital Media and Society series). In any case, I recommend this book more for an undergraduate class; it is written mostly in a user-friendly, breezy style.
Surprisingly and frustratingly, the authors do not attempt to venture into the future of IoT. This is surprising for two reasons. First, several predictions from the past are shown to have been correct (p. 96). Second, the authors themselves point out how such prior concepts as the Web 2.0 have become passé with the expansion of Internet functions. So too, one would expect that the IoT will also surely change its stripes as it deepens its penetration into human society. What form could this take? How could this change human life as we know it? Such critical questions will have to wait for another book—or for the IoT future to catch up with us.