The Internet of Individuation

Abstract

This thesis engages in a sustained reconsideration of a new and evolving technology - the Internet of Things - along social scientific and philosophical lines. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technical paradigm which connects 'things' in a way that allows them to collect and communicate sense data for analysis and action. IoT systems range from the everyday realm of smart home devices to government-backed agricultural management networks, massive industrial complexes spanning international supply chains and telecommunications networks themselves. The thesis does not seek to determine whether the Internet of Things' social effects are, or will be, progressive or regressive. Nor does it prescribe policy or other guidelines for its applications. Rather, the purpose of the thesis is to provide a critical engagement with the paradigmatic framing of the Internet of Things, to unpack the assumptions underpinning the practical accounts of its function, as well as the social scientific and popular evaluations that stem from these more common sense claims of the Internet of Things as a technological innovation. The thesis offers a more ontologically processual account of the Internet of Things, with an eye to grasping its participation in the ongoing production of novelty.

To this end, the main body of this thesis rethinks each of the IoT's basic technical operations: communication, sensing, and actuation. Each of these operations are transformed so that their technical realities are shown to be compatible with social scientific thought. Communication can be seen as modulation, sensing as concretization, and actuation as transduction. Three empirical chapters furnish these transformations with qualitative interviews with IoT practitioners in Australia and abroad: student-run engineering labs in Canberra; the office of a smart building company bursting with dreams and tangles of wires; a watering system for a national Arboretum; a former IT consultant who runs a farm in Yass, NSW; and a smart city consulting agency in the UK that specializes in experimental and community-based IoT installations. These case studies are more than interesting instances of IoT systems; approached from a processual framework, they show how possible it is for social scientists to think about, write about, and interact with technical reality in more critical and productive ways.

This thesis thus contributes an original analysis of the Internet of Things using a process ontology framework. Specifically, it uses the work of Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and their contemporaries to repose the 'problem' of the Internet of Things as an open problematic. Although studies in the sociology of technology have considered the IoT in general, there is not yet an extended analysis of the Internet of Things as a processual phenomenon in Australia or elsewhere. As such, this thesis provides additional insight into the Internet of Things as an object of study and a specific phenomenon unfolding in Australia and overseas, and discusses what new methods of problematizing that the social sciences might adopt to engage with it. Show more