A Pigeon Blogged This

I just missed the deadline to post and Blogger was down for server maintenence until now.

Bleeker’s A Manifesto For Networked Objects was frustrating to digest. From spimes to blogjects to the Internet of Things, the article it reads like an attempt to cram as many buzzwords into a description of an interesting, but not especially remarkable or novel idea.

Bleeker introduces the neologism “blogject,” a portmanteau whose cool-factor is enhanced by using the word “blog,” which has only a superficial connection to his discussion. Blogjects fail to be bloggers both the common definition of the word and his own definition as, “participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas – making culture.”

A blogger is a person who shares ideas using the Internet as a venue. People read blogs because they find them to be more personal, insightful, and opinionated subjective than, say, a newspaper. Compare this to Bleeker’s example of the Pigeon that Blogs. The Pigeon mindlessly transmits information on its location and air pollution data – or rather, the GPS device does this, as the pigeon is unaware of its purpose. This is nothing new or remarkable. Radio tracking long predates the Internet and such real-time broadcasting of data could have (and probably was) done eons before the Internet age.

The key is the blogjects are stupid. As the article explains, “blogjects have no truck with the syntax of human thought.” There is no processing, no analysis, no “thoughts, opinions, or ideas.” Blogjects are participants in the exchange of ideas only marginally as the raw data that informs people and thus can be processed into facts, then refined into ideas. Bleeker exaggeration, “The Pigeon that Blogs now attains first-class citizen status,” is absurd. The pigeon possesses “agency” in the sense that it, obtusely and indirectly effects change, if say, a scientists tracks the data for years and notices increases in pollution levels, a molecule in a sea of facts that leads environmentalists to start a campaign, which leads Congress to pass more stringent corporate dumping laws. Here, the scientists, environmentalists, and congressmen effect change, not the pea-brained bird with a transmitter tied to its led.

Here’s another comparison. Random Hall has their laundry machines connected to a server so that one can check the status of a washing machine online. If the washing machine is indeed blogging, as Bleeker would claim, that woe to the blogosphere. Tomorrow, Joi Ito is going to be replaced by a dryer.

Nevertheless, after cutting through article’s sensationalism, it seems that Bleeker’s general idea – connecting physical objects to the Internet – is a good one. Getting raw data from objects is the necessary first step that precedes processing this data, extracting information, and forming ideas, although I believe that processing large amounts of data is a more difficult and interesting change than simply collecting it. Imagine having a constantly updated online database of traffic conditions, tracked with cameras at commonly-congested stretches of road along with image-recognition heuristics for recognizing and accident or foggy weather. Bleeker would be pleased to know that Google Maps has been put to use for environmentalists in tracking deforestation using satellite views. Or, as Bleeker would say, tree stumps are blogging.