The Internet of Things E-Book

Mercedes Bunz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 273

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known as 'the internet of things'. In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and the breaking of new frontiers in communication. They also raise urgent questions regarding ubiquitous surveillance and information security, as well as the transformation of intimate personal information into commercial data. Discussing the internet of things from a media and communication perspective, this book is an important resource for courses analysing the internet and society, and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the rapidly changing roles of our networked lives.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. First things

Sensing networks

The Fridge Fallacy

Some agency, no intention

2. Addressing things

The borders of the internet

Inventing the user

Ethics of surveillance

How things have changed

Things at netwar

Readdressing the world

3. Speaking things

We need to talk

Imaginary friends

Learning to speak

Now we’re talking

Do what you’re told?

Conclusion

4. Seeing things

Technologies of visibility

Seeing is believing

The agency of things

Inbuilt politics

Conclusion

5. Tracking things

Keeping watch

Firm wear

Playful surveillance

Data entry

Conclusion

6. Last things

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Digital Media and Society Series

Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 2nd editionMercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle, The Internet of ThingsJean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTubeMark Deuze, Media WorkAndrew Dubber, Radio in the Digital AgeCharles Ess, Digital Media Ethics, 2nd editionJordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative MediaAlexander Halavais, Search Engine Society, 2nd editionMartin Hand, Ubiquitous PhotographyRobert Hassan, The Information SocietyTim Jordan, HackingGraeme Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social ImaginaryLeah A. Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New MediaRich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile CommunicationDonald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War ReportingDhiraj Murthy, Twitter, 2nd editionZizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital AgeJill Walker Rettberg, Blogging, 2nd editionPatrik Wikström, The Music Industry, 2nd edition

The Internet of Things

Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle

polity

Copyright © Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle 2018

The right of Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300,Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1749-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Mercedes thanks the lights for their amusing dialogues, Roomba for helping with the housework, and Toby for accepting that he has lost control of the home.

Graham thanks his connected home network – Lola, Rosie and Fin.

Introduction

What is the internet of things? The internet of things describes the many uses and processes that result from giving a network address to a thing and fitting it with sensors. These conjunctures of sensors, things and networks have become an increasingly important part of internet experiences. When we equip the things around us with sensors and connect them to networks, they gain new capabilities – in this book we call these skills. By skills, we mean a particular ability that things did not have before – such as seeing, speaking to, or tracking people. We study and evaluate these skills chapter by chapter. In particular, we explore the shifts that come with the new dimensions of communication that are enabled by the internet of things.

There’s a good chance that the reader is familiar with some internet of things devices in their own daily life. Many such devices are designed for a specific use and are given a single skill – they might turn on your lights or help you count your daily steps, for instance. Others, such as the increasingly connected car, are filled with multiple sensors and network connections. And then there are the internet of things devices known as smartphones. One way of looking at smartphones is that they are general-purpose computers that can simulate many other kinds of devices – so you can use one as a piano, as a TV or as a book. To support those functions, they contain a lot of sensors. Sensors are components of a device or system that detect and communicate changes in their environment. And sensors are a crucial part of the internet of things.

But the internet of things is not just about networked sensors being fitted to things. It is also about how those things gain new skills that are expressed in new forms of communication. These new forms have been created by new interfaces, such as the conversational technology of a virtual assistant like Siri or Alexa. Such interfaces have become more pervasive as computing power, as cloud storage and management capacity, and as the potential to deploy algorithms in data processing, have all become both greater and cheaper. As we go through the book, we explore how both physical things, like smartphones, cars or human bodies, and virtual things, like chatbots or virtual assistants, have been incorporated into sensing networks.

Chapter 1, First things, explores sensors and networks as the two fundamental elements of the internet of things, creating a communication environment that we call sensing networks. Sensing networks of connected things are systems for making sense – the internet of things mediates what has not been mediated before. It is a misapprehension that the internet of things is just about connecting domestic appliances to the web. Instead of following this Fridge Fallacy, we show that the internet of things introduces services that disconnect the user further from a product; this fundamentally changes questions of agency. A prominent example for this is Error 53, the software bug that automatically bricked the thing genuinely precious to all of us: the smartphone. The smartphone, today used less as a phone and more as a networked computer, comes with an expanding range of sensors that have turned the device into a different kind of thing. Not just because it becomes able to sense, but also because it stays connected to the manufacturer, thereby overwriting the assumed sole ownership of the user. This chapter looks into the technical and conceptual aspects of sensors and networks as well as into the new dimensions they introduce.

