Many of the networks discussed during the introductory phase of the class were ones in which the nodes represented humans, and the edges represented social ties. The Internet of Things is a neologism originally coined by Julian Bleeker, a media design and information science researcher, meaning both an environment in which everyday things are passively and ubiquitously connected and able to communicate, and also an abstraction layer on top of the real world in which the connectivity between objects and people can be quantified, and links between the real world objects and relevant (meta) data are established.

The Internet of Things is also a network in which nodes are people, places, things, objects and anything else which you interact with. Edges can be (recent) interactions, or hierarchies you build representing objects which you own or interact with regularly. First of all, let’s focus on networks whose edges represent recent interactions of some sort. So, if real-world objects are tagged somehow, perhaps with RFID Tags or Semacode, your personal network would contain edges from you to all of the objects which you “scanned” for tags and downloaded the corresponding meta data. I believe that (some of) the same lessons we studied in social networks are applicable. For instance, if you and another person have scanned two of the same objects, over time, a third object, perhaps one related to the other two, which was scanned by one person, would be scanned by the other. This is very similar to triadic closure in social networks.

The other type of network I mentioned, in which the edges represent objects in your personal network of objects, can also be very interesting. For instance, if you map every node (which is an object) to the graph in the previous type of network, reverse the (strong) links, and then reduce the first map to nodes with shared (meta) data and above a certain threshold of incoming edges, you could perform a very fast search in a person’s internet of things, but in such a way which creates hierarchies of social importance and interaction, much in the same way Google’s first few results are usually ridiculously popular.