Social Web of Things

We either redefine what human integrity and agency are, or we acknowledge that the techno-scientific enhancement we invoke in order to secure our model of growth dramatically challenges our human condition (Arendt, 1958). Blog Author: news(at)thomashirschmann.de

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Can sIoT make our lives more meaningful?

Due to the extremely social character of human life, any attempt to make our lives more meaningful has to take the social context of our behaviour into account. When we are honest enough to admit that our Western model of hyper-individualism is not really helping us in achieving a happy, let alone a meaningful life, we might understand that it is time to recalibrate our personal goals against the broader background of social relevance. In this article, we are trying to discuss the question how a social internet of things (sIoT) could support this recalibration towards meaningfulness.

Before we start, we need to differentiate between different levels of such a recalibration. At a first level, it might be just a short-term recalibration driven by the (still rather self-oriented) need to merely lead a more balanced life where different (equally important) life aspects are sought to be more leveled against each other. One such approach I recently came across is trying to balance certain areas (dimensions) of life against each other:

Example of a balanced “Life Score Card” with 4 Dimensions

The resulting outcome of such recalibration could be the obvious insight that striving only for certain (e.g. financial) types of goals makes no sense if we acknowledge that humans are multifaceted beings (who are more than just consumers). Due to our complex social life we also have a complex structure of needs which cannot be satisfied by one type of means/activity (e.g. money/consumption) only. While certainly being an important step towards leading a more equilibrated, well-balanced and - in a holistic sense - “rich” life, this first level of recalibration is just the first step in our quest for meaning.

At the second level, such recalibration might implicate a more general re-orientation away from consumerist/economical/instrumental goals (even if they might be balanced against each other), towards more immaterial objectives like the ones advocated by Positive Psychology, e.g. as proposed by Seligman’s PERMA goals:

Positive emotion (subjectively assessed)

Engagement (presence of a subjectively felt flow state)

Relationship (friends, family, partner and social connections)

Meaning (being part of something bigger)

Accomplishment (pursuit of achievements)

According to Seligman’s view as expressed in his book “Flourish”, all of these elements ideally contribute to happiness if they fulfill the following three conditions:

they contribute to well-being.

people pursue them for their own sake

they are defined and measured independently

Although Seligman’s PERMA goals state “meaning” as one of their elements, overall, they are designed to contribute to a happy rather than to a meaningful life, which is - as pointed out by Roy Baumeister, something essentially different. Baumeister draws on neurologist/psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, a manifest of his life-changing experience as a Holocaust survivor with ideas that are based on Kierkegaard’s “will to meaning”. Here, Frankl describes three different ways to discover meaning:

by creating a work or doing a deed;

by experiencing something or encountering someone; and

by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering and that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

In his book “Man’s search for Meaning” (1946), Frankl also stresses the importance of having a purpose - other than oneself - as a prerequisite for meaning and warns against egocentric orientations like affluence, hedonism, and materialism as distractions in the search for purpose. Baumeister picks up on these ideas and denotes the following four key elements necessary for a meaningful life:

He summarizes the impact of these four elements on a meaningful life the following way:

Purpose - which he understands as “a future event or state that lends structure to the present, thus linking different times into a single story”, meaning basically a goal which may stem from nature, culture or choice,

Values - meaning “having a basis for knowing what is right and wrong, good and bad”,

Efficacy - being able to navigate ourselves towards our goals and ultimately

Self-worth - deriving respect for ourselves from our doing.

“The meaningful life, then, has four properties. It has purposes that guide actions from present and past into the future, lending it direction. It has values that enable us to judge what is good and bad; and, in particular, that allow us to justify our actions and strivings as good. It is marked by efficacy, in which our actions make a positive contribution towards realising our goals and values. And it provides a basis for regarding ourselves in a positive light, as good and worthy people.”

Integrating Frankl’s & Baumeister’s insights we can formulate a third level of recalibration, beyond the mere search for happiness: a reorientation of our life goals towards meaningfulness in order to help us “feel our lives have purpose, value and impact” again. Of course meaning is of very mercurial character but despite of its highly subjective nature and the variance in the respective activities from which each of us derives meaning in our everyday life, people leading meaningful lives share certain characteristic features:

Connectedness: leading a meaningful life means feeling connected - in a social, cultural and biological way (connected to others, to a purpose, and to our biological nature itself).

Belongingness: other than a mere superficial happiness, meaningfulness is a state where we know where we belong and are therefore socially more integrated and also generally more more other-oriented, more specifically, a “giver” rather than a “taker” (by contributing to something bigger than the self).

