Privacy on Facebook

Interesting to watch this dynamic display of the privacy features on Facebook. Open Privacy for all? Did YOU decide that?

Project Habitele selected by ANR

The "Habitele" project has been selected by the French National Research Agency ANR (call "sociétés innovantes") and will be funded starting January 2012. Great news! More details to follow!

Survey "our mobile planet"

A new survey (our mobile planet) by Ipsos, Google and MMA (mobile marketing association) on mobile uses. Data are available but what for if you do not have a theoretical framework to understand the process at stake? But let's use what we can in that survey!

How the personalization effort made by Google and by Facebook may place them as the gatekeepers of our preferences and of our social worlds, without giving us any grip on it. Watch this TED conference. How an habitele theory can help keep in mind the importance of the social worlds diversity which we are connected to and the importance of staying in control of our shifting and commuting power (open to other bubbles and not enclosed in our small bubble)

A paper in french that sums up habitele theoretical framework

Dominique Boullier, "Habitèle virtuelle", Revue Urbanisme, n°376, janv-fév 2011

A survey about smartphones uses in the US by Ipsos and Yahoo

This survey (N=2500) gives very interesting results about the on-going momentum of smartphones uses and proposes 7 modes of usage: connect, search, entertain, manage, inform, shop, navigate (rather traditional and not very helpful, but...!). One relevant expression for habitele (already found in our field study " I just felt naked in a weird sort of way".

To all partners of the ANR project Habitele
Contrary to what was expected, the decision for the ANR call "sociétés innovantes" is due only by the end of October!! We must wait (and pray? ) ....

Mc Luhan, once again, had the most striking and accurate vision of the future of identity . See short quotations on the site Marshall Mc Luhan speaks (and this one on privacy)

Bagcheck and habitele

A website dedicated to the description of your bags content, which means in fact the products you love or you use. Bagcheck

If you check the web site, you will discover that it seems to work like a social community but that it is in reality a good opportunity for brands to check their product use and likes, and to recommend their own products. Good idea turned in a plain commercial stuff, too bad... But the app and the content may provide insights for habitele.
Thanks to Maxime Crepel for the info

Mobile Life : data and visualisation tools

Here is a TNS web site displaying in a very fancy mode the results of an international survey by TNS on mobile uses, including the various apps use and the time of the day, allowing to compare countries uses profiles (another part is dedicated to the purchase behaviour). Very useful for habitele. Let's be as clever as TNS at designing data visualisation interfaces for habitele!!

Zokem: the mobile tracker we were looking for!

Unbelievable!! Zokem! Look at this new set of applications that can be used to track the behaviour of users on their smartphones: exactly what we planned to do in our project Habitele. This powerful tool must be part of our protocol
Here is an impressive slideshare about a study Zokem conducted in Finland using their tracker.

Habitele and its domains

Habitele acts as a new envelop, where all our affiliations may become assembled (this has to be tested empirically) on a set of devices that we carry on our body. But the various kinds of affiliations must be accounted for, all the social spheres in which some personal identities are used and exchanged. Five domains of affiliations were designed in order to gather the ressources and devices in a more simple profile. Note that another component of habitele is not displayed here and will not be tested in the project, for feasability limits: the social sphere of tastes, the one that is displayed when we carry OUR music and OUR books.

The Habitele project workplan

The project was delivered to ANR (French National Research Agency) call for proposals 'Sociétés innovantes" for the end of May. Here is the workplan chart

Mydata inititiative

Another interesting report presenting the "mydata" initiative from the British goverment, aiming at creating business with personal data, however while empowering the users at the same time, through control of their personal data. This is a major shift from the prevention and besieged vision of other governments, supposedly acting for our own good ;-)

Habitele and personal data ecosystem

Some close relationships between the concept of habitele and the one of "Personal Data Ecosystem" that is emerging now, are quite obvious. And especially when it uses ecosystem which means that we are inside this world of data. We shall discuss the differences later on but the report of the World Economic Forum published in January 2001
is very relevant for the research on habitele.

habitele vs habit habitat habitacle

Habitele research project

Habitèle. Wearable digital identities

Goals of the project: a new theory for digital identities when they become wearable

· Academic: demonstrate the validity of an anthropological framework (habitèle theory) for understanding the major role of the mobile phone as a new skin/envelop (after habit, habitat and habitacle), that allows shifts from one identity or affiliation to another. Conduct a international survey to check the validity of the model and to explain differences.

· Operational: reinvent the problem of/ solution to digital identities as elements of what we wear (bags and wallets) -including credit cards, keys, money, IDs, notebooks, social networks profiles- and find new ways for equipping these activities and offering new solutions to the privacy debate.

