Object 2.0: Examining the Internet of Social Things Jess ...people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jhemerly/jess/files/jhemerly_203.pdf · term “Spime” to describe “objects that can track

OBJECT 2.0: EXAMINING THE INTERNET OF SOCIAL THINGS 1

J. Hemerly - INFO 203 - Spring 2010

Object 2.0: Examining the Internet of Social Things

Jess Hemerly

University of California, Berkeley

School of Information

INFO 203



Object 2.0: The Internet of Social Things

The “Internet of Things” refers to a network in which objects, equipped with tracking

and tracing technologies, create and share data about their histories and locations with

computers and other objects. It’s a network of networks, an invisible web of data that operates

according to human design but without human intervention. For example, self-regulating

appliances can communicate with other self-regulating appliances across a specialized

network, sharing information about their processes in order to minimize energy consumption.

Companies can also closely monitor their supply chains and the lifecycles of products.

Objects will—and, in many cases, already are—equipped with unique identifiers that act as

recorders and transmitters for objects’ life spans.

Many technologists, scientists, and artists conceive of a special world where objects

do not simply communicate with each other. Instead, armed with sensors, circuit boards, and

locative tracking capabilities, objects can communicate with humans through the same social

media that people call Web 2.0, or the social web. Blogjects—objects that blog—and

Tweetjects—objects that post messages to Twitter—are neologisms for objects that are

socialized by plugging them into the social web. Thanks to the combination of ubiquitous

computing technologies and open application programming interfaces (API) for social media,

our plants can tweet when we forget to water them and pigeons can blog and map information

about air pollution.

I argue that socializing objects provide them with social presence, creating several

potential benefits. However, there also exist many downsides and issues that need to be



worked out as the Internet of Things develops, both socially and technologically. In the end,

socialized objects will not become the standard for the Internet of Things. Socializing objects

will, however, provide a rich interdisciplinary area of experimentation and exploration for

artists, educators, scientists, and technologists looking for ways to build awareness of the

roles of nonhuman actors. These nonhuman actors include both inanimate objects to which we

delegate agency and the living but nonhuman things to which we can ascribe agency by

making them social communicators. This use on a small scale will minimize the cons while

maximizing the benefits of socialized objects.

I will begin by providing an overview of the Internet of Things and an explanation of

terms used to describe objects communicating through social media. Next, I will briefly

discuss Actor-Network Theory as a framework for considering the usefulness of socialized

objects, specifically the concept of agency and responses to critiques of anthropomorphism in

the work of Bruno Latour. I will then argue for three benefits of socialized objects, followed

by a discussion of three challenges around the viability of socializing the Internet of Things.

Finally, after weighing the pros and cons of socialized objects, I will close with a summary of

my argument and conclude that limited can minimize the cons and maximize the benefits of

socialize objects.

The Internet of Things

If Web 2.0 is the Social Web, Web 3.0 the Semantic Web, then Web 4.0 is the web of

data created by networked objects—the Internet of Things. These incarnations of the web are

not world-changing paradigm shifts; rather, they are layers of development in the operation

and design of networks. The Internet of Things is a concept from ubiquitous computing in



which objects are technologically equipped with unique identifiers. These identifiers work

with sensors, cameras, GPS, and other sensing technologies to create a network of objects

able to communicate with each other. Computers and other objects transmit, read, and

interpret this information, building the web of data.

You could think of it as a wireless layer on top of the internet where millions of things from razor blades to euro banknotes to car tyres are constantly being tracked and accounted for. A network where, to use the rhetoric of the Auto ID Centre, it is possible for computers to identify ‘any object anywhere in the world instantly’ (Dodson, 2003, para. 9).

IBM Social Media has called the Internet of Things a “system of systems” (IBM, 2010, para.

1). The emphasis in Internet of Things work has classically been building systems that allow

objects to act autonomously, sending information to and from each other, communicating and

acting independent of direct human intervention.

In a talk at SIGGRAPH, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling (2004) first coined the

term “Spime” to describe “objects that can track themselves through space and time” (para.

45). While we are far from realizing Sterling’s vision, we already see early implementations

of an Internet of Things, largely based on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags (Dodson,

para. 1-4). RFID tags, developed by the military, are what allow us to track Federal Express

packages, and enable companies to precisely locate objects within “flexible production and

distribution systems” (Crandall, 2005, para. 33-34).

On a more visible level, our mobile devices are already “spimey,” able to track their

location as we move around with them. With location services turned on, other computers,

like Google’s servers, can recognize the phone’s location and provide contextual search

results based on location. Geo-locative game Foursquare uses this information to provide



users nearby businesses from which they can “check-in” as part of the badge-earning game

(Fletcher, 2010, para. 1-4).

