Digital Media & Culture: Collaborative Essay Collection 2018/The Internet of Things/Research Question 2:The Outsiders

In what ways has the Internet of Things changed the lives of millions by the growing inter connectivity of everyday objects and does it cause people to over complicate their lives?

Introduction

With seemingly every single device produced by mankind nowadays connected to the internet in one way or another, it seems as if the web is an inescapable dome that surrounds everyone, with many seeing it as a force for diversity of thought, prosperous ingenuity, and a network of communication. Yet at the same time, many others see the constant internet reliance as an abandonment of values we once held dear, leading to antisocial behavior, neediness on technology and a higher risk of exposure to the dark sides of anonymity, such as bullying, stalking or blackmail. Both sides bring many good points to the table, and it only makes sense that this debate should be brought up. Are we too reliant on technology nowadays? If not, where do we get this impression that every single one of our inventions need to be wired up somehow? Many scholars who study the Internet of Things have theorized and mapped out reasons and research for why things are the way they are just now and emphasize the importance of the benefits as well as the detriments of technology. This essay is going to attempt to answer some of these questions using the detailed analysis from computer intellectuals and fact based internet knowledge.

Main Concepts

Part One

Jaron Lanier is a computer philosopher and former Silicon Valley visionary who has since encouraged the abandonment of digital media and has dedicated his career in helping young people ‘find their humanity again ‘. He states ‘Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence.’ This suggests that different technological reliance’s apply to different individuals.

‘This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good would come to them than harm.’ This was Lanier’s incorrect prediction. In empowering those with a communication device as versatile as the internet, it gave way to what are commonly known as haters and trolls. Those who cannot provide a voice in real life seek out to hurt others in a way they can only do via the internet. In a sense, there was an empowerment of sorts except not in the way it was intended. Human dignity and compassion was swept to the side to be replaced by vengeance and bitterness and a longing for disruption.

There is an interesting point to be made about the longevity of the interconnectivity and the consequences it will lead to with future generations. In 2011, a volcano in Iceland erupted which disrupted around nine hundred flights and put the entire northern hemisphere in a state of chaos in regards to travel. This was seven years ago and the situation regarding interconnectivity has only gotten more prosperous in connection to its cause and effect. 'We can’t say exactly what the earth will look or feel like in 2050. Many trends are already well established. How they continue comes down to the choices we make now. In that sense, the future is in our hands. Let’s choose wisely. Our grandchildren and everybody else in the family portrait 2050 will thank us for it.' This is an intriguing statement made by the European Environment Agency, telling us how the future of this technologically dependent society is in our hands. Their use of the word 'trends' is rather telling as trends come and go, leading to the belief that this wave of connected necessity may come to an end very shortly. However, there is evidence to suggest that this fad will carry on in the near future with little dropping. According to Tech Addiction, 'In a typical day, children consume just over three hours of media. This includes computer use, cell phone use, tablet use, music, and reading.' If this continues without parental interference, this could result in these childrens future offspring being more attached to technology and find themselves in a more isolated state than ever before due to lack of outside world exposure.

John Palfrey said 'The key to thriving in an increasingly complex world is to develop a nuanced, stable theory of interoperability.' This statement does seem to suggest that, whether we are aware of it or not, having all of our systems wired to each other is an essential part of the world we live in. According to Palfrey, while there are some considerations and limitations we need to take when becoming so reliant on them, the interconnected devices are a very helpful and purposeful piece of the puzzle we wish to solve to manage our lives better. He takes the counter approach to Jaron Lanier in enforcing the point that the Internet of Things is a force for good with great intentions and great outcomes if slightly less than desirable.

Part Two

Considered as the third evolution of the Internet, named the Web 3.0, which follows the era of the social Web, the Internet of Things faces a universal character to designate connected objects (or smart objects) with various use in relation to different fields such as the eHealth, home automation or the quantified self. If we think about how fast the Web 2.0 has evolved since its creation, how it affects the lives of the vast majority of the people on Earth (including in the poorest countries), and how the humanity takes it as granted and natural; the upcoming of the Web 3.0 and its expansion is life-changing.

