Tag Archives: infrastructures

Internet of Things (IOT)

Internet of Things (IOT)

An increasing number of devices are electronic and networked with each other and connected to the Internet. Radio transmitters connected to the devices collect, identify data via compatible networks, and communicate with each other. These devices are called IoT, or Internet of Things. According to a broader definition, cyber systems are also called IoTs. It can be defined as a dynamic, i.e. constantly changing and evolving, global network infrastructure, i.e., a network infrastructure in which physical and virtual “objects” have an identity, i.e., identity, physical characteristics, and a virtual personality. Intelligent interfaces, ie user interfaces that can, for example, adapt to the needs of different users or anticipate user activity, transmit information seamlessly between objects and the data network. The goal of development is for IoT to enable people and devices to connect anytime, anywhere, anytime. IoT increases everyday comfort and ease of use and can be used by both society and individual citizens. [1]

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The devices are characterized by the fact that they can be used to combine anything, such as smart watches, security systems, activity bracelets, smart homes, remote heating devices, airplanes, gates and doors, home appliances, consumer electronics, just to name a few. The Internet of Things consist of a growing list of Intelligent devices that would augment, optimize, and interconnect every aspect of our daily lives. An object, such as a car, electrical appliance, or grocery, can connect directly to the Internet through a computer component that has an IP address. The component can be, for example, a sensor, an RFID chip or a WLAN chip. Sometimes it is sufficient for the object to have an identifier, such as a parcel delivery code or a unique identifier modified from the registration number of the vehicle to enable the object to be identified on the Internet. The object does not then need to be connected  directly to the internet. Energy companies have provided consumers with smart meters that provide consumers with real-time information on consumption and energy companies can remotely read meters. The Internet of Things can also be utilized in logistics, in which case, for example, food can be measured ambient temperature in the supply chain, and alerts you if the temperature exceeds or falls below a certain limit. [2]

In recent years, digitalisation has also raised its head in the most traditional fields, and drones, for example, are already used in reindeer husbandry to detect reindeer herds from the air. In Oulu, reindeer herding is being developed under the auspices of IOT technology, and as a result, a Rudolf device was created, which can be used to monitor the health status and location of reindeer through a mobile application. In the future, the technology could even be used to prevent animal diseases and traffic accidents. With Rudolf, tracking even a single reindeer is effortless. [3]

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Digital applications extend their tentacles everywhere in society. Electronic warfare is also present on the battlefield with ubiquitous armored vehicles at the forefront of the attack, in support of the air operation and as part of the reconnaissance system on land, sea and air. Electronic warfare inquires and disrupts enemy systems and protects its own forces from the effects of enemy electronic warfare. [4]

In 2020, the number of connected devices per person was 6.58 and the total number of devices was 50 billion. Smart home appliances in households is highest in China, second highest in the US and third highest in the EU8. [5] Every second 127 new devices are added connected to the internet.

The Internet of Things as a concept is often dated to Mark Weiser’s work on ubiquitous computing at Xerox Parc in the 1980s and 1990s, 9 and as an actual term is dated to 1999, another pivotal  moment in the concept’s  elaboration  is 2008, the year when Internet-based machine-to-machine connectivity surpassed  that of human-to-human connectivity.

Behind the screen

Household objects that are currently being transformed into electronic technologies is not only lengthening, but also beginning to constitute a categorically different media “ecosystem.” How might an attention to these material and environmental effects provide an opportunity for generating new areas of environmental intervention in relation to sustainable media? We can no longer just stare at our own equipment but we must also try to see it from a broader perspective. What lies beyond the screen, of how hardware unfolds (avautua)  into wider ecologies of media devices, and of how electronic waste may evidence the complex ways in which media are material and environmental?

Energy meters are one  example of how recurring access to data about energy consumption is meant to influence behaviour and bring about a reduction in energy use. Attempts have been made to study the routes of how waste is travelling across United States by adding electronic tags into the trash items and tracking their journey.

“Thingification” is an overtly material approach to the previously “virtual” concerns of digital media, and is an industry strategy that is meant to expand the reach, capacities, and economic growth of the Internet. Thingification may make any number of activities and practices within our everyday lives more efficient, sustainable, and safe

Rethingification does not simply involve mapping out the static stuff that constitutes any particular media technology, but rather requires attending to the ways in which things attract, infect, and propagate mediatized relations, practices, imaginaries, and environments. A critical and material media studies might then begin to develop methods and modes of practice that adopt an experimental set of approaches to re-thingification.

Re-thingification of things

IoT has a lot of potential, but its information security is weak or almost non-existent, as systems and devices have been developed for the market quickly and often without compromising on information security requirements. Another challenge is the lack of concrete preparedness for the potential threats to social systems posed by the IoT. For example, in industrial, transport and energy production sites, poorly protected IoT activities can cause significant damage, the effects of which can extend to society at large. [1]

A society built on a large sector of digital information networks is vulnerable in many ways. We have got a taste of the lack of information security in an extensive data breach that targeted patient data in Finland. Cyber ​​hacking can do great damage to the lives of individuals and damage the structures of society. Examples include ensuring the security of power plants, electricity networks and water distribution.

