The Internet of Things: The Language and Practice of Early IoT Adopters 2011-2013

PhD thesisThis thesis examines the discourse and practice surrounding the technological development of the Internet of Things, and its expansion at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. The initial motivation for the Internet of Things was a fusion of the physical and digital worlds, enabled by pervasive network connectivity: “anything, anytime, anywhere”. Grounded in a rhetoric of a connected world, future sustainability, and improvements brought by the deployment of innovative technosocio- economic-environmental systems, claims were made that the IoT would not only deliver solutions to humanity’s ever-growing needs, but would also lead to a shift in the very principles governing such systems. This thesis argues for the need to readdress the dominant IoT discourse, not only by an analysis of discourse, but also by an analysis of the practices that fostered the development of this phenomenon. The study at the centre of this thesis is focused on a community of open source developers, artists, architects and computer enthusiasts who were curious about the possibilities opened up by this next stage of technological development, and who went on to test and re-imagine the use and deployment of the IoT. This ethnographic study follows the development of the first IoT platform, the creation of a communityled air quality network, and the emergence of the Open IoT framework. Through an analysis of practice, and an examination of its conceptual content and organisation in language, this thesis reveals how the space of the IoT was imagined, experienced and lived in. The thesis argues that investigations led by these early adopters and the reimagining of what Lefebvre called the “dominant space” pioneered the IoT discussion and its development during 2011-2013 in London, Europe, and America. Connecting with the social theorists in the fields of critical theory, phenomenology and social geography, this thesis provides a new viewpoint on technological development, and in consequence, it expands the currently rather technological discourse of the IoT.EPSRCAHRCMedia and Arts Technology Centre for Doctoral Training at Queen Mary University of London

Listenership in Japanese interaction: the contributions of laughter

This thesis contributes to the body of research on listenership. It accomplishes this through an investigation of the functions of laughter in the listening behaviour of participants in Japanese interaction. The majority of studies concerning conversational interactions have focused on the role of the speaker rather than on that of the listener. Notable work on the listener's active role in conversation includes research done by Goffman (1981), Goodwin (1986) and Gardner (2001). Laughter research has shifted from an early interest in the causes of laughter to an interest in how it is organised and how it functions in conversational interaction. Despite many studies on listenership and laughter as distinct areas of research, there have been relatively few studies on how laughter contributes to listenership behaviour. In order to explore the relationship between listenership and laughter, I used a corpus of spoken interactional data. This data consists of conversations between Japanese participants (university students and teachers) who were asked to tell each other stories about a surprising moment that they had experienced. The corpus was constructed in such a way as to make it possible to compare (1) solidary (student-student) and non-solidary (student-teacher) interactions and (2) higher status story-teller (teacher telling student) and lower status story-teller (student telling teacher) interactions. Qualitative methods (drawing on a variety of techniques of discourse analysis) were used to discover laughter patterns and functions in relation to the role of the listener both at the micro-level and in relation to the macro-structure of the surprise story-telling. Quantitative methods were used to analyse the relationship between laughter patterns/functions and the above interaction types (solidary/non-solidary and lower status/higher status interactions). I found, firstly, at the micro-level of analysis, that the listener’s laughter contributed to the co-production of conversation through functions that included: responding/reacting, constituting and maintaining. There were two patterns of the listener’s laughter that were motivated by the speaker’s laughter invitation: acceptance, and declination. Acceptance involved the functions of responding/reacting or constituting, with the listener’s laughter functioning to support mutual understanding and bonding between the participants. Declination could be related to signal the listener’s lack of support for the speaker, however, the listener used the third option, the ambivalence. This shows that despite the absence of laughter, a verbal acknowledgement or understanding response was alternatively used. In a problematic situation, the listener’s laughter was found to reveal the listener’s third contribution: the maintaining function, helping to resolve an ongoing interactional problem. At the macro-level of analysis, based on the three phases in a surprise story, I found that laughter played a key role at phase boundaries (1st: preface/telling; 2nd: telling/response; and 3rd: response/next topic). The laughter patterns and functions appeared in each boundary. The acceptance pattern was more frequent than other patterns in all of the boundaries. The responding/reacting and constituting functions mainly appeared in the acceptance. The patterns of laughter in a trouble context were rare because they only appeared in a trouble context. The maintaining function in such a context also occasionally occurred in order to repair the trouble situation. Looking at laughter in relation to the different interaction types, I found, lastly, that the solidary dyads tended to demonstrate acceptance (constituting the responding/reacting and constituting functions), while the non-solidary dyads had a greater tendency to show declination. In addition, the lower-ranked listeners tended to show ambivalence, while the higher-ranked listeners tended to be more flexible in showing either acceptance or declination. These findings suggest the existence of a relationship between laughter patterns/functions and politeness: a higher degree of solidarity and a lower degree of status can influence the display of acceptance patterns/functions and listenership behaviour; a lower degree of solidarity and a higher degree of status can indicate flexibility when choosing a response type. In a trouble situation, laughter in its various patterns/functions was used in all interaction types to recover resolutions to any impediments in the ongoing engagement. All in all, I found that laughter contributes to listenership, both through supporting affiliation and through helping to resolve ‘trouble’ situations. I showed how listenership expressed through laughter plays a role in negotiating, creating, and maintaining the relationship between the self and the other in mutual interactions. As implications, I finally indicated that such laughter activities as the display of listenership could be closely connected to the Japanese communication style

Information packaging of subject and topic in Japanese : semantic differences and selectional criteria for NP GA and NP WA

Many attempts to characterise NP GA (non-topic subject) and NP WA (topic subject) have been made in the past. Some have examined their syntactic properties, some their semantic nature and others their discourse functions. None of these however, capture what native speakers understand by NP GA and NP WA, or properly reflect the intuition native speakers have for these items. Another major failure of past analyses is that the differential process employed by native speakers when choosing between the two particles of GA and WA in a certain text or context has not been seriously studied. The assumption seems to have been that once NP GA or NP WA is somehow characterised, selection between the two is automatic, but as shown in this work, this is not the case. The research herein was undertaken firstly, in order to pursue or extract the essential or real differences between NP GA and NP WA as understood by native speakers; and secondly, to find out how the selection of one particle over the other is carried out in a real situation, e.g., in an actual text. Two major claims are made as the result of this investigation. Firstly, it is claimed that NP GA and NP WA can be described as denoting the concepts of existential assertion and existential presupposition respectively, and also that various syntactic as well as pragmatic phenomena concerning NP GA and NP WA can be accounted for by such fundamental semantic differences of NP GA and NP WA. Secondly, this dissertation claims that there are three selectional patterns concerning the use of GA and WA. The first one is where there is no conflict among the differential factors for selection, and the second is where conflicting factors are resolved by the ranking of the factors. The first and the second patterns are thus rule-governed, i.e., the appropriate particle may be predicted by a set of rules. The third case consists of situations in which native speakers are free to disagree with one another. The choice of particles here is not decided by rules but because of semantic content of the particles. The theoretical implications of this research are that NP GA and NP WA are both primary categories in semantic analysis and that some uses of NP GA and NP WA need to be treated as lexical items, rather than being dealt with solely by grammar rules