Digital Technology in Changing Social Relations — The Social Internet of Things: Developing a New Method for Leveraging the Friendships between IoT Devices

Advancements in technology allow humans to add many interesting features to everyday devices. As humans, we can tackle many problems in complex societies and manage the complexity of networked social systems. Sociability is a vital human capability that improves our social lives and manages social interactions. Adding this feature to smart devices can facilitate the management of complex and networked Internet of Things (IoT) settings. We can improve the relationship between social and smart devices in different ways. Nowadays, researchers are investigating the future generations of IoT, namely, social IoT. This study aims to develop a new method for updating and leveraging the friendships between IoT devices by using social IoT and social networking principles. We utilize a design science approach to propose a novel friendship management method for social IoT that is able to effectively evaluate and manage the relationships between devices. The new friendship development and updating models use the basic concepts of Knapp’s relational stage theory. In this chapter, a new simulation tool for evaluating the new friendship mechanism is proposed. The evaluation results show that the proposed method performs effectively and can enhance network navigability, service composition, and service discovery.