Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Media studies’ recent interest in topological culture suggests that today’s networked infrastructures with finer-granularity despatialize the places of cultural practices and relocate them on a sort of continuum always not-enough-differentiated or further-differentiable. For instance, streams of digital signal do not simply transmit fixed forms of objects in a predefined space, but unfolds a space itself as the result of an application, e.g. a filtering, performed on the streams to (re)differentiate their continuum into the provisional boundaries of objects and subjects. Interconnecting various physical entities and smart devices in a regional domain, the Internet of Things (IoT) also transforms today’s smart home into a topological continuum differentiable into many different problem-spaces according to its applications that function to individuate each singular problem latent in our everyday practices. One’s domestic interior under this smart system is strategically kept in a metastable state to be constantly re-bifurcated into a more optimal future state, which can be achieved only through the system’s proactive individuation of the most urgent problem embedded in the continuum and its realignment of the devices for the solution. We can borrow a mathematical concept ‘manifold’ from Bernhard Riemann’s differential geometry and Henri Poincaré’s group theory to examine how this topological continuum redefines today’s domestic interior as full of problematic relations susceptible of commodification into the form of smart applications. By doing so, we can infer a regime of power that governs the marketability of IoT and the human behaviors under its space making.