Chapter 2, Addressing things, explores the ways in which things can be enabled to sense their locations through systems such as RFID, iBeacon or GPS. The thing that knows where it is, and where it is going, is a thing that enables new grids of surveillance and monitoring. Location can also affect how things work – a network address can make a thing function only within specific geographical borders, as in the similar way that our IP addresses today define what part of the World Wide Web we see. And if giving a network address to everything can mean that anyone can find it, this raises critical questions of security and privacy as hackers scan networks for vulnerable devices to be exploited. But the power of address can also have a utopian potential: locating and addressing a thing in space could also open up options for very different, post-capitalist models of property ownership and common use.

Chapter 3, Speaking things, explores the capacities of conversational technology. From the lukewarm jokes of Amazon’s Alexa, to the nagging commands of a self-service checkout, conversations with digital technology have become normal. We talk to our phones and our phones talk back. Our cars direct us to our destinations in their out-loud voices. Conversational technology has become a daily interface for many networked things. This chapter looks at how language affects our relationships with technology, from the malfunctioning supermarket checkouts that lead people to steal, to the nomadic adventures of people who put too much trust in their car’s navigation systems. It explores how some of the earliest visions of computing find contemporary expression in the networking of objects with which we can speak – such as chatbots – and how this brings with it complex combinations of agency, algorithms and anthropomorphism.

Chapter 4, Seeing things, explores the new capacities of connected things to see the world around them. Assisted by sensors such as lasers, radar or cameras, things have first learned to auto-focus, then to identify what is in a picture, and then to self-drive a car. Informed by the technology of neural networks, they have been equipped with the skill to interpret information, thereby giving it meaning, although not always the correct one – they may mistake a baby playing with a toothbrush for a young boy holding a baseball bat, or fail to recognize a black person in an image. This chapter explores how sight imbues connected things with a new agency, for which programming must be held accountable in the future.

Chapter 5, Tracking things, explores the use of connected sensors to monitor, measure and quantify the individual’s health. Health-tracking devices such as the Fitbit, health-monitoring apps designed to work with major platforms such as Android, and the increasing integration of health technologies and tracking sensors into smartphones are driving changes in the ways that many people look after themselves. The personal, the intimate and the pathological are now all mediated with others. One’s daily activities and routines, diet and exercise habits, locations and movements, sleeping patterns and sexual activity, intake of caffeine or sugar, of alcohol or nicotine, of proscribed substances or prescribed medication – these all become knowable information to audiences that may not always be recognized or expected. Such detailed information has not been mediated until now. As the biological and the technological converge in those new networked systems, they redraw distinctions between public and private information, bringing new kinds of concerns about surveillance and security.

Addressing, speaking, seeing, tracking – these capabilities built into networked objects show that the internet of things has already become much more than just a simple internet-connected device. Instead, new and different uses of networked digital media, and new and different experiences, have been introduced for both public and personal communication. To examine those aspects, we draw upon a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives on technology and communication. We use the methods of historical analysis, to study how change occurs in society, combined with Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2003, Machin & Mayr 2012, Hansen & Machin 2013, Wodak 2013) – the latter most explicitly in chapter 4 and chapter 5. By examining word choices and patterns, organization and assumptions, as well as the use of image and design, we look at what contributes to the meanings of texts about the internet of things that have been written by companies at its heart. Viewing language as a form of social practice, we look at texts produced by firms involved in the internet of things such as Fitbit, Tesla or Google, and study how they suggest meanings for their new inventions, and how they introduce certain ideas of agency and power into our discourse.

In using both methods, we aim to explore the specific social and political qualities of the internet of things, and to get a deeper understanding of the newly acquired skills of things from the perspective of communication. We focus on the corporate applications of these skills, and with them the new roles that users have been given. And we aim to show that this is a topic that media and communication scholars need to take seriously. Other work that addresses the internet of things is often business-focused (such as Greengard 2015) or uncritically enthusiastic about the economic possibilities of sensing networks. Further contributions come from very different fields, addressing technical security (Dhanjani 2015), politics (Howard 2015) or design aspects (Sterling 2005, Rose 2014). This book, in comparison, emphasizes communication. We explore the specifics of sensing networks and their communicative capacities, in order to better understand the social dimensions of the internet of things.

