This Little Book is about philosophy. In our research on the PETRAS project,
many of the researchers have drawn on different philosophical theories
to help them to understand some of the difficult relationships between the
digital, physical and connectivity qualities of the Internet of Things (IoT).1
In our research, we have had to consider these relationships in terms of
how they impact privacy, ethics, trust, risk, security, and adoption. So,
throughout this book, we present several different philosophical theories
or strands of thought that help illuminate our research, these are; Thingyness, Hyperobjects, Heterotopias, Respect, Fairness, Ownability, Accelerationism.
Because philosophy is so broad and many of its ideas have been around
for thousands of years, it can be hard to know how it might apply to something
as contemporary and technologically focused as the IoT, or to figure
out how to get started with that challenge. With this difficulty in mind,
the seven chapters in this book each describe how you can use different
aspects of philosophy and theory to think about and understand the IoT.
We have written this book in plain English - each of the chapters can be
read on their own as a stand-alone, but if you read the whole book, then
the links between some of the theories and examples will start to become
more clearly visible.