Now imagine carrying a device equipped to specifically send information to

Foursquare. DoGood, for example, envisions a foldable coffee cup that automatically checks

you in to Foursquare when you enter an establishment (Vasquez, para. 2). The cup also comes

with a solar clock and Bluetooth to work with your mobile device. While it’s only a concept,

this is the kind of object designers looking to leverage the Internet of Things are dreaming

about. But its communication doesn’t occur only within an invisible web of data. This

particular object represents a subset of objects in the Internet of Thing where objects connect

to us through the social web: socialized objects. By social web I mean self-broadcasting tools

like blogs, Twitter, and Flickr; social location games; social networking sites; and even simple

Google Maps interfaces.

University of Southern California professor and researcher Julian Bleecker (2006)

coined the term “Blogjects” to describe objects that blog (p. 2). These objects blog not by

writing editorial commentary about their experiences, but through the work of designers who

use APIs and customized programs to harness the information captured by sensors and RFID.

This information then appears on blogs in the form of human-readable maps, charts, and text.

Bleecker’s early example of a Blogject is Beatriz da Costa’s Pigeon Blog. Da Costa, a Los

Angeles–based artist working at the intersection of life sciences, politics, and technology,

armed urban pigeons with pollution sensors and locative tracking devices, released them, and

created a web interface—in this case Pigeon Blog—to display their flight patterns on Google

Maps alongside the pollution levels in the air as they flew. “Whereas once the pigeon was an



urban varmint whose value as a participant in the larger social collective was practically nil or

worse, the Pigeon that Blogs now attains first-class citizen status” (Bleecker, p. 5).

Tweetjects share the characteristics of Blogjects. Where Blogjects are objects that join

the conversation through information posted to blogs, Tweetjects join the conversation on

Twitter. IBM’s Andy Stanford-Clark has been credited with coining the term when he wired

his house with sensors, enabling appliances to send information about things happening in the

house to the house’s Twitter account, @andy_house (MacManus, 2009, para. 4). On a more

product-based level, Botanicalls sells a kit consisting of a soil sensor that sends information

about the water level in the soil through an Arduino circuit board, converting thresholds to

messages like, “Please water me, I’m thirsty!” Botanicalls also enables plants to notify owners

of their needs via text or a phone call. (Botanicalls, n.d.) The kit is entirely open source and

hackable, allowing users to customize the thresholds based on the kind of plant and the

messages the plant tweets.

Actor-Network Theory Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a framework for thinking about the roles of and

relationships between actors, both human and nonhuman. Born out of Science and

Technological Studies (STS), it is a method for exploring the sociological impact of a

confluence of actors and actor-networks in science and in technological systems. Knowledge

is a “social product,” not the exclusive domain of scientists; it “may be seen as a product or an

effect of a network of heterogeneous materials” (Law, 1992, p. 381). Michael Callon (1987)

who, along with Bruno Latour and John Law, is considered a founder of ANT, explains:



… it is often believed that at the beginning of the process of innovation the problems to be solved are basically technical and that economic, social, political, or indeed cultural considerations come into play only at a later stage. However, more and more studies are showing that this distinction is never as clear-cut. This is particularly true in the case of radical innovations: Right from the start, technical, scientific, social, economic, or political considerations have been inextricably bound up into an organic whole (p. 84).

According to ANT, all actors are networks, and networks are actors—hence “actor-network.”

Actors have agency, and Bleecker’s (2006) definition of agency regarding Blogjects works

quite well in the ANT framework: “Agency is about having an ability to foment action, to be

decisive and articulate” (p. 8). Objects, both human and nonhuman, are capable of having

agency and therefore of being actor-networks.

Herein lies one of the chief critiques of ANT: that the idea of nonhuman objects

having agency is little more than anthropomorphism. While its proponents don’t believe that

nonhuman, non-living objects have intentional action—we’ve delegated responsibilities to

them—Latour (1992) does argue against anthropomorphism as a criticism. Using his

recurring example of a door opener, or groom—the mechanism that keeps the door from

staying open and slamming shut—to discuss this notion of agency, he addresses those who

would devalue ANT for anthropomorphism:

It is well known that the French like etymology; well, here is another one: anthropos and morphos together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans. The groom is indeed anthropomorphic, in three senses: first, it has been made by humans; second, it substitutes for the actions of people and is a delegate that permanently occupies the position of a human; and third, it shapes human action by prescribing back what sort of people should pass through the door. And yet some would forbid us to ascribe feelings to this thoroughly anthropomorphic creature, to delegate labor relations, to ‘‘project’’—that is, to translate—other human properties to the groom (p. 160).



