Reconsidering the user in IoT: the subjectivity of things

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.