Context and justification : the mobile phone aggregates all the functions, tools and identities that we were used to wearing in our bags and wallets

· People used to control their personal world through devices that they always want to keep close to their body (keys, credit card, money, IDs and so on). Now the mobile phone is aggregating all these traces of affiliations to various worlds and making the shift between these worlds very fluid. The mobile phone becomes the device for the habitèle, that was contained in our bags and wallets and it adds all the identities we create on the web and on social networks platforms. The device could easily be replaced by data and applications in the cloud provided that it keeps some close coupling with the body: the portability is a key feature

The new theoretical framework of habitele is derived from many years of observations and analysis (Latour, Gagnepain, Sloterdijk theories) but must now be validated by a large survey using digital methods in order to imagine a new understanding for the digital identities proliferation and the legal/ethical controversy.

· The Flickr group “what’s in your bag” has now more than 19000 members who post comments about each piece of contents in their bags. Bags are a precious equipment that people like to talk about, as well as about their behaviour on social networks.

Theoretical stakes

· The mobile phone does not have a theory of its own because it is not thought of as an envelop. Social sciences should have done this for the car, 100 years ago, which transformed the city, the climate, and mobility too. The mobile phone is not a question of what is said, who talks to whom, but of being connected and aware of it, creating the “possibility for a call”, and at the same time offering the opportunity to shift from one social world to another in just one second. Living permanently on an “alert” state of mind and “commuting” so easily change the conditions of socialization. “The medium is the message” when more than half of humanity is connected since 2007, using almost the same device. Mc Luhanian and ANT frameworks will be the main references.

· The habitèle theory includes a large part of legal discussion about property, trying to reuse medieval modes of property (dominium) that have been destroyed in favour of the unique “exclusive property” regime (supposedly)., which created all the problems we are now facing. As strange as it may appear, the user is not the “owner” of his personal data, they constitute his personal envelop, his new skin, his dominium that can be penetrated and used respecting some conditions, since these data are formatted by some institution or company (the state for the ID, the telcos for phone number and access, the social network platform for the profile, the national bank for the money, etc..). The political and ethical discussions on privacy might be reframed using the habitele analysis.

Survey methods

The survey will be made of:

· the analysis of tags on bags contents (Flickr database, 19000 photos + various sub groups),

· community management on a website dedicated to this topic and created for the purpose of this survey (analysing comments and co-producing the research)

· International state of the art and figures in 8 countries: about the uses of mobile phones, credit cards, IDs and social networks profiles,

· In-depth interviews of 100 persons in 7 countries (USA, Canada, Brazil, Tunisia, Nigeria, India, Korea, England) and 500 interviews in France. Including a method based on going through one’s wallets and bags

· Observations of 5 specific experiments and uses of mobile phone (or other portable devices) in each country (e.g. micro-payments)

Technologies required

Development of an API or equivalent on Flickr

Development of a social network web site on the topic and datamining tools to monitor the conversation (available at the medialab)

Quantitative and textual analysis tools for the survey (on the shelf, integration needed)

Contacts

Dominique Boullier, professor of sociology at Sciences Po, scientific coordinator of the médialab.

dominique.boullier@sciences-po.fr

http://sites.google.com/site/dominiqueboullier/

Blog habitèle: http://habitele.blogspot.com/

Habitele main schema

References

References related to habitele

BOULLIER, Dominique.- L’urbanité numérique. Essai sur la troisième ville en 2100, Paris : L’Harmattan, 1999.

BOULLIER, Dominique.- “Le Web immersif”, Quaderni, n°66, Printemps 2008.

BOULLIER, Dominique, P. JOLLIVET et F. AUDREN.- « Security : always too much and never enough. Anthropology of a non-starter market”, Annales des télécommunications, vol.62, n°11-12 Novembre 2007

BOULLIER, Dominique.- « Portables en tous genres et prises sur le monde », Consommation et société, n°4, 2004. http://www.consommations-societes.net/

BOULLIER, Dominique.- « Objets communicants, avez vous donc une âme ? Enjeux anthropologiques », Les Cahiers du Numérique, n° 3, vol.4, 2002.

BOULLIER, Dominique.- “Habitèle virtuelle: une nouvelle enveloppe pour commuter, notre téléphone portable », Revue Urbanisme, n° 376, Janv- fév 2011, pp 42-44.

BOULLIER Dominique.- « A urbanidade das redes digitais » in Maria Alexandra Cunha, Klaus Frey e Fábio Duarte (eds), Governança local e as tecnologias de informação e comunicação, Curitiba (Brasil), 2007.

theory of habitele

The theory of habitele has been presented at Chicago during an NSF workshop where I was invited by Geof Bowker
Boullier, D. (2011).- “Habitele: Wearable Digital Identities”, NSF workshop, New Configurations of the Virtual and the Material, Chicago, March 19-20

La théorie de l'habitèle a été résumée dans un article de la revue Urbanisme du mois de Janvier 2011
BOULLIER, Dominique.- “Habitèle virtuelle: une nouvelle enveloppe pour commuter, notre téléphone portable », Revue Urbanisme, n° 376, Janv- fév 2011, pp 42-44.