An Alphabet of Things

The IoT--the Internet of Things--is a thing these days. The concept of things talking to other things doesn't really describe what goes on with most of the things in our house. In buying new appliances for a future kitchen remodel it was an actual struggle on our part to keep the amount of technology to a minimum because dinner shouldn't have to wait on a software update. The expense of things that can talk to other things isn't within reach for the vast majority of people on the planet, nor is their global proliferation sustainable within our resource base on the only planet we have. 

I remember seeing the photos years ago in Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Peter Menzel and other photographers took portraits of 30 statistically average families with everything they owned outside their homes. Having moved several times in the past few years this is the kind of thing that shows up in recurring nightmares for me. (He did something similar with food in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.)

Perhaps inspired somewhat by the memory of that photobook, my own efforts to reduce the number of things I own, as well as the opportunity for some wordplay that Sweet Hubs and I came up with when we heard someone refer to IoT recently, I present herewith a more realistic Alphabet of Things. It definitely represents mixed feelings.

A: The Anxiety of Things

B: The Blandness of Things

C: The Cost of Things

D: The Detritus of Things

E: The Evidence of Things

F: The Fragility of Things

G: The Gunkiness of Things

H: The Heaviness of Things

I: The Interior of Things

J: The Joy of Things

K: The Knowledge of Things

L: The Load of Things

M: The Messiness of Things

N: The Newness of Things

O: The Oldness of Things

P: The Patience of Things

Q: The Quantity of Things

R: The Rarity of Things

S: The Satisfaction of Things, or The Scarcity, depending on your circumstances

T: The Tonnage of Things

U: The Urgency of Things

V: The Value of Things

W: The Weight of Things

X: The Xenomania of Things (c'mon, X-ray was too obvious and kind of weird here, and now you get to learn a new word!)

Y: The Yoke of Things

Z: The Zest of Things

Having opened with Peter Menzel and photography that shows us the world in a different way, I have to close this with a bit about a British photographer whose works both are and are not about things, and the alphabet, and time, and paying attention to what's already there: Martin Wilson. 

I encountered him thanks to reading the poetry blog of his brother, Anthony Wilson. Anthony praised his brother's genius in a post you should read because it describes Martin's process. That led me to Martin's site where I hope to one day buy a print of one of his works, probably "Double Yellow Lines" because it's so on point for the work I do. The bonus is that Martin bikes around London to capture these images, so part of the story sometimes involves a really sweaty ride to get somewhere in time to get the lighting he wants or to avoid peak traffic that would get in the way. Go look, and be sure to click on See a Detail. Sadly, images don't appear to have alt-text. Anthony's post describes the process so I hope that gives enough of an idea of what Martin has captured.

Now, I'm off to do a closet purge or clean a drawer or empty a box in the garage or something else that enables me to say goodbye to some things. If any of this made you consider the things in your life in a new light I hope you'll come back and drop a comment about that moment of mindfulness.