DO THINGS MATTER?

The internet is stupid. Kitsch with a sleek interface is still kitsch, even when it takes more kitschy technobabble to differentiate the currenty, Web 2.x kitsch from previous iterations of the same themes. The only things more stupid than the internet are the people who use it, and their dim understanding of the technology which supports their interactions is reflected in their limited vocabulary. Also, they don’t understand irony.

Enter the “Manifesto for Networked Things” (PDF link via BoingBoing), by Julian Bleecker, who coins without shame the unfortunate second-order neologism ‘blogject’.

“Blogject” is a neologism that’s meant to focus attention on the participation of “objects” and “things” in the sphere of networked social discourse variously called the blogosphere, or the social web

As Bleecker immediately points out, this term ressonates with Sterling’s far more elegant term spime, which are searchable objects that can be tracked through time and space, and record their own histories and interactions with other objects. So a blogject is a species of spime, distinguished by the fact that it blogs. Bleecker prefers not to use Sterling’s term because, as he says, the semantics of ‘blogject’ are “immediately legible”. Well, its syntax is prima facie atrocious, but are its semantics any better?

“Bloggers” loosely defined, are participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas — making culture — through this particular instrument of connections called the Internet.

Although this comes off a bit heavy handed, I appreciate his understanding of blogging: it is a kind of internet-mediated social interaction that reflects our contributions to and interactions with a community. The internet not only facilitates these social interactions, but it unlocks many of the constraints of space and time such that entirely novel modes of interaction are possible, thus allowing for a expanded conception of participation. It is really the idea of participation that Bleecker is after.

The first-order consequence of the Internet of Things is a network in which socially meaningful exchanges takes place, were culture is made, experiences circulated through media sharing — only with objects and human agents. 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…The Blogject capacity for producing effects is powerful because it has always been pervasively, ubiquitously, everywhere tethered to the far reaching, speedy, robust network of social exchange and discourse that humanity has constructed.

I am in full (and admittedly jealous) agreement with Bleecker here, and his examples are entirely convincing to someone who is already behind the machine participation project. However, agreement isn’t enough to justify these claims. Lets look at his arguments.

The first two of Bleeker’s three characteristics of blogjects seem to collapse into a single characteristic: blogjects are “self-describing”. They know where they are, where they’ve been, and who they’ve interacted with. And this knowledge is more than just passive properties that need to be queried and retrieved; blogjects are agents. The third of Bleeker’s characteristics is that blogjects assert their knowledge to others; channeling Heidegger, we might say that they make their presence an issue for others. And in so asserting, they become social agents- bloggers- and thus enter the class of interactive, social spimes.

But has Bleecker really differentiated blogjects from spimes? A spime is trackable and searchable, and stores its spatiotemporal history; insofar as spime access is conducted over the net, we might naturally think of all spimes as blogjects. It would seem almost silly, given Bleecker’s radically interconnected picture, to ground the distinction merely on whether the information runs over the Internet. But resting the difference on assertion in some ways just begs the participation question- what, exactly, is the distinction between making information available to others, and genuinely asserting that information? Bleecker is explicit that ‘assertion’ should not be cast in mentalistic terms- “Things could not care any less about their Turing Test report card.” Rather, the participatory force of a blogject arises out of its “ability to affect change”. But this is just two ways of saying the same things. The smoke detector clearly affects change. It gets me out of my house in the case of smoke. Does Bleecker want to claim it participates? Hooking the detector up to the network so I get text-messaged in the event of a fire may be convienent, but hardly changes the basic structure of this interaction. I don’t mean this as an attack; I actually hope he bites this bullet, because thats what I’ve been claiming for years. But if we can’t ground the difference between supposedly ‘passive’ spimes and ‘active’ blogjects, I see no reason to burden ourselves with extra terminology, when spime does so nicely as is.

Bleecker has other reasons for drawing this distinction, which stem from his somewhat cloudy notion of ‘space’. He explicitly intends this notion to be literal- he is talking about the “physical, geospatial world”. The idea, I suppose, is that spimes are merely trackable objects, so email and DNS servers would count, whereas blogjects are trackable, interactive objects that share our space. It is literally in the sharing of space that we can ground the distinction and make sense of the troubling notion of interaction. So the information blogged by the pigeons matters to our physical world, and it is this sharing of space that enters them as participants into our social world. Your email, on the other hand, which likewise shares searchable tracking information, fails to share our space, and so fails to count as a participant.

It is worth noting how similar these premises are to Dreyfus’ (2001) discussion of the internet, and yet how radically different his conclusions are. For Dreyfus, the internet undermines the need for shared space in grounding genuinely social interactions; for Bleecker, the internet enables the sharing of space.

I am much more comfortable talking about ‘environmental space’ as opposed to ‘literal physical space’ in these conversations, just to avoid the whole Dreyfus issue. Environmental space is just the space in which we act when we act together, and that can occur both in the real world and on our blogs and message boards. We interact in these environments, complete with human and machine agents, with many of the same normative standards and expectations. Is video surveillance really any different from snooping my inbox? Both my real world and internet interactions are projections of me, and I worry about any attempt to render me so schizophrenic.

But then, my interactions with the pigeons (insofar as I do interact with them) is conducted not in the real world but solely on their blog, which grounds the way we interact. In many ways, the internet is more real to me than northwestern Canada or whereever those pigeons happen to be sending info from. Furthermore, Google is clearly a participant in the sense Bleecker wants- it actively participates in shaping our understanding of the internet- but it is something of a stretch to say that it is an agent in our physical world. Of course, it has all sorts of access to the physical world, but its interactions with that world are not what make it matter to me. What matters are my interactions with it.

Saying that we don’t need the term ‘blogject’ or that space isn’t really necessary in the way Bleecker suggests isn’t meant as a devastating criticism, or to in any way undermine his project. But I think there are methodological issues that need to be patched up before we can really begin to see the impact of a radically networked world.