Page 57 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

The physical things belonging to our everyday reality are both witnesses and protagonists of the (hi)story of our places (territories, home
and work environments...) and of our social life and communities. If only they could tell stories about what happened to them and around them, the possibility of interacting with things in the person’s environment could provide people with significantly enhanced experiences and services. Objects and people are digitally identifiable and they can be correlated by location and proximity to each other. Furthermore, users’ mobile phones are going to be replaced by one or several wearable devices that allow sensory perception to be extended through the digital insertion of various human senses (e.g. touch, sight, hear- ing..). Future social systems therefore should be able to support highly dynamic real-world social interactions with the person’s environment.
Users’ mobile phones are going to be replaced by one or several wearable devices that allow sensory perception to be extended through the digital insertion of various human senses.
In analogy with the Social Media networks of human beings there could be a notion of rela- tionships between things, making them intelli- gent and social. One possible definition is that things come in social relationships because and when their owners come into contact with each other during their lives (e.g., devices and sensors belonging to friends, classmates, travel compan- ions, colleagues). We can identify different levels of “social” involvement of such intelligent and social things:
• posting information (e.g., about the state of environment...) on the Social Media plat- forms of humans;
• interacting with humans and other things on the Social Media platforms of humans and things.
Governing networked society
In the USA, the Federal Communication Com- mission (FCC) recently (end of 2017) changed “net neutrality” rules, the principles whereby ISPs must treat all Internet traffic in the same way, moving back towards a situation where the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint will be allowed to charge the Over The Top (OTT) companies, called also platform companies, for faster deliv- ery of their data.
This merely confirms the huge power of OTTs and particularly of the so-called FANGs – Face- book, Amazon, Netflix, Google – which now dominate the entire economy and not just the digital business. Their power has grown so quickly and changed the whole economy so much that it is necessary to revisit the policy and rules that have governed the Internet for last two decades, rethinking traditional policy positions. Visibly underlying net neutrality (the term was coined in the early 2000s) are reasons of social equity in the sense that everyone
– individuals, small businesses, start-ups and multinational corporations – should be able to use the Internet on a level playing field.
Members of the TELCO community have been arguing for years that net neutrality prevents the ISPs from properly monetizing their investments in broadband networks. TELCO companies building and operating mobile and/or fixed broadband networks have had low profit margins in recent years, whereas FANGs have high profit
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Digital Trends in Culture