Self-control: in line with the proposed element of “attitude” (Frankl) and “values” (Baumeister), it requires self-control, to maintain our focus on the bigger picture. This is also confirmed by the findings of Michel’s “Marshmallow experiment” and the resulting concept of “delayed gratification”.

The finally resulting question is however: how can the sIoT help building/sustaining a life with such meaningful features? The most obvious answer is: By supporting our sense of connectedness. One such approach could be the following:

Suggested dimensions of connectedness, potentially fostered by sIot: 

Social Dimension: being (socially) connected with OTHERS / FAMILY / A PARTNER (opening up, sharing yourself, building a trusted relationship).

Instrumental Dimension: being (instrumentally) connected with SOCIETY / VALUE-GENERATING ORGANISATIONS (holding yourself back for the greater good, contributing and belonging to something bigger).

Physical Dimension: being (physically) connected with the WORLD / BIOLOGY at large, being able to move, eat, feel, breath and sense the world around you (opening up your biology to feel connected with (your) nature in a basic biological sense).

Intellectual / Spiritual Dimension: being connected with the WORLD OF IDEAS & BELIEFS via a meaningful set of thoughts, intellectual / spiritual actions/contributions (sharing your mind).

It is easy to see that there is a rather large gap between the current (intellectual state and concept of) IoT as we are encountering it today and the here outlined concept of sIoT as a supportive factor for the kind of connectedness that is contributing to a meaningful life.

Current IoT ideas are still stuck at the level of being merely a technical support function for our navelgazing tendency of narcissistic self-indulgence - think of current pedometers, heart rate, movement and arousal trackers. What we instead need, to make (wearable) tech meaningful, is to use it to reconnect ourselves - via the above described dimensions - with our social environment, with a greater good to contribute to, with our biological nature, and with our intellectual selves. A good example for increasing that kind of social connection might be the suggested function of the Apple watch to feel the heartbeat of your loved one in real time. The biggest change in thinking currently needed to achieve more meaningful results from IoT is the insight that wearable tech needs to focus less on the wearer and more on his/her relevant social context - because any impact on the relevant others around him/her will contribute more to the wearer’s happiness and life’s meaningfulness than any improvement in tracking the statistics of one’s self-improvement, however sophisticated they might be.  

However, the more serious we take the issue of meaningfulness and the level of connectedness that it requires, the more often we might have to admit that technology can only do so much to bring us closer to others - and to oneself. The most important part of this journey can only be made by us selves as technology cannot help us bridge the existing emotional and social rifts in and between us. This endeavour is not a technical but a psychological one - and (until now) tech is not yet been able to help us but often rather seems to widen the gap and sometimes even isolate us. But maybe some day in the future tech will help us overcome our seemingly irreversible level of social disconnectedness:

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Clarification on Terminology: sWoT / sIoT

On this blog I am using the (both generic and therefore impossible to be trademarked) terms Social Internet of Things (sIoT) and Social Web of Things (sWoT) synonymously but wanted to clarify on my usage, as especially my usage of the latter (sWoT) is systematically different from Ericsson’s usage (they used it merely as a metaphor):

“The social network metaphor gives the user an understanding that the network is connected to many things and services, and it also provides a user interface that people are familiar with. With the social network interface you also have the possibility to scale the interface, which is very important when you have hundreds of connected things and services.” (Source: Ericsson)

The explanation for their metaphorical usage of the term “Social Web of Things” mainly stems from a UX perspective, where they have tried to solve the problem of a user-friendly mental model for the interaction with a scalable network of things:

“Back in 2008 we started working with some projects involving interaction design for large networks of connected products and services. … Apart from the obvious issues with limited screen real estate and graphical complexity, we discovered an implicit and more of a pedagogical problem: it wasn’t just the GUI that was hard to scale; in a way people’s minds didn’t scale either.. … We have of course been thinking about a solution. ... The nature or social relations are examples of other heterogeneous eco-system-like networks which we understand differently. Probably better. The concept of ‘friendship’ and ‘social relations’ are for example understood so well by virtually everyone that they are intuitive to us. So with that in mind we came to think that a solution to both the practical scalability issues and the mental model/pedagogical issue could be to simply “dress” a network of things as if it was a social network.” (Source: Ericsson).

So, what Ericsson actually tried to do here was to mask the technical complexity of a network of connected things with a socially common disguise that at the same time should make the whole concept of IoT psychologically more tangible (friendly) to potential users. However, this is exactly where I disagree with their usage and where I try to establish an own interpretation of this otherwise artificial / generic term “Social Web of Things”:

I believe that THINGS must actually start to behave / act SOCIALLY, meaning they have to get a real social profile / identity - beyond just being looked at with the metaphor of a social network. Further, I think that it is the RELATIONSHIP to - and mediated via - a THING that defines its RELEVANCE, and thus ultimately its meaning for users. Otherwise we (humans) will have no reason to deal with an overabundance of data generated by uncountable devices that will at same point all be connected to and communicating with us. Or in short: the interaction with THINGS needs to make sense in a unique human-centric, SOCIAL sense - otherwise there is no point in interacting with a THING, be it connected or not.

