Sociotechnical Imaginaries of the Internet of Things

Abstract

This chapter aims to identify different/competing sociotechnical imaginaries around Internet of Things (IoT) technology, the discourses and imagery on its affordances, as well as its risks, and the actors that engage in building/promoting/contesting these imaginaries. It is based on print media analysis, in particular systematic content analysis of news articles (and their images) published in the past ten years about IoT in online editions of “quality” newspapers from Spain, Portugal, and the UK. The chapter provides a brief overview of the theoretical dimensions of sociotechnical imaginaries and its application to IoT and addresses three main dimensions: how IoT futures are conceptualized in media, utopian visions, and dystopian visions. We ascertain that the media representations show diverse and conflicting narratives about IoT futures, even though there is a dominance of industry-led narratives. The absence of political discourses about IoT in media may be a symptom of the difficulty of regulating digital technologies. Private-for-profit owned media outlets are more prone to reproducing imaginaries put forward by tech companies and endorsed by institutions of power, such as governments, envisioning a future society entirely reliant (and surveilled by) their products, whereas non-profit owned outlets give voice to more contrarian, dystopic visions.