Sunday, April 2, 2017

Blog 12: The Internet Returns?


Back again for the fourth time in a row, this post marks the beginning of our reading of Samuel Greengard’s The Internet of Things. From the title alone I’m already intrigued as I thought the idea was that from here on out the readings and the course topic would focus on the concepts of rhetoric and its use in writing, and that we were done with the internet part of 3577W. Maybe this book is going to talk about the relationship between the two? Guess there’s only one way to find out…

In chapters 1 and 2 we get a quick look at how involved digital tools are in our lives now, and that most (if not all of them) have some form of internet connectivity. There’s definitely a noticeable mix between seeing how the technology has gotten to this point and looking towards the future of this technology in these two bits. Most of the reading focuses on a brief summary of the history of the internet, and thought it is pretty neat to see how far we’ve advanced nowadays, after talking about this so often this semester I’m not sure what else I can add about the subject. At the very least I thought that the explanation of the “Internet of Things” was fascinating. I think it’s an interesting idea to combine various specific internet capable devices under a single concept. Instead of connecting online in the fashion of the computer or phone where you can surf the web, these devices have one or only a couple things that they can do when connected online and usually do so by treating the internet as a network to pull data to and from - like an invisible version of a traditional machines connected by wires if you will. Since these devices fairly easy integrate into society, I’m just as interested as the book is to see where we’re heading next in this “Internet of Things” revolution.

Questions:

  • Other than phones and computers, what other internet capable devices are a part of your daily life?
  • How far do you think these Internet of Things could go before ethical issues would come into play? For example: people’s memory becoming worse since you can just write notes down on a device and effectively have it remember for you.

Image from: http://blog.initialstate.com/week-internet-things-iot-12052014/

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