Computer hackers, organized crime, and various fanatics form their own war front, with a front line everywhere. Organized crime can afford to buy the best computers and encryption software on the market. This allows drug offenders to exchange information under the noses of authorities with their 128-bit encryption. Breaking such encryption, according to Adams, will take 40 billion years from a Cray supercomputer. So figuring out the code is laborious even for the U.S. security agency NSA, which is said to have a nearly three-acre cave full of supercomputers. In his book “The Next World War” (1998), James Adams says that high technology means not only superior military power but also a very high degree of vulnerability. For example, a touring man managed to black out four U.S. air control centers while burning a dead cattle in a pit they dug. Below happened to be an important fiber optic cable. [6]

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As one text collected in The Crystal World Reader, and drawn from the US National Mining Association, remarks, there are at least sixty-six individual Minerals that contribute to a typical computer, and “it should be evident that without many Minerals, there would be no computers, or Televisions for that matter. The minerals needed to build computer networks are not an inexhaustible natural resource. Digital waste is also something that cannot be ignored in the debate on digital information networks.

What do these distributed arrangements and materialities of computation enable, what processes and relations do they set in play and require, and what new environmental effects do they generate? The actual and anticipated debris of electronics might provide one way that we could tune into these material processes to develop practices that speculate about material politics and relations in order to be less extractive and harmful. But this approach would require a re-thingification of things, particularly the Internet of Things.

Reference:

Jennifer Gabrys, “Re-thingifying the Internet of Things,” Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, eds. Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, New York and London, Routledge, 2016: 180 – 195

[1] https://peda.net/jyu/it/do/kkv/6kvjvtt/6tth/iotieei2

[2]  https://www.ficom.fi/ict-ala/tilastot/iot-esineiden-internet

[3]  https://www.dna.fi/yrityksille/blogi/-/blogs/oulussa-porotaloutta-kehitetaan-nb-iot-teknologian-siivittamana

[4]  7https://upseeriksi.fi/koulutusohjelmat/maavoimienko

[5 ]  The Mobile Economy 2020, GSMA

[6]  https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/seuraava-sota-on-digitaalinen

photos:

1. https://peda.net/jyu/it/do/kkv/6kvjvtt/6tth/iotieei2/iotieei2/e

2. https://www.dna.fi/yrityksille/blogi/-/blogs/oulussa-porotaloutta-kehitetaan-nb-iot-teknologian-siivittamana

3. https://www.digital-war.org/blog

Hydropolis & Cybercity

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Infrastructure used to refer to roads, tunnels and other public works. In Signal Traffic, Shannon Mattern points out how words “architecture” along with “telecommunications” and “media” began to trend in the 1960’s, approximately at the same time. “Infrastructures made human settlements possible”, Mattern continues, and this indeed the case with the Salpausselkä ridges spreading across Southern and South-Eastern Finland: a national highway number 12 follows the Salpausselkä I ridge, along with a railway and some major cities and towns. The formation itself does not stand out very much from the landscape, save for a few steep quarries revealing the moraine and materiality of the ridge. According to Mattern, an area in which human settlements gathered, also forms an infrastructure — “an area of local intercourse”. What are examples of these areas and what kinds of local intercourses do they entail?

Considering the various urban forms: topography, transportation, cosmology, philosophy, defense… Everything intertwines and services merge to one another. An example could be a case of postal services piggybacking in the cargo compartment of a vehicle intended for commuting. Decreased commuting may mean changing timetables and thus affecting the time when the postal service is able to do their work. That means people receive their mail less frequently or later during the day — how will everyday habits be shaped by such a trivial change in society?

How are cities mediated or unmediated? Was there an unmediated era, and what did it look like compared to today? What were the visual characteristics of an unmediated city: unpainted surfaces, human-sized buildings? We can now access overviews of areas more easily with drones or with the aid of Google Earth. Has it already changed views of how we construct neighborhoods or new suburbs?

The intermingling of temporalities: old and new form interfaces with one another, sometimes leaking into one another. New technologies are introduced, old are discarded, but not entirely. During the implementation of mobile network technologies, analog television broadcasts were phased out. If you listen to amateur radio, unused bandwidth frees up space in the “spectrum” for other purposes and transmission of data. Listening to the various signals nowadays (conveniently with the help of an online SDR), aside from voice communication, one may find out there are people out there still communicating with morse code; planes transmit some of the flight data as continuous signals to airports without manual human reporting; remote weather stations send weather data, all this without the help of internet connection that the contemporary human is so dependent on.

It is evident the Salpausselkä ridges are natural formations that have supported human activity for thousands of years: their affordances have allowed convenient ways to arrange defense, logistics, trade routes, services and other industrial endeavors. The formations are an obvious location for erecting radio/TV/telephone masts and water towers. Some buildings and sites have been built on top of the ridge to highlight their presence in the area, or to offer the visitors an outlook to enjoy.

Lauttasaari water tower was taken down in 2015. In an article by HSY about constructing a new water tower instead of trying to preserve the old one, it is stated that repurposing old water towers is an expensive and difficult feat, depending on the way the tower has been originally constructed. A study conducted in Romania points out how many of the old water towers have been converted into sites for preserving cultural artefacts or sites for cultural activities. In many cases, radio towers and antennas are located on top of a water tower. What is the relationship between the hydropolis of water and waste with an electrified and communicative cybercity?

The Salpausselkä ridges contain majority of the groundwater reserves of the area. The gravel within the ridge filters the water — some of this water is bottled, and the water can be bought from Finnish supermarkets. What is the future of water system when faced with challenges such as drought? How are these very essential and invisible infrastructures and related ecosystems designed to prevail?

(Image: Jari Laamanen, Wikipedia)