*I'm keenly interested in these suggestions that a network society inherently transforms our understanding of futurity and history.
*There are suggestions here that Ruskinian sentiment about artsy old objects can use the Internet to fight back against planned obsolescence. That's got to be part of it – but that's not even half of it.
(...)
Looking backwards whilst walking forward
Whilst the consumer landscape is kept ‘fresh’ with information about the new, the network properties of the Internet of Things offers other opportunities that do not adhere to a forward facing model of time, and instead offer value to objects through the recovery and retention of information from the past. It has been suggested that people surround themselves with between 1,000 and 5,000 objects. Of those thousands of objects many of them are probably not truly cared for and end up in rubbish bins or in storage. But for every owner, in almost every household there are a selection of objects that hold significant resonance, and will already connect them to an ‘Internet’ of memory and meaning. An intrinsic human trait is the process of imbuing meaning onto objects so that they provide connections to people, events and environments. Artefacts across a mantelpiece become conduits between events that happened in the past, to people who will occupy the future. These objects become essential coordinates across families and communities to support the telling of a stories and passing-on knowledge.
Projects such as Significant Objects (http://www.significantobjects.com) attach short fictional stories to artefacts that are subsequently sold on eBay. The value added by the unique story increases the sale price of the items and changes dramatically how an object is interpreted. Similar, but a shopping ‘centre’ in its own right, is Pass The Baton (http://www.pass-the-baton.com/) a commercial project that allows people to attach a personal history to an object before selling it through the project website or an actual shop in Tokyo. Both projects subvert the orthodox use of linear time by placing more emphasis upon the provenance of an object rather than projecting an aura of newness.
Operating outside of a ‘sales context’ but firmly within the field of The Internet of Things, the authors introduce a research project that is enabling people to tag personal objects with memories, and allow other people to review them by scanning the tag. Tales of Things (http://www.talesofthings.com) allows visitors to the website the ability to upload an image of an artefact, associate it with a story (online audio, video or text file) and generate a unique printable barcode for them. Once the barcode is attached the object, a free iPhone or Android application is able to scan the barcode and retrieve the story. The ability to add comments and further stories to artefacts as they are adopted by new owners offers a network of memory in which things are connected by subject and not time....
