overview

This note discusses the internet refrigerator and other 'dot appliances' such as wired toasters, airconditioners, washing machines, blood pressure monitors and internet toilets.

It covers -

• fridges - making sense of the internet fridge
• appliances - other net-enabled domestic appliances such as the internet washing machine and toaster
• diagnostics - heart monitors, internet toilets and other diagnostic devices
• vehicles - the online car
• politics - perspectives on designers, manufacturers, retailers, governments, journalists and consumers
• usability - accessibility, security and other concerns
• studies - salient writings on the net fridge and other online whitegoods

It supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding life online, the new economy, networks, accessibility and RFIDs.

     wired whitegoods?

The internet fridge, digital washing machine, online toaster, web air conditioner and wired toilet have been variously characterised as -

• future saviours of ailing whitegoods manufacturers and retailers
• opportunities to drag the 'household industries' into the digital epoch, with stodgy metal bashers becoming high tech service providers
• geek fantasies - conceptually flawed and commercially unviable
• embodiments of an ideology that privileges appearance at the expense of functionality
• notions that will feature more in breathless fan magazine prose than in actual households
• an echo of past forecasts about wireless controlled washing machines, milking machines and pianolas.

The discussion of networks elsewhere on this site notes that in principle it is possible to network a very wide range of devices, indeed any device, and link them to the internet.

Such networking would accommodate reporting by sensors and communication of commands that encompass financial transactions, logistics and instructions to fill a dam or turn on a house's central heating.

It might be through physical media such as ethernet cabling or instead use wireless protocols. Inclusion of devices will be facilitated by emerging standards such as IPv6, which offers scope for billions of devices - from office laser printers to RFID water sensors in millions of potplants - to each have a unique address.

It is thus unsurprising that enthusiasts, academic research centres and corporations have explored the scope for -

• the smart home - with standalone automation of heating/cooling and other services or control at a distance via the net
• the smart precinct - with online security monitoring of houses and gardens
• placing individual devices such as fridges, coffee pots, ovens and toasters online
• adding sensors and connectivity to equipment such as toilets, beds and baths
• moving some diagnostic devices from medical clinics and hospitals to neighbourhood centres and households, with reporting from that equipment via the net
• providing internet connectivity in cars, buses, trains and other vehicles.

It is also unsurprising that much of that exploration, although attracting academic and mass media interest, has failed to result in substantial rollout of technologies ... and appears unlikely to come to fruition in future.

'Beauty Queen, Bulletin Board and Browser: Rescripting the refrigerator' by Helen Watkins in 13(2) Gender, Place & Culture (2006) 143-152 comments that -

in Australia in 2003, nothing better represented the persistence of techno-optimism than the heavy promotion in print and electronic media of the “Internet fridge” - an LG Electronics' product that features an Internet-linked touch-screen/processor, mounted in the shiny stainless steel front of a domestic refrigerator. In the advertisements, what the beautiful, hip urban digerati are gaining from possession of this piece of domestic ingenuity is unclear . . . except of course that they are more hip, more beautiful, more digital.

The Internet fridge is a good example of the way that, in the 21st century and especially in developed nations such as Australia, Internet technologies exist within social and political life as the result of the intersection of the marketing of Internet access products, the development of new technological systems for access, and irregular government regulation and policy pronouncements of the “need” for new forms of information and communication technology

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