The Internet of Things can be understood as an “indeterministic and open” cyberspace, in which we see the evolution of virtual software “objects” associated with physical and inert objects and consuming circumstantial data, such as RFID or barcodes, meaning that even a can of beans in the supermarket has its impact on the Internet of things. Everything around us might become interconnected in a way. Thus, it is believed that the Web 3.0 will simplify our everyday life.

The wealthiest people are already experimenting the new trend of the home automation: smart fridges, smart beds, smart balances or even smart bins, etc. Their everyday life is simplifies by objects which talk to them and notices them whenever something is either changing, missing, needed in their house. Most of all these smart objects are all connected to their smartphones and becomes a “Swiss knife 3.0”: it can be used as a remote control, a light switch, a credit card, and a device for all the apps which will connect the phone to the smart objects around them. Additionally, a phone can also take the role of a person, to whom a user can talk to. “Our relationships with our personal devices will become intimate in new ways. A phone that talks to you is different from a phone that just lets you talk to other people, and it takes on a different role and status in its user’s life."

Also, in addition to making our living easier, the Internet of Things can also help the environment. The tech world is beginning to see smart devices increasing energy efficiency in homes and on farms. For example, with smart sensors, farmers are adept to reduce the quantity of waste they produce, as well as monitor their agricultural processes, depending on humidity, sunlight, weather and other external factors. It's also possible to reduce the quantity of water used to hydrate growing crops when a sensor discovers that the moisture levels in soil are just right.

However, the Web 3.0 can also have its perks but the Internet of Things hasn’t reached a point in which we can say that it affects our lives as much as the Web 2.0 does today, so the implications and the possible complications that it can cause isn’t that critical at this stage. Still, we can only imagine the consequences of the Internet of Things based on what the Web has brought us, good or bad.

“Historical data remains the best way to forecast the future ”.

According to a team of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) , if we take into consideration the modern smartphones and the increasing number of connected objects, in the year 2025, 150 billion objects should be connected amongst each other, with the Internet and with several billion of people. The information arising out of the big data should be more and more filtered by complex algorithm, which jeopardizes a lesser protection of personal information, an information of people and of the society less and less self-determined, particularly in case of exclusive appropriation of numeric filters by external entities (governmental or private) which could manipulate their decisions. This is already a very actual problem in the Web 2.0, it seems like our information are constantly at the risk of being taken, and being taken advantage of. The best example is the very recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal: data of 87 million Facebook users have been shared with the British political consulting firm. This is certainly the biggest problem emerging from the Internet of Things: the overflow of data will become more and more complicated to administer and filter, and in this manner will be more vulnerable and easier to collect for external entities.

“With the predicted advent and increasing density of smart things, data collection will penetrate people's lives even more deeply and introduce whole new sets of linkable and identifiable private data. Where smartphones and social networks require a significant amount of active participation and awareness, humans will be mostly passive and unaware of data collection by the foreseen flood of smart things”

Furthermore, the problems of living in world where information is so readily available is information overload. A user can get overloaded from all the information available to them via Web 2.0 technology. So it is only logical that the Web 3.0 will amplify that as well, there will be more machines and objects not only gathering information but also distributing information, it will become more and more difficult to “switch off”.

Besides, in a more entertaining angle, the Internet of Things has been a real topic of science-fiction films for a long time. One of the most recent ones is the film "Tau" directed by Federico D' Alessandro, which tells the story of a woman who is held captive in a futuristic smart house and hopes to escape by breaking into the computer programs that control the house. Even though it is impossible that today’s technology could make this kind of scenario reality, it is interesting to see what kind of fictive complication the Internet of Things can arouse. Likewise, the Pixar animated film “Wall-E” imagines another sci-fi scenario inspired of the Internet of Things. In “Wall-E”, the humans have become so dependent to the smart objects, that they are incapable of doing anything by their own. On top of that, they lost the sense of normal social behavior and hardly make the difference between human and robot.

