An Internet of Things, or an Internet of Verbs?

I've been a big fan of Kevin Ashton's notion of "an Internet of Things;" I think it's one of those happy phrases that is compact but deeply meaningful. There aren't many moments when techno-punditry clarifies instead of muddling our understand, much less achieve a kind of poetic elegance; but for me, the Internet of Things does it.

I think that the core insight of the term-- that lots of things that currently aren't linked to the Internet, and capable of sharing information with each other, will become networked and interactive in the future-- is right on. If there's a technological inevitability, this is it.

I've recently been obsessing about the metaphor of "cyberspace," why it's held such potency, what intellectual avenues it has opened and closed, and whether it's going to survive. At Monday's FutureCommons event, I led a little discussion on the end of cyberspace, at which Ross Mayfield pointed out something very revealing:

NetGens think of the computer as a door, not a box. When they are on, they have 5-7 IM windows open and multiple tabs into different communities. Each community provides a way of being, to express facets of their identity while engaging in an activity. Most activities are centered around objects to spin stories and hold conversations. They don't go to places, it's more likely they augment plazes in the real world. With increasing mobility they tap groups for what they need to get done no matter where they are and make where they are matter. They Google, Flickr, Blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate and above all share. In other words, the web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.

This got me thinking. There are any number of terms people have coined recently for the convergence of-- or the new kind of world created by-- mobile technologies, ubiquitous connectivity, social software, etc. etc.. Wade Roush talks about continuous computing; Paul Dourish talks about social navigation; you also see the terms sociable computing, pervasive computing, etc. etc. No surprise that a thousand rhetorical flowers are blooming, given the newness and amorphousness of the phenomenon they're trying to describe; also no surprise that many others follow Mark Weiser, who coined the terms ubiquitous computing and calm computing, in putting together combinations of "something" + "computing."

Here, I think, is a small thing that points to something very big.

For the last twenty or so years, our language for describing the Internet has been rich in spatial metaphors-- there was cyberspace, the Information Superhighway, what have you-- but pretty poor when it came to describing user interaction. How many millions of times did we read that something was "just a mouse click away"? Was there ever a more overused phrase in all of history? And why weren't there more terms that talked about what you did online, instead of describing where you "were" when you went online?

So far, the emerging language for describing the Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, is a mirror image of the PC-based, Web 1.0 language. Terms like continuous computing or sociable computing tend to describe experiences or the character of interactions, but don't try to imagine the Web 2.0 as a place, or a cloud, or a jelly donut. This new Web isn't a thing or a space; it's a set of experiences.

The Internet of Things, for all rhetorical elegance, is an important and essential step to something more profound: not an Internet of Nouns, but an Internet of Verbs. If you believe that language tells us something about the future, this means that the critical, defining features of this new Web will revolve around interactions, events and experiences, not virtual places or even real things.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, future, pervasive computing, physical, space

Comments

[Michael Dennis]

I too like the idea of an internet of things, but I wonder if the metaphor works in the way you suggest. Isn't an internet of things still a space populated by these 'things'? And if the internet is increasingly seen as a space of interaction--wasn't that crucial to the vision behind the old ARPANET--why wouldn't the vocabulary and practices of sociology and anthropology be the instruments for understanding this domain? Also, the problem with all the new phrases that use the phrase computing or some tense of compute is that these actions don't resemble anything that refers to the action of computing. The integration of new digital technologies isn't seameless, but it sure seems effortless for the pundits and those who write about the topic. Having read Markoff and the recent article in T&C on the counterculture and the Internet I wonder just how many people are even experiencing an internet of things; when you get down to it the counterculture wasn't all that big and after reading this new literature it appears that Stewart Brand is more important than researchers in building our digital world. However, I know this cannot be the case, can it? Might the problem here be that we are still focusing upon a technology as the defining characteristic of our object of study rather than something more amorphous, but more central to understanding the changes we are seeing in the very small worlds we study? My apologies for the length of this post.

[Constructivist]

the internet will be about the culture not the technology