Blogjects…hmm!!!

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Lately I’ve been testing new (to me) feed readers … (BlogBridge, Awasu, and the newest version of FeedReader(3)); an activity that sent me back to my neglected collection of feeds. I miss having the time to read and comment, read and blog, blog and talk with my virtual colleagues and critics. Obviously I read and found this:

On Anne Gallaway’s blog (Purse Lip and Square Jaw), there is an entry on the subject of “blogjects”. Not really on `blogjects’ but she takes the word/concept to task. What are blogjects? A videocast and a picture can help make sense of what these are.

Essentially, the term is meant to represent objects with certain built in capabilities to interact with the environment; designed to collect information and feed it back to the user. Here they speak of GPS mapping and googling attached to : i.e. a camera.
In what they call the Internet of things (seen as post web 2.0), objects are anthropomorphised, they literally ‘talk back’.

The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. “Blogjects” — or objects that blog — captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist.

As Anne Galloway remarks, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network theory (ANT) is certainly the theory that seems to best represent such actants; the term Latour used to signify people and/or object agency. Actant as a term collapses both into one: no more hierarchy, instead both have equal powers of shaping but they remain separate yet interconnected.

ANT is not focused on the objects says Anne Gallaway, but instead Latour foregrounds the links or relationships these make possible (the network they map out). I agree with Anne’s reading, in that it’s the interdependant connectivity made possible by the translations of actants, that lead to versions of the social. Latour in his latest book mentions there is no social a priori, it is constructed through translations, mapped out from the center out, according to the actants that create the signifying network organised around a controversy/issue/event. (Reviews here).

Instead the notion of blogject seems to collapse person-machine into one, in more of a cyborg type of entity, than a Latourian actant which retains more of its separate yet interconnected reality. The blogject is anthropomorphised, it “thinks” and “communicates”; while the cybord is a human that is machine like. Blogjects seem to fit nicely in Donna Haraway’s cyborg world: “Haraway’s ideal “cyborg world” consists of people living together, unafraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines.” The kinship is forgotten for a fetishised object as Anne remarked.
I too object to the Internet of things being seen as “a renaissance of objects”. Objects have always informed and participated in significant ways in our world. The digital object is just another “species”. (Knorr Cetina also has much to say on this). How I read blogjects (and surface reading it is at this point) and the explanation provided is as follows: they carry their own DNA (to carry through with the anthropomorphism), reveal traces of human/object activity, while feeding back contextual information that is otherwise hidden, accessible only to experts in the past or invisible because of our human limitations.

The tools/objects can help us see more of the context, the history, and even the background and as such extend our information source and perhaps enhance cognitive potential. But what I or You do with what you now have access to and are able to see can be something completely other than connecting to humans in any significant way or creating “sustainable and habitable worlds”. That’s a big technological leap of faith.

What blogjects seem to represent well are various traces of our human/object activities, what they call ‘cataloguing the weak signals” (see slides of presentation).This newer ‘legibility” of traces of what use to be opaque or invisible also implies new types of literacies; a literacy of diverse codes, genres and symbols. It also implies more demands on our already stretched to max attention. Without some purpose, some type of practical use, this is just one other type of information, in an already saturated information world.

As an ordinary user, a citizen doing my thing, I can choose to tune out, or never tune in in any significant way, watching a trend go by without taking part in it. In business certainly. In research, and specialized uses, the many types of mapping made possible by technology is quite useful. (See DontClick.it and see the mouse traces of past users). In education? perhaps, once schools ramp up to systematically teach information-media literacies across the board.
And furthermore, if blogjects don’t partake in actual blogging, that is publishing person generated text we can read, instead of bouncing snippets of all kinds of data, than a more apt term could be “datajects” (sounds too much like reject) or “infojects” or even “mediajects”. What do you think?

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1 Doug Noon says:

Francine, this is interesting to me because I recently ran across a similar-sounding term in my online wanderings via my RSS. According to the Wikipedia entry for ‘blogject’, the term may be “an evolution of the term Blobject used by Bruce Sterling during his SIGGRAPH 2006 speech in Los Angeles, California.” Sterling is a science fiction writer, a provocative speaker, and a philosopher for an age that is becoming increasingly influenced by networking technologies.

I don’t know about actor network theory, but I’m interested theoretical models that can help us understand social trends. Thanks for exploring this discovery of yours. I think there may be some relevance between Sterling and the term you are wondering about.
Posted June 10, 2006, 3:46 am
2 Francine says:

Well Doug, you got me searching a bit deeper and wider. I do like to trace the origins of things, and maybe emulate the blogject in collecting data!

I didn’t even consider Wikipedia. Google turned up what seems to be the original paper by Julian Bleecker who gives this rather long explanation of blogjects:

Blogging? Objects?