Socialized objects like Blogjects and Tweetjects are similarly anthropomorphic, especially

since they are designed to communicate like humans. However, this is not a bad thing. As

Latour explains, many objects have agency; connecting them to social media protocols only

makes us aware of that agency. Those objects that do not have agency can be granted agency

or a different kind of agency by arming them technologically to tell a story, like pigeons

blogging about pollution. It is not science fiction or fantasy. Nonhuman living things become

informants for the environment.

With socialized objects, information transmitted from objects and translated through

social media enhances the ability to communicate to nonhuman actors, revealing the work that

they do and, subsequently, their mediations in our experience. In short, nonhuman objects can

tell us what they are doing and what’s going on around them. “You discriminate between the

human and the inhuman. I do not hold this bias (this one at least) and see only actors—some

human, some nonhuman, some skilled, some unskilled—that exchange their properties.”

(Latour, 1992, p. 160) This building of the network helps us to better understand more of the

actors and networks involved in a given geographical space, a technology, or the environment

at large. Socialized objects, then, can be a useful tool when applying the ANT methodology to

a given technology, system, or phenomenon.

To give a brief example of how the framework applies here, let’s look at the Internet

of Things using the ANT framework. Applying ANT to the Internet of Things allows us to

tease out some of the pros and cons of a layer of socialized objects. The Internet of Things is

itself an actor network consisting of numerous nonhuman actors—these are the web-enabled

objects. Whether it’s a mobile phone, an appliance, or a car, each of these actors has its own



role in other actor-networks. But there are many more actors involved than just these objects.

There are companies vying for control, whether through protocols and standards or through

the production of tracking and tracing devices, which themselves become actors. There are

servers, acting on behalf of the companies, users, and objects, receiving, recording, and

transmitting data. And, of course, there are the users who buy and use the objects. All of these

actors and networks will play into my analysis of the benefits and costs of socialized objects.

Benefits of Socialized Objects I have identified three major benefits of socialized objects that I will discuss in this

section. Each of these benefits can be understood by keeping in mind the framework laid out

by ANT and the notion of objects having agency, expanded into the world of social media by

Bleecker (2006). These benefits build on each other. I start with the effects on the object

itself; move to the impact of perception of and interaction with space; and finally, show how

socialized objects can be used to understand and manage complex issues around the

environment.

Realizing agency and creating social presence. According to Bleecker (2006), there are three major characteristics of Blogjects,

which, by virtue of their participation in social media, can be extended to Tweetjects and

other objects using the social web: they “track and trace” their locations; they contain

“embedded histories of their encounters and experiences”; and they “have some form of

agency” and “have an assertive voice in the social web” (p. 6). The first characteristic relates

to location—they keep a geo-locative record. The second characteristic, histories, means that



objects can tell us about their factory of origin and the employees or machines that built it; its

composition, including materials; intellectual property rights, e.g. patent ownership; and its

carbon footprint including, as Bleecker suggests, “rules, protocols and techniques for retiring

and recycling Things” (p. 6).

The third characteristic of Blogjects is that they have agency. This does not mean

artificial intelligence, or training a mangy pigeon to peck at keys on a keyboard with its beak.

Bleecker suggests that Blogjects are imbued with agency, that agency lies in their ability to

affect change by what they bring to the social conversation, and that we are more likely to pay

attention to nonhuman things when they are “first-class citizens”—that is, when they join our

social communication channels (p. 9).

Human-like communication from online agents, such as product recommendation

agents, influences the users’ perception of a social relationship, making the interaction more

enjoyable, thus more effective (Qui & Benbasat, 2009, p. 145). If we apply this to objects that

also communicate in human language, we can argue that the same social relationships can

develop between people and objects, especially if the communication comes through the same

channels through which we communicate with other humans—i.e., social media. Bleecker

(2006) writes, “A Blogject can start a conversation with something as simple as an

aggregation of levels of pollutants in groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and

made consequential through hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data,

this Blogject is going to get some trackback” (p. 4). The story about environmental data,

then, comes out of the backdrop and becomes a current event in our normal social media

streams.



Connecting objects to social media channels breaks down imposed barriers between

human and nonhuman, as we are able to read, through first-object accounts, about the roles

they play in our day-to-day lives. “What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a

century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to

find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding”

(Latour, 1992, p. 154). Plugging objects in to social media channels provides them a place in

the social conversation and allows them to literally beg for understanding.

