Computable Bodies: Instrumented Life and the Human Somatic Niche

Description

Data. Suddenly it is everywhere, and more and more of it is about us. The computing revolution has transformed our understanding of nature. