A talk on habitele at University of California Irvine

 

An opportunity to discuss the habitele theory framework in the US:
Dominique Boullier will give a talk at University of California Irvine
“From Personal Data Ecosystems and Mobile Phones to Habitele: anthropological theory of wearable digital identities”
A talk by Dominque Boullier
Talk: Friday, May 18, 3:00-4:30 pm, in Donald Bren Hall room 5011

Good attendance and remarkable questions, from which I select these two:
1/ isn't habitele still too much focused on Ego ? This is true when we start to explain it in order ot challenged the doxa in that area of identities. However, the method try to obtain tat from relational activity, including the outside influence. This means that Ego is defined by a major feature which invades Ego and incorpotes it in the sphere of this attribute (e.g. being a member of a tennis club means that when a call arrives from this social workl Ego is summed up as this affiliation and attracted by the influence of "tennis club" (the agency here is tennis club). But we mus be cautious in not developing a new vision of an extended ego when analyzing habitele.
2/ why ot study only the social life of data  and stop trying to connect it to individuals? It could be an approach  very legitimate, and relevant, the one we do at the médialab, studying the topology of the web. However, our goal in the habitele theory is precisely to say at the crossroad between a connected being defined by its personal data ecosystem (and this may become a pure computer sciences issue) and a connected being who still has a body (and a device that is always carried close to it). This is why habitele is both about the technical architecture which is built and the body that inhabits it. It may seem a contradiction, it is only the experiential field of any process of inhabiting.
3/ are the social worlds divided in 5 areas not too restrictive and/or too much affecting the research strategy? They are just here to remind us of a pluralist definition of affiliation, of the various social worlds. We shall let users categorize by themselves, but in order to present them with a general pattern of their own behaviour, we need to aggregate the veru diverse affiliations observed. The preestablished categories must stand for very provisory definitions, to be challenged. Some new one were proposed by Irvine colleagues, quite relevant ones!