The distinction between objects that blog, and human agents that blog is important to flesh out, starting with what bloggers are. “Bloggers” loosely defined, are participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas — making culture — through this particular instrument of connections called the Internet. (Bloggers also do so when they meet face-to-face, but we’ll avoid that important nuance for the time being.) Bloggers, as a type of social being, do more than literally blog. They report on what they see, know and think about. They may use “blog software” — a paleolithic mechanism for circulating culture — and lots of other things. Probably most importantly, they have something semantically weighty to talk about, whatever their particular idiom of social exchange may be
— politics, geek news, gadgets, music, personality fetish, knitting, best practices for smoking salmon — what have you.

In the same way, Blogjects — objects that blog — don’t just literally “blog” in the routine sense. Although there are good examples of some embryonic Blogjects that literally just blog (and don’t even do a very good job — they’re hardly two way, don’t pay attention to comments — but I guess some human bloggers don’t pay attention to comments, either), blogjects in the near-future will participate in the whole meaning-making apparatus that is now the social web, and that is be coming the “Internet of Things.”1 The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas.

Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do — by starting, maintaining and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion. If the contribution to that discussion happens through some seemingly mundane bit of networked disseminated insight matters little in terms of their consequence. A Blogject can start a conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is going to get some trackback.

They are objects that report, they interact with things and report the captured signals back. Sorry, blogjects nope! Of course by interconnecting the various data and information sources, the creative potential is quite interesting given certain conditions.

I agree that this matrix of interconnected data is fertile ground. I agree that intelligent objects are now more accessible, but how are they being used by most?

I tried a number of times to introduce simple tagging (one type of blogject–I think) and how it could be used to a number of my colleagues in an attempt to help disseminate and interconnect related information, only to find that few would make the small effort (4 out of 350!). Reasons have little to do with technology and more to do with not understanding what these collections can do for them and others, and somehow explanations or demonstrations didn’t do it either.

I’m an avid technology user, but oddly don’t find any real use for cell phones other than for emergencies. Yet I can rapidly see many applications to newer information related technologies. Why? I suppose my interests and NEEDS drive my interests and uses while shutting out others. We can only deal with so much.

Your posting on blogging and about experiencing it first to know uses, is similar to what I am trying to say, that knowing (at least being capable of imagining) potential followed by needs orients selection and choice to use or not.

For example, the “geotagger” on your blog sends back interesting information on user location, but…….so what? A cool piece of code, but with (to my knowledge) few applications for the blogger other than to satisfy curiosity. Don’t get me wrong, I too love these ‘gadgets’. Instead of seeing them as information tools, they are to me “inner circle” badges, blog branding, tag/links to and for the technorati.

So… I see blogjects as just more sources of information. And sometimes as much of an info junkie as I recognize myself to be, I catch myself thinking “ignorance is bliss”! Fewer things to think about, fewer choices to make.

Have you read Barry Schwartz (2004) the Tyranny of Choice?

Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.

This should be common knowledge in educational circles, where giving too many choices leads to paralysis and not action, apathy not creativity. Enough said. Thanks Doug. I enjoy your writing.
Posted June 11, 2006, 4:04 am
3 Julian Bleecker says:

It’s fun coming across various insights and remarks on the Blogject concept in all corners of the network. I would add to your insights that my wanting to think about Blogjects as something new (and forgive my devising a bungling idiom) is a political move best described thusly: “we” (inhabitants herein of the planet) need new things to cope with (insert your epic worldly challenge here) in a new way because the old ways are not working. There is, empirically, something new about objects nowadays in that they can potentially (so long as we don’t dismiss the ways they can help us create more habitable worlds) co-inhabit this fascinating and promising digitally networked world of social exchange that is taking place on the Internet. That social exchange is dramatically new (cf. Benkler and Jenkins, forthcoming), and heavy with opportunity for refashioning the world.

Example: We have never had a world in which an $18.90 sensor (in single units) coupled to an existing two-way datastream (eg General Motor’s OnStar(tm) system or, as I’m doing, a simple GSM network data transfer and a Nokia phone) can disseminate at a high rate (25/sec) the content of gasoline or diesel emissions from vehicles — and publish that in real-time to the entirety of the networked world. That _potential_ for a simple Blogject is new. This Blogject has no Artificial Intelligence — that’s not what Blogjects are about. But, in the Latourian sense, Blogjects are social beings in that they (can) participate in conversations that matter, substantively.

Blogjects are “only” sources of information if that is all we want from them. Websites were only sources of information once, too, until they because conversational (in a Weinberger/Searls/Locke sort of way way) and changed the way we engage in social discourse, and even had measurable, substantial effect in 1st life politics and further. We know this for a fact. The social web changed things measurably. Can objects, also participating in the same register of discourse, do likewise, and perhaps have impactful effect?

Why would we not try to make it so? Too many choices? Really? Who decides what choices are available to be made?
Posted June 30, 2006, 1:52 pm

Knowledging across life’s curriculum

Blogjects…hmm!!!

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