In proposing an adequate theory and measure of social presence that can include

mediated communication environments such as the social web, Biocca et. al. (2004) define

social presence as, “the sense of ‘being together with another,’ including primitive responses

to social cues, simulations of ‘other minds,’ and automatically generated models of the

intentionality of others (people, animals, agents, gods, and so on)” (p. 459). Making

nonhuman objects participants in social media increases their social presence, making visible

the roles and responsibilities of the objects to which we have delegated them.

A designer working to socialize objects, especially objects that communicate through

text like Tweetjects, has the task of determining just what kind of voice the object will have.

This is an opportunity to make the object’s voice as human as possible in order to maximize

our engagement with it. Socialized objects are not bots; they are vocal actors with their own

agency. Botanicalls, for example, allows users to customize the messages a plant Tweets in

order to provide the plant a sense of personality (Botanicalls, n.d.).

It is important here to draw a distinction between living and non-living nonhumans. In

the case of natural objects, Latour argues that many need not be considered in the actor-



network because they lack agency if symbolic or natural causality explains their inclusion in

the actor-network analysis (Latour, 2005, p. 10). But by equipping them with technology, we

enable them to become storytellers, lending them agency such that their stories impact our

perception and our social relationship with them. Pigeons already have agency in the

environment, but in the case of Pigeon Blog, this agency takes a different form: they now

serve to tell us about pollution in the air as they move through it. Plants, on the other hand,

become actors by providing information about whether or not they need to be watered. That

is, they act on us through technology-enabled communication.

An example like the tweeting house consists of technological objects, therefore these

objects already fit into the ANT framework as having agency without needing to provide it by

socializing the objects. In Latour’s world, we have already delegated responsibility to them—

keep our food cold, receive phone calls from friends, warm the house. In this case, connecting

them to the social web simply helps us to become aware of their agency. As discussed in the

ANT overview earlier in this paper, they themselves are actor-networks. Their visibility

through Twitter also provides us a glimpse of the underlying web of data that can be shared

between objects and the impact they have on our lives and our worlds.

Engaging with space.

As objects reveal agency through social presence, we develop a larger and more

complex picture of the relationships and influences in the world around us. Embedding

sensors in the environment allows the objects to which they’re attached to tell an aggregated

story. Bleecker (2006) calls this “cohabitation,” where we develop a more profound sense of



sharing the world as objects begin to communicate in the same communication channels in

which we communicate with each other.

In “Sentient Cities,” Crang and Graham (2007) suggest that weaving multimedia,

sensors, and locative technology into the urban space changes the way we interact with that

space, making it a “hybrid” space (p. 790). They discuss three forms of what they call

“sentient” urban environments: commercial, military, and artistic (p. 789). The artistic

experiments focus on humans creating data and telling stories about places and experiences.

Socialized objects, while possibly available as commercial products, are currently in the realm

of the artistic.

Sentient urban environments can be combined with user-generated data to create rich

histories of space. For example, Urban Tapestry combines the data sent from something like

Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robotic Dogs, which capture pollution data, with user-

contributed stories about space (Crang & Graham, 2007, p. 806; Singer, 2004, para. 2-3). By

combining the data about the space sent from an object with location-based, user-contributed

data, Urban Tapestry’s designers can build a sense of engagement with the space and an

awareness of the invisible information about its status. In this case, that invisible information

concerns pollution levels, and by including data about it in the social media space, pollution

itself becomes a visible actor in the actor-network.

Locative games like Urban Tapestry, and even Foursquare, use the new and

unexpected to transform the urban environment. More importantly, these “locative

performances” create “sociotechnical communities through locative performances” (Crang &

Graham, 2007, p. 810). Bleecker (2006) suggests:



Whereas the Internet of Non-Things was limited to human agents, in the Internet of Things objects are also active participants in the creation, maintenance and knitting together of social formations through the dissemination of meaningful insights that, until now, were not easily circulated in human readable form (p. 15).

Together, users interact with data about a space to create an enriched, highly social history of

the space. Information comes together from various actors and objects to create a picture of

experience. Artifacts, objects, and locations will be “imbued with memories in a far richer

way than ever before” (Varnelis & Friedberg, 2008, p. 35).

Cameras hung in urban spaces act as translators for the point of view of a particular

object or from the space itself. In the natural world, cameras can transmit video to a streaming

video site to build engagement with a space, near or far, from the point of view of an object.

Think of “critter cams” that, when affixed to a tree in the Amazon, make us aware of that tree

as well as the activity in its immediate space (Bleecker, 2006, p. 13). Combining this video

with user-contributed information, as with locative games, will again help to build a unique

and comprehensive picture of space and the actors working in it.

