Using Web 2.0 to Promote Compassionate Consumption and Alter the Geographies of Knowledge

A few months ago I wrote a short article on using Web 2.0 frameworks and technologies to promote compassionate consumption, using my own experiences as a geography teacher and the wikichains website as an example. The article is titled "Fluid Knowledge and Transparency" and was published in the Special Forum on Pedagogy & Qualitative Research in the Association of American Geographers Qualitative Research Specialty Group Newsletter. I'll post the first paragraph below, and the rest of the article can be accessed here.

Contemporary capitalism conceals the histories and geographies of most commodities from consumers. Consumers are usually only able to see commodities in the here and now of time and space, and rarely have any opportunities to gaze backwards through the chains of production in order to gain knowledge about the sites of production, transformation, and distribution. Over the past decades, the production of commodities has been globalized at a staggering pace, and yet our knowledge about the production of those same commodities has shrunk. The aim of WikiChains is, therefore, to encourage a different type of globalization: a globalization of knowledge that will harness the power of the Internet in order to allow consumers to learn more about the commodities that they buy.

The Tesco API: A Link Between the Physical and Virtual Worlds

Today the Guardian reported that Tesco has launched a beta API for its online shopping service. This may seem rather unremarkable given how many other websites already have fully funtional APIs. However, apparently this is the first ever API offered by a supermarket.

What this means in practice is that all sorts of applications andwidgets can be written to order groceries from tesco.com. You could be reading a recipe book on your kindle and click on a link so that all the ingredients you need are ordered from the online store. If integrated with a smart fridge and smart cupboards (via RFID tags), your account might even automatically know not to order milk because your fridge knows that you already have enough.

So here we see the first step in creating a hybrid virtual/physical kitchen, and for better or worse an idea that will surely speed up the development of the Internet of Things.

"Geography gets interesting:" The Headmap Manifesto

Ten years ago: before cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and Web 2.0. were commonly understood ideas, Ben Russell in his Headmap Manifesto presciently wrote:

there are notes in boxes that are empty

every room has an accessible history

every place has emotional attachments you can open and save

you can search for sadness in new york

people within a mile of each other who have never met stop what they are doing and organise spontaneously to help with some task or other.

in a strange town you knock on the door of someone you don’t know and they give you sandwiches.

paths compete to offer themselves to you

life flows into inanimate objects

the trees hum advertising jingles

everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached

Web Squared and the Internet of Things

Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle recently wrote a provoking white paper for the forthcoming Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. They expand on the idea of Web Squared being a successor to Web 2.0.

Web Squared is about the Internet becoming smarter as an exponentially increasing amount of content is being created and uploaded. O'Reilly and Battelle state that the Internet is:

...no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow," an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.

The main idea here being that the Web can learn inferentially with a large enough body of data. The Web is thus beginning to understand things that we do not have to explicitly explain to it.

The exponential growth in the amount of uploaded data, and the ability of intelligent systems to learn is especially important within the context of the "Internet of Things." The Internet of Things refers to the networking of everyday objects and things (e.g. coke cans, razor blades, toasters etc.). Much existing content in the Internet of Things has been created through coded RFid tags and IP addresses linked into an electronic product code (EPC) network.

A movement is underway to add any imaginable physical object into the Internet of Things. In Japan, for example, many cows have IP addresses embedded onto RFID chips implanted into their skin, enabling farmers to track each animal through the entire production and distribution process. In the words of journalist Sean Dodson, we are facing a future "where pretty much everything is online," or according to O'Reilly and Battelle, "the web is now the world."

Moving back to O'Reilly and Battelle's white paper, one of the most interesting parts of the essay is the argument that while it initially makes sense to assume that for the Internet of Things to work, every object needs to have a unique identifier (through a combination of cheap RFID and IP addresses), what Web 2.0/Web Squared tells us is that it is not necessary to physically tag every single physical thing.

...we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machine-learning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the "Internet of Things," it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don’t have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

So, Web Squared will help to bring about a true Internet of Things: a world where very little can exist outside the network. Myriad frightening surveillance and privacy issues are imaginable, but these have been discussed extensively elsewhere. Putting these issues to the side for the moment, I also see one important (potential) positive outcome of the Internet of Things: an issue that myself and my co-author (Havard Haarstad) will discuss in our paper at the 2009 Royal Geographical Society meeting.

If all things become networked, then all steps in the prodiction, distribution, and transformation of all things become potentially visible. This, in turn, implies a new form of globalisation: we have already experienced a globalisation of things, but we could potentially witness a globalisation of information about things. Poor production practices (e.g. environmental harm, child labour, racial/gender/sexual discrimination) can no longer be hidden behind the veils of distance. Consumers of things would be able to base their purchasing decisions on a combination of their personal policital, cultural, religious, and ethical positionalities and a relatively accurate base of information. Purchasing decisions, of course, quickly influence production practices. If consumers no longer have any interest in buying Nike shoes produced in Indonesian sweatshops (no matter how inexpensive they are), Nike will ultimately stop producing shoes in Indonesian sweatshops. I firmly believe that many of the harmful and poor production practices taking place in the world today only exist because they are essentially hidden from most of us. We rely on highly controlled information (advertising, product packaging etc.) instead of open and networked information.

This vision of the Internet of Things naturally relies on an abscence of controls on flows of information. It is all to easy to imagine an Internet of Things in which information is controlled, restricted, and censored by companies and governments that have no interest in a new form of globalisation being brought into being.

As stated above, these issues will all be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming paper, which I will upload here as soon as it is publication-ready.