Page 56 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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Some authors (Manovich L., 2012) have already started to address some of the theoretical and practical issues raised by the possibility of using massive amounts of social and cultural data in the social sciences, including the discussions about the differences between “deep data” on a few people and “surface data” on many people.
Is the IoT going to be social too?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is already a reality, but it is merely at the beginning of a social, economic and cultural transformation. Basically the IoT will revolutionize our conception of
the world and how we interact with it. The IoT could be defined as a group of smart devices (cars, fitness trackers, TVs..) that are fitted with sensors and software and are able to connect to the network, store and exchange the data.
The evolution of the IoT is about transforming our lives and spaces into a Cyber-Physical-Social Hyperspace and changing what it means to be connected and social.
These advances will enable us to develop our capabilities further but posing new challenges
to our society and how we relate to each other. This will also produce new ways of expressing our creativity extended to culture, leisure and art. We increasingly hear about new technology, gadgets, devices and apps coming onto the market that make our life, work and daily tasks easier. The IoT will generate synergies between devices and the information they exchange. We already have smart homes managed by devices with artificial intelligence. Our lives are starting to change as a result of all this information and all these devices impacting how we work and communicate with friends and relatives and how we spend our leisure time.
The ability to transform any physical object into one that is digital and connected furthermore
makes it possible to build emotional links be- tween users – we are going to be able to feel, share or contribute to works and enjoy experi- ences that are mediated and influenced by IoT.
The evolution of the IoT is about transforming our lives and spaces into a Cyber-Physical-So- cial Hyperspace and changing what it means to be connected and social, thanks to smartphones, tablets, and all types of wearable devices, which are connecting people and things both directly and indirectly through various applications and platforms. There are many sectors that already exploit the benefits of connected devices (IoT): health, logistics, energy, smart cities, industry.
In the near future, there will be more connected things than humans and these things will have to communicate together. In the future many services will require associated groups of things interacting with each other, based on technol- ogies such as swarm intelligence and swarm robotics. The establishment and management of relationships between things can occur with different levels of human intervention. In one case humans are responsible only for setting the rules of things’ interactions and then enjoy the services resulting from such interactions and groupings, while in the other case things simply participate in the human social network built by their human owners as their extensions.
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Digital Trends in Culture