Publicly available data, such as information about transportation—traffic, trains, and

ferries—can be pushed through social media too, for more practical purposes. The same

technologist who wired his house to Twitter, Andy Stanford-Clark, also harnessed the

publicly available data about RedJet ferries in order to make them tweet their comings and

goings (Stanford-Clark, n.d.). In our social media streams, these modes of transportation tell

when they are arriving and departing without us having to look beyond our streams of social

information. They have social presence, helping us engage with their role in space.



Exploring ecology.

The Internet of Things will be a layer of data created by objects. Communicating with

servers and with each other, companies will harness the capabilities for supply chain

management (Dodson, 2003, para. 5). But supply chain management can also be lifecycle

management. That is, companies can get a bigger picture of the entire life of the object, from

factory to landfill. This information has the power to help companies picture and quantify the

environmental impact of their products.

Italian appliance manufacturer Merloni Elettrodomestici and Electrolux, the world’s

largest appliance manufacturer, teamed up to create the concept of “pay-per-use laundry using

state-of-the-art washers with sensors that optimize the length of the wash cycle and the

amount of water used” (Hood, A476). Users have the machines in their homes but they don’t

actually own them; “the company monitors energy use, maintains the machines, and recycles

or refurbishes them when they are no longer operating at optimum efficiency: after 4-5 years”

(Hood, A476). Families save money and reduce environmental impact thanks to the

information beamed from appliances to company computers.

While this is a great step forward for the sustainability movement, the machine

automates everything, putting the user in the place of relying on the machine—an agent for

sustainability—to do its work. The family buys the machine and forgets about it. But if it was

able to somehow communicate, perhaps even publicly, the amount of money or water saved

with each load throughout its history, that social communication would create a better sense

of awareness of how it affects and potentially reduces the family’s environmental impact.

Socialized objects, then, can step in to make visible what these objects are actually



doing and how they alter our ecological impact—our impact and our technologies’, all actors

in the larger network. Much of what I’ve discussed so far seems novel, but when we think

about the picture that can be built by connecting all of the actors and actor-networks together

socially, they paint a picture of a larger societal issue: sustainability. I have shown several

examples in previous sections of socialized objects designed to explore issues around ecology,

specifically pollution and consumption. As Crang & Graham (2007) write,” in a world of

augmented, enacted, transduced or ‘blogjected’ space – we will no longer, even if we ever

could, be able to see the environment as a mere passive backcloth for social action. At the

very least the environment has always recursively influenced and been influenced by action”

(p. 811). Awareness could very well lead to action.

Designers working in this space have the opportunity to use ubiquitous computing and

nonhuman actors to tell rich stories about how we as humans impact the world. Bleecker

(2006) emphasizes that this is not some social media Planet of the Apes scenario, where

nonhumans takeover the world. Rather, “I’m saying that design agents should think hard

about the opportunities for creating more lively engagements with Things, enrolling them into

the thick, contested and messy imbroglios of trans-species dialogue that lead to more

habitable worlds” (p. 16).

Pigeon Blog exemplifies the use of nonhuman objects to explore issues around

sustainability. The pigeon was able to show, through the simple map and chart interface, how

pollution levels changed in just a short flight range. The pigeons were able to become socially

present and tell a story through this interface, essentially making pollution visible from the

flight of the pigeon. The designer has exposed the agency of both the pigeon and the pollution



and provided them social presence.

Similarly, the messages Andy Stanford-Clark’s house sends to Twitter are not just

cosmetic things like, “The phone is ringing,” but also messages about how much energy a

given appliance is using or how much water has been run in a given room (MacManus, 2009,

para. 5). Stanford-Clark has made socially visible the activities of the appliances in his house

and can easily monitor consumption. Setting all the objects in the house up to tweet to one

account, the house’s, shows us both the agency of the house as an actor-network and the

individual agency of the appliances within. This is a great way to explore and understand

what we’re using and how without complicated charts, meters, or metrics. Stanford-Clark has

made sustainability a social act. Imagine a game where people competed for badges based on

how much they saved, and were able to monitor competitors’ progress through Twitter.

Even Botanicalls has its philosophical roots in ecology. The Botanicalls site lists one

of the purposes of Botanicalls as follows: “Enhance people’s connection to plants, and

explore the ways plants help humans, how caring for a shared resource can create sense of

community, and how natural life is a valuable counterpoint to our technical environment.”

(Botanicalls, n.d.) It seems counterintuitive that pairing natural and technological allows us to

become more in-tune with the natural world. But in ANT terms, making visible objects’

agency helps us to see how they are part of the environmental actor-network, acting on us to

recognize them as participants in the creation of the environment’s story.

Let me emphasize that socialized objects are by no means a solution to all of our

environmental woes, or to social disengagement with ecological issues. These problems are

too large to have a single technological solution. However, socialized objects could be a great



part of the sustainability toolkit, a technology for engagement with the natural world, and a

way to understand our impact as humans on the nonhuman processes and objects around us.

We can follow nonhuman objects near and far, whether schools of dolphins or a city’s

average power consumption. Giving objects social presence can also provide the environment

social presence.

Downsides to Socialized Objects Despite the benefits to be derived from socialized objects, there are also several

downsides. First, a usage gap exists between groups of users that will prevent the mainstream

adoption of Tweetjects and Blogjects, relegating socialized objects to niche users. Second,

more voices in our social media channels means more information. Charges of society-wide

information overload already abound; social objects would only elevate those fears. Finally,

the underlying technologies of the Internet of Things need to be open in order for designers to

exploit them in the social web. However, this same information meant for utility can betray

the identities of users. Thus, there exists a tension between privacy, openness, and control.

Usage gaps will not go away. Only users connected to the social web can hear nonhuman objects with voices, and

not everyone uses the social web, regardless of whether they have the hardware and the

connectivity to do so. This is something that Jan van Dijk and Kenneth Hacker (2003) call a

“usage gap,” an aspect of the digital divide projected to grow as tools and improved versions

of existing tools proliferate, writing:



In the information and network society, relative differences in getting information and lines of communication become decisive for one’s position in society, more than in every society in history before. Giving everybody a computer and a network connection, banning the cutting lines of “segregation” in this way, will not remove them. Much deeper and more clear-cut differences in skill and usage will appear as both technology and society increasingly differentiate (p. 324).

We can glean from this projection that, while the Internet of Things will continue to develop,

interest and engagement with it will depend largely on the skills and interests of the user. Not

everyone reads blogs or posts 140-character messages to Twitter, and likely never will,

despite possessing a computer and mobile device. Younger users, immersed in Web 2.0,

would likely have less trouble adopting objects into their social channels than an older user

unfamiliar with blogs and Twitter. People may simply not see the utility in chatty objects,

limiting their adoption and popularity among various groups of users ranging in skill, interest,

and access. Socialized objects will fall into the usage gap.

Widespread adoption of socialized objects seems unlikely. Rather groups of users, like

hackers, heavy social media users, artists, and technologists are the most likely to use

socialized objects. Industrial designer Carla Diana (2008) writes, “The DIY attitude is one of

play, experimentation, and an appreciation for an intellectual landscape of possibility and

undefined paths” (Diana, p. 49). The ubiquity and decreasing price of sensors, cameras, GPS

devices, APIs, and connectivity—not to mention that most social web services are free,

financially speaking—puts amateurs in the do-it-yourself community in a unique position to

experiment and develop tools and devices that can be embedded in objects. All of the

examples of socialized objects in this paper are one-off experiments, installations, or come as

a kit to be assembled and customized.



But the DIY community is only one social group, and its members are far more

willing to take things apart and put things together than the average user (Diana, 2008, p. 49).

Expecting people to experiment with hardware is an even more demanding request than

asking them to sign up for Twitter. Botanicalls comes as a kit, not a fully assembled product,

and customers need to use a soldering iron to put the pieces together on the Arduino circuit

board. This requires a serious investment of time, effort, and energy on the part of the user.

Unless grandma is in tune with the DIY community—which is certainly possible—she won’t

be wiring her plants to tweet anytime soon.

Make the noise stop! Even without having voices in the social web, the sheer amount of data created and

transmitted by objects could leave us overwhelmed by information about, well, everything.

Varnelis and Friedberg (2008) caution:

Meanwhile, not only devices (like mobile phones and PDAs), but also furniture (like chairs and tables), objects (like trees and street signs), buildings (like monuments and apartment buildings), and landscapes (like forests, deserts, and riverbeds) become sentient information platforms— sensors to collect and send data to whoever is out there to collect, analyze, and read it. And like all spirits, these could be dangerous; not only do we have the dystopian scenarios of the geospatial Web filled with geo-spam and our every move tracked with RFIDs, but what might happen if every light bulb insisted on leaving behind its life story or if a printer reported on what you printed? (p. 37-39).

These scenarios are not anything close to the reality of today’s Internet of Things, but they are

provocative ways to think about what might happen when every object leaves a trace. The

already heavy demands for our attention will not just come from other people, but from

objects, too.