This insight, as I perceive it, is essentially missing in Ericsson’s interpretation of the term sWoT. Because they seem to believe that our (humans) life goal is basically to be hyper-connected with all things around us simply to drive our life’s efficiency to new peaks - which they picture to be enjoyable in itself:

“Ericsson believes that in the Networked Society, more than 50 billion things will be connected, in order to make our lives and our businesses more efficient and more enjoyable.” (Source: STARK Corporate Communications)

But as the slightly odd (because in today’s context pretty outdated) promotional film of their concept of sWoT is unintentionally proving: No one would actually “be friends with” her/his microwave, vacuum cleaner, stereo or TV - unless we are so unfortunately lonely, that we turn to talk to these things as all of our human friends (and our partner) have actually left us:

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How to Overcome Existing Barriers of sIoT

What is the big barrier at the moment to make the sIoT reality, to make IoT actually smart in the already priorly described sense where smartness is understood as the capability to effectively handle socially demanding interactions and relationships?

In order to fully understand this problem, we have to become aware of our current technological context and the state of “innovation” we are in. This state has been nicely described in the PWC report on “The Wearable Future”:

“In a market that is saturated with technology for innovation’s sake, we don’t need more innovation—we need more meaningful applications.”

But what is “meaningful” supposed to mean if we can safely assume that it is NOT about applying more calculating capacity per square centimeter of human environment. Where can we draw upon to successfully define meaningfulness and effectively take IoT to the next level?

In the face of the ongoing struggle of even the smartest minds to solve the mystery of the basics of our own consciousness, my suggestion would not be to wait for the advent of real Artificial Intelligence to solve this problem, but instead to understand the collective of all (potentially) smart WEBTHINGS forming one whole BODY in a comprehensive framework of embodied (pseudo-)cognitition. In such a theoretical concept, every new THING that we insert into the interconnectedness of a smart IoT has to be understood as a means for potentially smart interaction between itself and other THINGS as well as other HUMANS, effectively blurring the lines between objects (things) and subjects (humans).

The potential smartness of each of these new THINGS (and the collective meaningfulness of the resulting IoT) can thereby be measured - analogously to Alan Turing’s famous test - by the capacity of each THING to actually be indistinguishable from actual human behaviour in its concrete functioning/interaction.

This leads us back from THINGS to HUMANS, to be precise to the science of understanding humans (principally psychology as well as all other scientific disciplines that foster this understanding).

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice (1485-90), Public Domain.

It also allows us a first fundamental insight with regard to the biggest imminent barrier to the realization of sIoT in the above described sense: It is not as long as we have understood the basics of human behaviour that we will be able to build a smart, social, and especially meaningful IoT. And breaking the problem down even one more level, we can say that that it is not until we have fully understood the basics of human SOCIAL behavior that we will be able to make our vision of a full-fledged sIoT reality.

Pioneer plaque by Carl Sagan & Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan, Public Domain.

This SOCIAL insight about the IoT allows us to deduce that the CONTROL over THINGS has to be shifted to the interaction, so that not only the emergent behaviour but also the resulting INTELLIGENCE (programmable status) will become the result of the social interaction of things. To make this kind of social interaction possible, we have to make THINGS aware of their material (“dinghaft”) character. Or as the two embodied cognition researchers Anna Borghi and Felice Cimatti from the universities of Bologna and Calabria respectively have put it in their fantastic article “Embodied cognition and beyond: Acting and sensing the body”.

“we hold that there is a huge emotional and cognitive difference in a body which is able to sense itself while moving and acting in the world from a body who explicitly knows that it is a body which is moving and acting in the world. We think that in this second case the sense of body becomes somewhat different from the first one: when this body becomes an “I” it realizes that it has persistence in space and time.”

Applied to this context, the article’s final line in the abstract therefore sums up quite nicely the agenda for smart/social things to become part of a proper sIoT: In sum, the basic idea … is that a THING has to become a social entity.

Finally, to let a proper expert explain the necessary paradigm shift of (socially) distributed intelligence, I want to cite Prof. Rolf Pfeifer from ETH Zürich / Department of Informatics – Artificial Intelligence Lab:

A thing will become socially relevant for the IoT when it will become aware of its social interactions, or when it will be able to say:

“I socially interact, therefore I am”

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Biological Inspirations for sIoT

Everyone who understands at least the basics of biology knows, that - as the prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky has put it in his seminal 1973 essay,

“Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”.

