Avatar activism and the « survival of the mediated » hypothesis
By now, you’re all way too familiar with the Egyptian Facebook activism. And everybody and his sister has spent the last year-and-a-half discussing how wrong was Malcolm Gladwell in dismissing Moldovan Twitter activism. And millions of you have smiled at Gaddafi’s crazy rant against Tunisian Wikileaks activism. But I’m sure the notion of Avatar activism appeals to a more restricted audience.
In an attempt to fill this gap in your general knowledge, let me point you to a recent article by Mark Deuze.
Mark Deuze (2010). Survival of the mediated Journal of Cultural Science, 3 (2)
One interesting part of the essay deals with protestors around the world appropriating the aesthetic codes and themes of James Cameron’s film Avatar. In the Palestinian village of Bil’in, for instance, activists disguised as blue-skinned Na’vi fight « Israeli imperialism ». The same goes with other community initiatives around the world, such as the Dongria Kondh tribe in eastern India and the Kayapo Indians in the Amazon rainforest.
Colloque Performance, théâtre, anthropologie (INHA/EHESS, 24-25 mai 2011)
J’interviendrai lors de ces deux journées d’études organisées par Georges Vigarello, Sylvie Roques et Christian Biet. Voilà pour l’instant l’argumentaire et le programme – cela s’annonce tout à fait passionnant.
PERFORMANCE, théâtre, anthropologie
Le mot de performance s’est imposé dans le monde de l’art. Les chorégraphies de Jérôme Bel en danse, le « bio-art » de Yann Marussich jusqu’aux transformations physiques d’Orlan en sont autant d’exemples Il est porté sans doute par un contexte : celui de la productivité, de l’innovation, voire de l’informatisation1. Il s’est imposé aussi au théâtre, d’autant plus facilement d’ailleurs que la place du « faire » y semble première. Il s’y est même banalisé, régulièrement évoqué, jusqu’à apparaître quelquefois comme étant à l’essence même du jeu2. L’intérêt indéniable est ici d’aiguiser l’attention vers la part physique du spectacle, son versant le plus charnel.
- Voir Innovation et performance, approches interdisciplinaires, dir. D. Foray et J. Mannesse, Paris, EHESS, 1999. ↩
- F. Dupont, « Facere ludos. La fonction rituelle et l’écriture du texte dans la comédie romaine: un exemple, le pseudolus de Plaute », Colloque international, Genève, 27-29 novembre 2003. ↩
Empowered patients, greedy pharmacoms and the coming ‘eHealth divide’
Who wants to appropriate the so-called « eHealth revolution » and put it to commercial use? Just have a read through this scary bit of pharmacom fireside chat freshly published on The Pharmaceutical Executive Magazine website - then we’ll talk.
Thus spoke Sarah Krüg, from the Medical Education Group at Pfizer. Patients empowerment via online databases, open information sharing and web-based self-help groups represents a business opportunity for pharmacoms (but then what doesn’t?). The danger that the biomedical monopoly over health care be replaced by an even more pervasive pharmaceutical merchandising is a clear and present one.
Apomediation and Medicine 2.0 have to proceed in close association with a big dose of vigilance. Vigilance to prevent astroturfing in online communities. Vigilance to be aware of drug-pushing. Vigilance to avoid that bridging the digital divide (the age, sex and socio-economic status gap in accessing online information) doesn’t result in creating a new « eHealth divide » between those who have access to quality online information about health care – and those who are prey of Big Pharma disinformation.
Doctoring Fukushima: from nuclear catastrophe to natural bodily function
In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident, an interesting video has been circulating. Disguised as an educational animation targeting children, it is actually an anonymous pro-nuclear propaganda feature based on a tweet by media artist Kazuhiko Hachiya. Nuclear Boy (a character representing Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant) has a bad case of stomach-ache. A series of defecation-based incidents ensue. Doctors take turn to ease his condition and hopefully they will help him avoid ‘Tchernobyl diarrea scenario’.
Scatological humor aside, what is interesting here is the concurring efforts to medicalize and to naturalize a nuclear disaster. If the explosion of a reactor is comparable to defecation, it becomes a natural bodily function. It is thus inscribed in the normal course of events. It is even vital that Nuclear Boy ‘passes some gas’ at some point. In this case, like in others I’ve been discussing in this blog, the negative effects of human-made technologies are normalized by inscribing them into a medical discourse about the body. As far as medical knowledge is summoned up to provide scientific backing to the claim that ‘everything is for the best’, the entire event becomes a moralizing hygiene lesson comparable to those that early 20th institutions used to deliver to the masses.
What is medicine all about? Staring at screens
Recently, the New York Times’s blog dealing with health and medicine, Well, featured an interesting piece on Desktop medicine. The author Pauline W. Chen, M.D., maintains that medical profession has been profoundly changed by the advent of desktop computers. In the past, doctoring was all about « sitting at patients’ bedside ». Today, it’s basically about staring at a screen. The article is quick to point out that this reflection is not exempt from a certain nostalgic idealization of the past.
I would add that saying that « we have gone from bedside medicine to desktop medicine » as a bit of an ideological dimension to it, too – as far as it relies on a technodeterministic meta-narrative (« computer-mediated communication is superseding face-to-face social interaction », « machine automation replace human labour », « robots will rule the world », and so on). Read more
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What’s this blog about?
I'm an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS, Paris). Bodyspacesociety offers regular updates about my ongoing research, publications, and teaching. If you want updates on media features and conferences, please click here.
The views presented on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the positions of my institutions of affiliation.
New books out now!
The special issue of the journal 'Communications' Cultures du numérique is out. Also, you might want to check my latest book Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Both published by Editions du Seuil, both available in bookshops and online.
» Buy Liaisons numériques
» Visit the companion website
» Buy Cultures du numérique (Communications, n. 88)
All blog content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License.
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