With growing concerns over information overload as a result of the amount of digital

information in which we’re immersed, some would argue that the last thing we need is a

bunch of objects adding to the noise. Our already clogged information channels will only

become more overwhelming if objects were to come online, too. Socialized objects are not

autonomous agents designed to help alleviate information overload. Rather, they are

expressions of the agency they already possess or that they have been granted through their

socialization. Objects declaring their agency in order to raise awareness of complicated issues

like sustainability and consumption can potentially make things worse.

Once you start looking at the relationships between actors and networks, the picture

only grows larger, incorporating more actors and more networks, encompassing more topics

and scenarios. We are bombarded not just by communication, but communication

representing topics that may not have previously been in our social grasp. Social psychologist

Donald Michael (1998) used poverty as an example of this cognitive overload in a San

Francisco talk over 10 years ago, before the dotcom boom, before social media as we know it:

“All of these and more infuse any topic that we pay attention to and try to do something

about. But, clearly, we can’t attend to all of these (and others) because each has its own

complex mix of interdependencies to be attended to” (p. 9). He goes on to say that, with

complicated problems such as these, more information essentially begets more information,

resulting in doubts and more options, in what he calls a “self-amplifying ‘information loop’”

(Michael, 1998, p. 11).

But every object need not have a voice on the social web and we need to recognize our

inability to process all information everywhere. Michael suggests context alertness as a way



to combat information overload, recognizing the tradeoff between being “up” on all the

current information and being able to deeply and meaningfully process information about

certain issues (Michael, 1998, p. 16). Designers working in the space should socialize

judiciously, thinking carefully about how the object will communicate, managing relevance

and context by considering what story it can tell and the social importance of that story.

Designers must also accept that everyone won’t adopt any given socialized object, as I

have already discussed in the context of the usage gap. But drawing hobbyists into the

conception of the objects to make them seem fun and engaging through customization and

participation could serve as a refuge from information overload. University of Washington

Information School professor and former PARC researcher, David M. Levy (2005) has

proposed the leisure as a way to fight the effects of information overload. Pulling from

philosopher Josef Pieper’s work in post-WWII Germany, Levy suggests that creating time and

space to think and reflect is essential to managing the amount of information in the world

around us (p. 285). Hobbies are an important outlet, and working with objects to make them

reflective could be a unique and meaningful way to reflect and unwind.

Balancing privacy and openness.

Embedding objects with the ability to track and trace their locations and histories raises

serious concerns about privacy. This Internet of Things, “a world of information overlays that

is no longer virtual but wedded to objects, places, and positions, and no longer fully

simulative since it facilitates an active trafficking between model and reality” (Crandall, 2005,

para 54), raises serious concerns about ownership and privacy. Who controls the information



and the computers able to access it? Should an object’s genealogy be the “property,” so to

speak, of an owner who purchases it? Who owns the data the object has recorded?

Companies already collect large amounts of data from unknowing users; the Internet of

Things will provide them even more, especially when attached to an object’s human owner.

Corporate products touting connectivity of objects as a feature will collect information from

objects and send that information through their servers. If they own it, they may feel entitled

to use it in any way. Worse, there may be no way to even know exactly what information they

transmit. Users expect a right to control their personal information, but do they have a right to

control their objects? In fact, Saadi Lahlou (2008) argues that, “The very notions of ‘alone’ or

‘control’ may no longer be the appropriate conceptual tools in an environment populated by a

ubiquitous population of non-human, intelligent, connected devices, some of which belong to

the user herself” (p. 313).

Of course, in order for the Internet of Things at large to be socialized, technologists and

designers would need access to the information floating in that web of object-driven data. As

Bleecker (2006) puts it, “I want to know more than just what the Thing is. I want to know

how to refractor and rejuvenate networked objects, and for that I need open source Things” (p.

8.). This requires that access to information in the Internet of Things must be open to all users,

or adhere to some standard, open protocol. This openness creates transparency, alleviating

some issues about where the information goes and what happens to it. Gerschenfeld et. al.

(2004) suggest a single protocol, “Internet-0,” to serve as the backbone of the Internet of

Things: “To eliminate this technological Tower of Babel, the data protocol that is at the heart

of the Internet can be adopted to represent information in whatever form it takes: pulsed



electrically, flashed optically, clicked acoustically, broadcast electromagnetically or printed

mechanically” (p. 78).

But openness still comes at a cost. The same issues relating to privacy in the social web

for humans would apply to privacy in the social web for nonhumans. A purely open device

would enable access to potentially private information that, like anonymized Internet data,

disseminates information that an object’s owner may consider private. And as with

anonymized Internet data, getting a hold of enough of the pieces can result in a fundamental

de-anonymization, where knitting together pieces of information sent from the object and the

user can identify the object owner. Using examples of experiments ranging from how people

like their coffee to activity sensors in shoes, Saadi Lahlou (2008) explains that “combining

ubiquitous sensing, databases, pattern recognition and search algorithms makes it possible to

identify who is doing or did what, and to some extent to predict who will do what and when”

(p. 306).

