The Internet of Things

Mercedes Bunz, Graham Meikle

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509517497
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

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.

1
First 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 Information Age 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 comm...