The book emphasizes throughout that the internet of things is built on already familiar technologies, which have been developed further. To describe its development, we often use examples that have attracted some media attention and that readers may recognize. In a disruptive environment such as digital technology, it is only natural that some of those examples will soon be out of date. But those examples should be distinguished from the concepts that they illustrate. Those concepts describe more fundamental shifts within the field of communication, such as those caused by recording devices and sensing networks, by conversational technology or algorithmic sight.

Of course, the internet of things is an industrial formation, and is bound up in part with questions of automation, manufacturing, agriculture, retail and transportation (Government Office for Science [UK] 2014). It also extends well into economic sectors once considered knowledge or creative industries. In their book about the future of work, Robert McChesney and John Nichols survey the internet of things and the claims for its economic potential. They adduce claims such as that of Cisco Systems that the internet of things will generate savings and revenues of $14 trillion by the year 2022, and conclude by warning: ‘A large share of these savings will come by eliminating jobs’ (2016: 94). Others, like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015), demand to read the same recent high-tech developments as a step towards a post-capitalist economy capable of achieving a utopian world without work, for which we should get organized. To those authors, the rapid automation of logistics such as the internet of things turns into the possibility of a globally interconnected system that could be used as a post-work platform (2015: 178).

Our aim with this book, however, is to develop an account of the internet of things from a different perspective – the perspective of communication and media. So this book, above all, approaches the internet of things as a matter of communication and meanings. Technological systems embody ideas about the ways in which we organize ourselves and each other, and they also provide the means for us to make meanings about that social organization. Understood in this way, a book about the internet of things is also a book about its human usage. Through looking at the capabilities of sensing networks, this is a book about the human dimensions of technology and about the technological dimensions of the human.

1First things

The phones had been working fine. But then came the update. And with the update came a new error message – Error 53. This message indicated that the Apple iPhone 6 would no longer work and could not be fixed. Thousands of smartphone owners were confronted with this message telling them that their phones could not be restored. Error 53 had been triggered by a software update, which could sense if a user had turned to a non-Apple employee to repair the phone’s touch-sensor home button. For whatever reason – urgency, availability, travel abroad, simple preference – the phone had not been taken to the Genius Bar of one of the company’s Apple Stores, but to some other shop to be repaired. When the phone’s new internal security check detected unfamiliar parts used in its repair, it automatically bricked the phone in a way that rendered it irretrievable.

Apple described this in an announcement (2016a) as a security feature, designed to make phone theft more difficult. The bricking of thousands of iPhones may have been an unintended consequence of the software feature. But it also kept the users dependent on the manufacturer. Although the company moved quickly to update their iOS software, the incident revealed that the users did not, as they had imagined, own the expensive phone in their hands, however intimate a relationship they had developed with their devices. Instead, the episode revealed that, in practical terms, the phones were very much under the control of Apple. Error 53 also revealed the extent to which daily media use now involves complex relationships between networked objects, fitted with sensors that detect and communicate change in their environment.

Error 53 is an example of the internet of things. Some readers may be surprised that a book about the internet of things should open its first chapter with a story about a smartphone. They may imagine instead that the internet of things is about fridges or factories or retail supply chains. But we want those readers to consider the smartphone as a different kind of thing – not just as a phone, but as a networked object fitted with many sensors. Other readers may expect to read that the internet of things is a future phenomenon that has not yet arrived – and may never do – rather than the smartphones that have been in their pockets for a decade or more. Like all technological formations, the internet of things manifests complex patterns of both adoption and adaptation. And the object whose adoptions and adaptations most clearly illustrate the transformations that happen when our things become networked and learn to sense the world around them is the smartphone.

