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Reconsidering the user in IoT: the subjectivity of things

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Abstract

This essay develops an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the relationship between “the person” and “the user” in the Internet of Things (IoT) by exploring a similarly troubled dyadic discourse: the thing. The goal is twofold: first, to provide a critical framework for scholars studying the humanistic and social implications of IoT; second, to broaden the scholarly discussion of IoT beyond an increasingly standard set of topics that includes usability, security, and privacy. I focus on the role of the subject in comprising things and things’ social role in constructing the placeness of the home. By considering “smart” and “unsmart” objects through the lens of an advertisement for Sony’s smart home ecology, I demonstrate that “unsmart” objects frame smart devices in a historical materiality that, paradoxically, allows for an overly technical approach to IoT devices. Such an approach risks effacement of the social, subjectival makeup of things in which the human is primarily framed within the ontology of the object rather than that of the agential subject. Where things are ubiquitously understood as objects, we are primed to understand people as users rather than humans.

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Notes

  1. If this sounds strange, consider Shoshanna Zuboff’s [47] work on surveillance capitalism: humans are already becoming objects of our designed, computational infrastructures. Garnet Hertz [31] has done some very provocative and worthwhile artistic/designerly work that illustrates this, as well.

  2. Originally published at https://www.sony.com/regional/smart-home, these videos are no longer publicly available in their original location. They were, however, archived by archive.org and can be accessed at the following URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20170519071859/http://www.sony.com/regional/smart-home .

  3. Few scholars, if any, have done more to examine the role that objects play in the realm of literature than Bill Brown [7, 8]. Rather than speaking through examples found in those works, I hope to add to them.

  4. For the purposes of shoring up any problems arising from the conceptual space between owning books and collecting books, I contend that the combination of “media center” and “book” constitutes a collection—to have a place designed for housing a particular type of artifact is at least tentative evidence towards collection.

  5. This is perhaps not unlike the experience of an IoT-focused technologist approaching a discussion of books.

  6. One is reminded, too, of John Cusack’s character in the film, “High Fidelity,” who undergoes an autobiographical reorganization of his record collection [23].

  7. The work of Bertrand Russell [39, 40] has also addressed this problem through the lens of what he refers to as “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description.” As embodied agents, humans are naturally acquainted with phenomena. Through the scientific lens, phenomena are described, and in description they are objectified.

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  1. Department of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, 47405, USA

    John S. Seberger

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Correspondence to John S. Seberger.

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John S. Seberger is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Informatics at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his PhD in Information and Computer Sciences from University of California, Irvine, and is a former Graduate Fellow of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing.

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Seberger, J.S. Reconsidering the user in IoT: the subjectivity of things. Pers Ubiquit Comput 25, 525–533 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01513-0

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