And evolution teaches us, that all life on earth is connected by the evolutionary history we share, as manifested - among other aspects - in our genetic code. This way, we are all part of one shared tree of life, firstly outlined by Charles Darwin in his first notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837), later to be picked up and popularized by Ernst Haeckel and many others.

(Darwin Tree, source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Since then, this connectedness of life has been shown to be true in many more ways and much more facts and knowledge is now available to support this view, as the modern versions of the "tree of life" clearly show:

Evolutionary tree of life, by Leonard Eisenberg. Source: Evogeneao

One especially interesting fact in this regard, that might help us to better understand and define the basics of a “Social Internet of Things” (sIoT) comes from the world of plants, specifically from fungi. The vegetative part of fungi is called “mycelium” and consists of an extensive branching of thread-like filaments through which a fungus absorbs nutrients from its environment.

Mycelium has an essential role in ecosystems with regard to the disintegration of plant material and may form an extensive network as far-reaching as several square kilometers and can become older than 2.000 years.

Oyster mushroom mycelium, by Tobi Kellner, licensed under Creative Commons.

The special character that makes mycelium so interesting for the sIoT is its role as a communicational network between plants. As the BBC article “Plants talk to each other using an internet of fungus” points out, mycelium serves as a communicational super-highway between plants, effectively establishing a “wood-wide web”.

This plant-web becomes especially fascinating as it may serve as a functional blueprint when it comes to structure and function of a - smart and social - Internet of Things, as it naturally shows smart characteristics as

mutually beneficial relationships between plants and fungi

informational benefits of plugging into the fungi-network

larger social structures of plants supporting each other via the fungi’s mycelium and

powerful defense mechanisms using the mycelia to transport toxins

Here, I just want to make the point to draw some parallels especially with regard to the following aspects of the IoT that need further refinement in definition and therefore could benefit largely from the outlined analogy:

SMARTNESS:

What does it mean for a thing (within IoT) to be “smart”? Analogically to the development of human intelligence, we can tentatively assume that smartness can mainly be defined by being able to handle socially demanding interactions / relationships (-> see the “Social Brain Hypothesis”). In consequence, we will most probably define smartness in objects of the IoT as a way of “smartly” (adequately) responding to relational requests between objects and objects (O-O) as well as between objects and humans (O-H). Most probably we will see a convergence towards a smartness that leads to an overall beneficial state of the whole system of objects & humans in which any one single object is situated in.

INTERACTION:

How will things interact with each other, will there be just one or several layers of communication? Looking at the interaction between plants, we will most probably see (several) different layers of interaction, some more direct, others of more indirect nature. Between objects, there might be interactions on three layers:

physical (via their direct physical nature)

digital (via their digital representations / data generated by them)

virtual (via their virtual / higher-order representations)

ETHICS:

Identity is an artificial construct born out of the need to efficiently/successfully manage (ourselves) in a community of conscient / intelligent beings. However, cooperation / cooperative competition is far more prevalent among social animals / within biological systems. Therefore, biology has a lot to teach us about sustainable social behaviour, that is both beneficial to the individual and the group.  

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Rethinking Identity & Agency

This project aims to spark some new ideas about how we think about ourselves as PERSON - determined by the physical / biological constitution of our bodies and limited by the intellectual & emotional capacities of our brains. Along with our various daily interactions on a digital level, we have continuously extend our SELF into the digital realm and will - now with the rise of the INTERNET OF THINGS - extend our body and brain's borders even more. However, for the first time we will also be able to give the digital THINGS we are using, an own AGENCY, an attitude and something like an own personality and maybe WILL. 

By making these things ACTORS of their own in a new SOCIAL WEB OF THINGS, we will for the first time extend our identity beyond the direct control of our own limbs and thoughts, and there might be new (semi)independent limbs and thougts emerging.

We are becoming - or maybe already are - proper CYBORGS as a result of the new technological route we have taken:

"This vision of technological enhancement entailsthe convergence of the physical, the digital and the virtual world, and the creation of hybrid forms of living and functioning, such as virtually connected cyborgs (Fleishmann 2009)."   

It will be exciting to see how our IDENTITY, our SELF will change over time with the rise of these new parts of us, these EXTENSIONS OF OUR SELF with an AGENCY of themselves that is at the same time a new "us".

My best guess is that we can learn a lot from the insights of EMBODIED COGNITION and PHENOMENOLOGY to understand these changes and find new avenues of self-definition and understanding our new IDENTITY.