To think of the smartphone as primarily a phone recalls McLuhan’s observation that we tend to explain new phenomena by reaching for a comparison with the past. ‘We look at the present through a rear-view mirror’ (McLuhan & Fiore 1967: 74–5). Instead, consider the smartphone as a networked computer that has an expanding range of sensors built into it. Sensors are components that allow the device to detect changes in its environment or to respond to stimuli (Kalantar-zadeh 2013, Gabrys 2016). And because your device is networked and identifiable, so are you. Your smartphone locates where you are, detects which direction you are heading, and records how fast you are moving to get there. Its touch-screen uses capacitive sensors that detect the user’s fingertip gestures. It continually listens to its ambient environment, so that when you speak to its digital assistant – for example by saying OK Google or Hey Siri – it is ready to respond. What we call the phone’s cameras are digital image sensors that detect and interpret light. Depending on the model, your phone might contain a fingerprint or a retina sensor, used to unlock the device and responsive only to the unique physical characteristics of the individual user. There may be a proximity sensor that shuts off the app screen when you’re holding the phone close enough to your face to make a call. There may be a barometer that can sense air pressure and elevation. There may be a moisture indicator that detects when the device has been submerged in water. There may be an ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness of the screen. There may be a magnetic field sensor to operate the inbuilt compass app and the device’s location services used to define your precise physical position – these find uses in art museum walkthrough tours that detect which painting the user is looking at, as well as for hook-up apps that help the user find where that specific person is in that busy nightclub. There may be an accelerometer that adjusts the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape as the device is tilted. Or there may be a more complex ‘three-axis gyro’ sensor that detects rotation around any axis, enabling precise location uses or sophisticated gaming or augmented reality effects through which objects on screen can rotate as the device itself rotates. Your smartphone also connects you to countless other networked things, and your phone can detect and respond to these – it reacts to real-time traffic updates and informs you about breaking news. To see the smartphone as just a kind of phone is to look at it in the rear-view mirror. Its many sensors, its internet connectivity and its access to data have turned it into a new kind of thing.

This is a book about why and how this environment of connected things and sensors matters. Any object or device can now be linked to digital communication networks – your phone, your watch, your car, yes, but also beehives and basketballs, razors and rocks, stoves and sex toys. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. Since 2008, internet-connected things have outnumbered the world’s human population (Pew Research Center 2014: 2). According to tech consultancy firm Gartner (2017), 8.4 billion networked things were in use by 2017, an increase of 31 per cent on the year before. The European Commission (2016: 2) estimates that more than 26 billion things will be connected by 2020. A widely cited report by Cisco goes further and claims that 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020 (Evans 2011: 3; see also Pew Research Centre 2017: 41). And once connected, any thing can become a part of further networks and be used to circulate information. More than this, a connected thing can be designed to sense its environment and create information about what is happening there.

Your fitness wristband records details of your heart rate, your daily movements and your sleeping habits, circulating these and many other intimate insights between devices and servers. Your phone’s location services power apps such as Citymapper that allow your partner to check where you are while crossing the city to meet you. While you are at work, your vacuum cleaner moves through your kitchen, pausing to rotate in a circle for extra effect when it senses dirt. Your car warns you that there’s bad traffic a few miles ahead and self-drives itself on an alternative route home, thanks to street lamps equipped with sensors that infer traffic patterns from air pollution. The internet is no longer just about connecting computers – now, equipped with sensors and connectivity, every single thing can be connected. Once networked, things have become able to record and process, to store and circulate information. From cars to vacuum cleaners, things can now see where they are going, what is in their way, and what they can do about that. Household objects are now able to listen to what you say, interpret your natural speaking voice when you ask them to switch the light on, or respond to your comments with a joke. Things have started to communicate and to sense the world around them.

Sensing networks

The developments we address are not just about things in general, about adding inert objects such as kettles or umbrellas to the World Wide Web; they are also about networking many different kinds of sensors that can detect and communicate change in their environments. So as well as the term internet of things, we also use the term sensing networks to describe those phenomena. Sensors generate and circulate information in ways that turn them into actors in networks of communication. Networked sensors mean that the sensed information can be compared with other data to calculate a response. Networked sensors are being used to construct an environment in which the sensing and locating, the measuring and responding, the communication capacities of a convergent device like the smartphone, are dispersed and embedded across the entire environment around us.

Sensors are common in daily life, from smoke detectors to pregnancy tests, from shop doors that open automatically to lights that switch on when we enter the room (Kalantar-zadeh 2013, Andrejevic & Burdon 2015, Gabrys 2016). There are lots of different kinds of sensors in the internet of things. What they all have in common, despite their differences, is that they are components of a device or a system that detect and communicate their environment. Sensors may measure or respond to physical stimuli, such as the fingerprints, retina structure or voice patterns of a specific individual – your own phone may use these kinds of sensor to let you unlock it. Sensors may detect changes in their location, position, orientation, elevation, or speed or distance of movement. They may detect changes in moisture levels or atmospheric pressure, react to the presence of liquid or gas, record changes in the chemical composition of an entity, or respond to altered levels of heat or light or sound. What all of those sensors do is detect and record change, and circulate information and messages. They create and communicate data about the world and those in it. Sensors are media of communication.