Services that support social objects also rely on terms of service and end user licenses

that these services reserve the right to change at any time, and say so explicitly in the terms

(Facebook, 2010, sec. 13, 1). Human users have difficulty reading terms of service in the first

place, let alone keeping up with changes to them. Since objects can’t change their privacy

settings themselves, users would need to keep up with changes for their own accounts and for

their objects’ accounts. Because of this, the social sites to which objects should and will be

connected will remain limited to sites with stable privacy settings, like Twitter, blogs, and

even Flickr. Even the tweeting house has its Twitter account set to by request only (Dodson,

2003, para. 5). We’re not likely to see “Facejects” any time soon.



Again, the experimental technologist, or artist has a special role. “Explicit calls have

been made to both use these technologies to create an oppositional vision of urban space and

simultaneously to render visible the systems of knowledge production that are increasingly

rendering our lives transparent” (Crang & Graham, 2007, p. 805). Through these experiments,

designers simultaneously create fun and interesting socialized objects and expose people to

the kind of information a fully developed Internet of Things would unknowingly transmit

about them and their spaces once deployed.

Conclusion

On one hand, socialized objects present a number of benefits. Objects have social

presence through voices and personalities, making us aware of their roles and perspectives,

telling stories about the spaces they occupy, and helping us to understand the actors and

networks involved in a seemingly untenable human social problem, in this case sustainability.

But there also exist costs and complications, especially when we take into account the

nascence of the Internet of Things. First, a usage gap for social media prevents mainstream

viability of socialized objects. Second, the social web has already brought us more

information than many users can handle; more voices in our social channels could only

exacerbate information overload. Finally, there exist serious privacy and control concerns

about what the objects we possess communicate to computers, to each other, and to us.

The reality is that the Internet of Things, as developed by companies mainly interested

in supply chain management and product tracking, and with its potential for privacy abuse,

will never be fully open for experimentation. We won’t know what cameras are connected to



what network, and who may have figured out how to access them. We won’t know whether or

not our dishwashers are transmitting data about more than just how many dishes were in our

last load. The cons simply outweigh the pros of the socialized object version of the web,

which will not work on a massive scale. The requirement that users to deal with serious

privacy issues or adopt and learn unfamiliar social media technologies is simply too much to

overcome.

Plants that use Twitter are fun, but not for everybody. However, this isn’t necessarily a

bad thing. With the growth of DIY culture—e.g., Maker Faire, Instructables (Diana, 2008, p.

48)—and interdisciplinary programs like NYU ITP and CalIT2 at the University of

California, San Diego, we’re seeing a boom in the intersection of technology and art

innovation. As technology becomes cheaper, it also becomes more accessible to those looking

to experiment. Working with technologies native to the Internet of Things but using them in

creative and educational ways allows us to expand our understanding of the world around us,

to see the nonhuman actors in our networks in ways Latour would have us think about them.

The Internet of Things will exist regardless of whether or not technologists, designers,

scientists, and artists come together to enable objects to communicate through the social web.

However, socializing objects has the ability to increase awareness of the Internet of Things,

which would otherwise operate as an invisible web of data that tracks, traces, and exposes our

habits through the objects we carry. As several of the examples provided in this article show,

socializing objects within the Internet of Things is a great area of exploration for artists,

particularly those working in the area of new media. Combining technology with social media

interfaces in order to make statements about social, cultural, or political issues has the power



to make objects the voices in artistic endeavors. There exists a valuable opportunity to use

objects to keep dibs on the Internet of Things, to make its capabilities more transparent.

Combining social platforms to enable user-generated content to complement object-

generated data is also another way to make use of socialized objects. As Julian Bleecker

(2006) phrases it, “Now that we've shown that the Internet can become a place where social

formations can accrete and where worldly change has at least a hint of possibility, what can

we do to move that possibility out into the worlds in which we all have to live?” (p. 17).

Allowing users to add their stories to the stories told by objects with social presence enhances

the perception of social relationships with those objects. Socialized objects convert concepts

like agency and actor-networks from theoretical frameworks to design specs. These kinds of

experiments won’t change the world, but they do have the potential to render visible, if only

briefly, the larger network of actor-networks—nonhuman and human—that interact to create

the natural, social, and technological fabric of the world around us.



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Documents

Object 2.0: Examining the Internet of Social Things Jess ...people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~jhemerly/jess/files/jhemerly_203.pdf · term “Spime” to describe “objects that can track