Part Three

In order to understand in depth the effects of internet in society we have to remember that technology is material culture. It occurs in the course of a social process, within a particular institutional environment and on the basis of the ideas, values, interests and knowledge of its original creators and their followers. In this process we have to count on the users of this technology, those who appropriate it and adapt it, instead of simply accepting it as it is. Thus, they modify it and produce it in an infinite process of interaction between technological production and social use. Therefore, to assess the importance of the internet in society, we have to consider the specific characteristics of the internet as a technology. Then we will place it in the context of a total transformation of the social structure and relate it to the cultural characteristics of said social structure. Because we live in a new social structure, the society of global networks, characterized by the appearance of a new culture, the culture of autonomy. Internet is a "technology of freedom", according to the term coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, who paradoxically, although it came from a libertarian environment, counted, for the benefit of scientists, engineers and also of its students, with Pentagon financing without having any military application in mind for their investigations (Castells, 2001). The expansion of the internet since the mid-1990s was the result of the combination of three main factors:

- The discovery of the network network technology (World Wide Web) by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to be improved by the open source contributions of a global community of users, in line with the Open condition of TCP / IP internet protocols. The network continues to operate under the same open source principle and two thirds of web servers operate on Apache, an open source server program.

- The institutional change in internet management, which places it under the strict control of the global community of Internet users, privatizes it and allows commercial and cooperative uses.

- Significant changes in structure, culture and social behavior: network communication as the predominant form of organization, the marked tendency towards individualism in social behavior and the prevailing culture of autonomy in the network society. Below I will delve into these stated trends.

Ours is a network society, that is, a society built around personal and corporate networks operated by digital networks that communicate through the Internet. And since networks are global and know no limits, the network society is a society of global networks. This social structure of this historical moment is the result of the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and certain socio-cultural changes of great importance. A first dimension of these changes is the emergence of what we call the "egocentric society", or, in sociological terms, the process of individualization, the decline of the community understood in terms of space, work, family and ascription in general. It is not about the end of the community, nor about localized interaction in one place, but about a reinterpretation of relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community life, based on interests, values and individual projects.

The process of individualization is not exclusively attributable to a cultural evolution, but the material result of new forms of organization of economic activity, politics and social life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the information age (Castells, 1996-2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), labor and economic activity (appearance of the company in a network and the processes of networking) and culture and communications (transition of a mass communication based on the media to a mass self-communication based on the internet); in the crisis of the patriarchal family model, with a growing autonomy of its different members; in the substitution of media policy for mass partisan politics; and in globalization in the form of selective networks of places and processes throughout the planet. But individualization does not mean isolation or, of course, the end of the community. Sociability is reconstructed in the form of individualism and a networked community through the search for like-minded people, in a process that combines virtual interaction (online) with real interaction (offline), cyberspace with physical and local space.

Conclusion

In conclusion, theories applied by Lanier as well as the analysis and data provided by these different websites have managed to stretch the knowledge and understanding of just how influential the Internet of Things truly is. How it effects is in the most subtle of ways with what it does to our everyday habits. It really seems to blur the lines between the correct answer on whether we have become too dependent on our devices and since abandoned our humanity. Some may say that it is quite a stretch to say that we are becoming all too reliant on the machinery though, as ever since the first western technological revolution in the 1600s, we have always used machines to sort our lives out. However, the 21st century is truly giving way to a new sort of person. One which seems to take all these devices for granted and who believe their most desired person of the time will be there with the tapping of some keys. Only time will tell if our inter-connectivity will cause ultimate harm though, and it is essential to identify and stop it before it becomes too late. 'The future lies in interconnected devices but how we manage them will decide how our Digital future is shaped.'

References

1. Lanier, J; You are not a gadget: a manifesto. (2010). Choice Reviews Online, 47(10), pp.47-5602-47-5602.
2. Travelweekly.com. (2018). The cult of Airbnb: Travel Weekly. [online] Available at: http://www.travelweekly.com/Danny-King/The-cult-of-Airbnb [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].
3. European Environment Agency. (2018). Complex challenges in an interconnected world. [online] Available at: https://www.eea.europa.eu/signals/signals-2011/articles/complex-challenges-in-an-interconnected-world [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].
4. Techaddiction.ca. (2018). Statistics on Children’s Use of TV, Internet, & Video Games - TechAddiction. [online] Available at: http://www.techaddiction.ca/media-statistics.html [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].
5. ETtech.com. (2018). 5 challenges to Internet of Things - ETtech. [online] Available at: https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/5-challenges-to-internet-of-things/52700940 [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].