So sensors are one fundamental element of the internet of things. Another is that those sensors are connected to networks. In this context, the term network does not only mean that things are connected, thereby becoming ‘smart’. The word network also invokes a number of different conceptual aspects that we draw upon in this book. As Bruno Latour has argued (2005: 129), there are three very different aspects that need to be considered when it comes to networks. There is the infrastructural sense, as in train or electricity networks. There is the organizational sense, in which markets, firms and states relate to each other. And there is also the conceptual sense, in which tracing and inferring networks is a method of analysis. In Latour’s own words: ‘Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described’ (2005: 131). In this book, we draw upon all three of these dimensions of network – to describe infrastructure, to describe organizations, and also to make connections between different kinds of actors and groups that come together to create or use technologies for communication. Towards the end of this chapter we return to the Error 53 example and examine it as a network of relationships between human and technological actors.

Besides Latour, the work of Manuel Castells has also been pivotal in bringing the word network to the centre of contemporary analysis of media and communication, particularly through his InformationAge trilogy of the late 1990s and his later book Communication Power (2009). So central is the term to his analysis that, as academic Mark Graham once pointed out on Twitter (2014), Communication Power has one short sentence that manages to include the word network seven times (you can find it on p. 426). In Castells’ analysis, networks are structures for the processing of flows of information. The globalization of finance and industries, the rapid development of digital communications systems and the pervasive use of information technologies have allowed for the creation of the infrastructure for a network society (Castells 2000, 2009). In this analysis, network structures increasingly predominate over hierarchical ones, because networks can be easily reconfigured, can be expanded or contracted to respond to changing circumstances, and can survive damage or alterations to individual parts of a network (2009: 23). Castells describes how resources of political, financial and social power are increasingly exercised through network structures of organization – as is resistance to these forms of power by contemporary social movements that draw both on identity politics and on opposition to neoliberalism (Castells 2004, 2012). With this Castells brings together the different aspects of network discussed above – the infrastructural, the organizational and the conceptual senses of networks. He describes networks that have specific forms of organization as a result of particular technological developments. In this as well as in the next chapters of this book, we extend this approach further onto the internet of things. We examine newly developed infrastructural and organizational networks that equip things with new skills, in order to see how those skills allow for new forms of organization and power. And we consider how networked things also provide a resource for political alternatives – for example, by allowing new ways of communal usage of technological resources.

Such shifts follow from things being linked to networks. The technical development crucial for the internet of things is that it has become possible to link anything to networks. Networked things rely on many different communication protocols, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, Near-Field Communication (NFC), Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, LoRa, Sigfox and others, as well as mobile telecommunication networks, including the impending rollout of 5G. A further crucial development is the introduction of internet protocol version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 became necessary when the internet began to fill up in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Back in the 1970s, the computer scientists developing the internet had assumed the need for no more than a few billion network points (on the early development of the net and the key choices that informed how it developed, see Abbate 2000, Leiner et al. 2000, Castells 2000, 2001). But by 2011, the final available blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated to domain name registry agencies. So its successor IPv6 was designed to take a while to fill up. IPv6 allows for 3.4 × 10^38 addresses. That’s 340 trillion trillion trillion internet addresses, or 340 followed by 36 zeros, which should keep us going for a while (Bratton 2015).

The availability of protocols such as Bluetooth or ZigBee, and the dramatically increased capacity of IPv6, enable the potential networking of essentially anything at all. This may sound like a very different internet from that of cat videos on YouTube and holiday photos on Facebook. But, in fact, it can be seen as an extension of that internet across our entire environment. Like those cat videos and holiday photos, the sensing networks of the internet of things are a matter of communication and mediation. They concern the creation and distribution of information, and they concern the interpretations of that information that we call meanings. So the internet of things should not only be seen as a rarefied domain of engineers, industrial designers and urban planners. It is also the domain of those of us whose concern is the uses of networked digital media for both public and personal communication, and those of us who study the many ways in which media are used for purposes of control or communion, of entertainment or information. The internet of things should be seen as a major development for the field of media and communication studies. It is an internet that offers a rich area of study to humanities and social science scholars of communication.

Communication is the making of meanings. Research in communication and media tends to focus on human communication, where meanings are produced by the circulation of messages between people. Messages may be exchanged one-to-one (as in an exchange of letters between lovers), or few-to-many (as in a TV news broadcast), or many-to-many (as in the fervour of a trending Twitter hashtag). In each of these cases, the focus is generally on the human beings who