Just like the motivation of the “alpha‿ blogger, the character of the motivated Blogject is to make, disseminate and enhance meaning, to draw attention and to be assertive. Like the alpha blogger, the Blogject enters into conversations that yield consequences. It’s not at all interesting to have my car “blog‿ routine things such as the routes I’ve driven, its time-average fuel consumption, or the street address of a restaurant I’ve just passed that has a menu that would appeal to my palette based on previous restaurant experiences. It is much more consequential, and much more assertive of a first-class participant in the network of social discourse for flocks of vehicles to provide macro-scale insights into how much fuel is consumed hourly on Interstate 405 in the Los Angeles basin, or how many tons of pollutants are exhausted into the atmosphere every hour.

The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. That’s not as manifestly grand a statement as it may seem. It means, in simple terms, that Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on‿ matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal matters.