Miller Presents at American Anthropological Association

Christine Miller, Clinical Associate Professor of Innovation, presented her paper “Enchanted Objects, Social Robots and the Internet of Things” at the 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, November 18-22, as part of an invited panel. Abstracts for both the presentation and the panel can be found below.

How do our relationships with objects change as they become less “thing-like” and more like sentient beings? This paper addresses the issues of cultural change and global assemblages (Collier and Ong 2005) from the perspective of what has been referred to as the “third wave” of the internet, or the Internet of Things (Jankowski, Covello, Bellini, Ritchie, & Costa, 2014). The first wave introduced the fixed internet connecting approximately one billion users. The second wave brought the mobile internet connecting another two billion users. It is estimated that by 2020 the third internet wave, characterized by the emergence of ambient technology and ubiquitous computing, will provide connectivity to 28 billion ‘things’, many of which will take on roles that are now filled by human beings. This trend has been gradual, but is accelerating at an exponential rate with recent advances in technology. Actor network theory (ANT) posits that human and non-human actors become associated in networks as “participants in the course of action.” (Latour, 2005:70) As networked devices (non-human objects) are able to communicate directly with each other (Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interaction) they are becoming less dependent on humans for direction and are programmed to take on increasing responsibility and agency. How is our understanding of non-human actors and “social” and “non-social” roles bringing about cultural change in the era of networked objects and the Internet of Things (IoT)?

Panel Abstract
Cultural Change: Disruptive Assemblages for Change and Innovation in Social Life
What causes cultural change? Practicing anthropologists working in design, consumer and organizational research find that culture involves the flow and movement of social and non-social agents (Latour 2005) that come together in a correspondence at a specific time and in a unique context (Ingold 2015). This session will consider cultural change from the perspective of global assemblages where agency is distributed among people, things, discourse and other elements. Metanarratives of cultural change such as evolution, diffusion, acculturation, ecology and world systems theory assume general processes and a more stable, consistent social life. Instead we focus upon dynamic forces of instability and disruption to explore how particular social and non-social elements come into association, establishing correspondence through the flow and movement of agents distributed among the assemblage. We seek to understand emergent correspondence from cultural practices in relation to technology, governance, exchange, ethics and values. The individual papers will identify specific trajectories of change (Collier and Ong 2005) occurring in the lived experience of consumers and members of organizations engaged in the design, marketing and delivery of products and services. By exploring instances in the practice of business anthropology, we aim to show how cultural change is historically situated and unpredictable but not accidental.