
The Internet of Things and Humans - nreece
http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/ioth-the-internet-of-things-and-humans.html
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kijin
About 30 years ago, two French sociologists named Michel Callon and Bruno
Latour developed a method called Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It tries to
explain social phenomena in terms of how "actors" \-- both humans and
nonhumans -- interact in networks.

ANT is a popular approach among sociologists who study scientific and
technological developments, but it's also highly controversial because it sees
nonhuman things as being just as integral to the network as humans are.
Instead of humans _using_ phones to produce various social phenomena, for
example, humans and phones act together according to ANT. As if phones had a
volition of their own. Critics of ANT argue that this is nonsense. Proponents
of ANT reply that you don't need to have your own will in order to participate
meaningfully in a social network.

For most of human history, it seemed that people simply _used_ things to get
what they want. The things in question were too simple, often no more than a
chunk of rock. Surely the interaction between ancient populations was much
more interesting than their interaction with rocks? But even in the stone age,
those simple tools had a tremendous effect on the fate of the humans who
wielded them, so it's often useful for historians and anthropologists to ask
how things _interacted with_ people, instead of just asking how people _used_
them _in_ their interaction with one another. It's a useful change of
perspectives, a different algorithm perhaps, that yields interesting
theorerical insights.

But now it seems like ANT might be more than a novelty method. It could
actually be a _substantially better_ perspective than the traditional
alternatives. More and more "things" are becoming "smart". They are no longer
being unilaterally used by us; they use us too, and are in turn used by
others. They get a life of their own and adapt to completely unforseen uses.
They are reused and abused; in turn, they reuse and abuse the information we
feed them. As long as you have an IP address, it doesn't matter whether you
have a brain or a CPU. You exchange information as equals, you process them,
and you propagate your results to the rest of the network.

Perhaps the fundamental relationship between us and our tools hasn't changed
at all. But if so, the emergence of the Internet of Things and Humans makes it
much easier for us to _recognize_ that we never really unilaterally used
anything after all. Nothing in nature unilaterally uses anything else. It's
always a two-way interaction, whether it's between a Neanderthal and his rock
or between you and your self-driving car.

All French sociologists are crazy, but some of them are geniuses.

------
lowglow
SFHN + Techendo are throwing an IoT Hackathon on the 25th: [http://hackendo-
integrate-2014.eventbrite.com](http://hackendo-integrate-2014.eventbrite.com)

Come out if you're interested!

~~~
morenoh149
don't know why you're getting downvoted. I'm glad I saw that link.

