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.
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
E-Santé : Résistance, autonomie et environnements apomédiés
La quatrième séance de mon séminaire EHESS Corps et TIC : approches socio-anthropologiques des usages numériques a eu lieu le jeudi 27 janv. 2011. Le sujet traité : e-santé, médecine 2.0, le rôle des professionnels de santé, des collectifs de militants des droits des patients et des pouvoirs étatiques. Voici, comme d’habitude, les slides.
ATTENTION CHANGEMENT DE DATE : La prochaine séance (où il sera question de corps dans les médias sociaux) aura exceptionnellement lieu le VENDREDI 11 février 2011 de 17h à 19h en SALLE 2, EHESS, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris. Pour s’inscrire, il suffit de m’envoyer un petit mail gentil.
E sante – Résistance, autonomie et environnements apomédiés
Les Avatars : surpuissance, régénération et devenir technologique du corps en ligne
La troisième séance de mon séminaire EHESS Corps et TIC : approches socio-anthropologiques des usages numériques a eu lieu le jeudi 13 janv. 2011. Le sujet traité : la figure de l’avatar, son rôle dans la culture numérique, ses liens étroits avec, d’un côté, les expériences vidéoludiques, de l’autre les applications biomédicales. Voilà les slides et une bibliographie des textes cités.
La prochaine séance (où il sera question d’e-Santé) aura lieu le jeudi 27 janvier 2011 de 17h à 19h en salle 5, EHESS, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris. Pour s’inscrire, il suffit de m’envoyer un petit mail gentil.
Virus, viralité, visceralité – Logiques culturelles et processus sociaux en réseau
Voilà la présentation contenant les notes de la première séance de mon séminaire EHESS Corps et TIC : approches socio-anthropologiques des usages numériques : rôle et place de la notion de virus dans la culture du numérique.
La prochaine séance (où il sera question de cyborgs et d’hacktivisme) aura lieu le jeudi 9 décembre de 17h à 19h en salle 5, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris. Pour s’inscrire, il suffit de m’envoyer un petit mail gentil.
Growing health divide: what’s so fun about these stats again?
Take health and income data from 200 countries over 200 years. Stir up. Add Hans Rosling‘s distinctive delivery style and a little CGI magic and you have a compelling representation of… the growing health divide between richer countries and the developing world. Sure, from the early 19th century to nowadays, life expectancy has been rising everywhere. But income differentials are now abysmal and the health inequalities are unprecedented. So, ok, this is great television, and this BBC show is all about ‘The Joy of Stats’ and a happy-go-lucky approach to life but, how can we be so positive about « a clear trend in the future [where] it is fully possible that everyone can make it to healthy, wealthy corner »?
Séminaire EHESS « Corps et technologies des l’information et de la communication »
Première séance du séminaire EHESS
Corps et technologies des l’information et de la communication
Approches socio-anthropologiques des usages numériques
animé par Antonio Casilli sociologue au Centre Edgar-Morin (IIAC EHESS/CNRS) et chercheur associé à l’Institut Télécom (équipe de recherche ETOS, TEM).
Date : jeudi 25 novembre 2010
Horaire : de 17h à 19h
Lieu : salle 5, EHESS, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris
L’essor des usages informatiques de masse a coïncidé avec le télescopage de deux plans – l’un physique, l’autre informationnel – de l’expérience humaine. Tout en s’inscrivant dans une continuité entre les objets techniques et la corporéité même de l’usager, les TIC véhiculent des représentations sociales qui semblent mettre entre parenthèse la sensualité et la matérialité des corps. Cet enseignement a pour objet une exploration synchronique et diachronique des pratiques et des recherches portant sur le corps dans les contextes d’interaction assistée par ordinateur. Il s’agira de tenter d’éclairer les logiques sous-tendant les différentes dimensions de ces technologies (de la e-santé à la construction d’avatars dans les jeux vidéo, de la mise en scène de soi dans les réseaux sociaux aux hybridations « cyborg » d’organismes et de machines) aussi bien que de s’intéresser aux contextes institutionnels et aux régimes de production des savoirs qui conditionnent ces faits sociaux.
Programme
Les séances à venir auront lieu les 2e et 4e jeudis du mois (17h, salle 5, sauf la séance du 10 février, reportée au 11 février, même heure, salle 2). Le séminaire est ouvert aux auditeurs libres – étudiants qui désirent simplement participer aux séminaires de l’EHESS, sans y être inscrits officiellement.
* 25 novembre 2010 (17h, salle 5) : Virus
* 9 décembre 2010 (17h, salle 5) : Cyborg
* 13 janvier 2011 (17h, salle 5) : Avatar
* 27 janvier 2011 (17h, salle 5) : eSanté
* 11 février 2011 (17h, salle 2) : Réseaux
* 24 février 2011 (17h, salle 5) : Jouissance
Liens utiles
Page web EHESS : http://www.ehess.fr/fr/enseignement/enseignements/2010/ue/124/
Page Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167047909985177
Page Calenda : http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle18070.html
Are social media deepening nutritional inequalities?
CNN’s food blog Eatocracy has joined forces with the popular location-based social networking service Foursquare to launch a new healthy eating campaign. The concept is very simple: people are encouraged to check in local farmers markets to unlock special ‘Healthy Eater’ badges. The mix of emulation and status anxiety motivating most Foursquare users should expose them to nutritionally correct environments. It should also provide CNN journalists with something to talk about (I was gonna say ‘something to sink their teeth into’) for a week-long series dedicated to tomatoes and jovial shopkeepers.
If you detect a little sarcasm in my prose, it is not because of the unlabored definition of health that such intiative seems to promote. CNN might be perpetuating the stereotype that ‘healthy’ equates to ‘fruit and vegetables’. But, as far as social media are concerned, this is as good as it gets when it comes to health information campaigns.
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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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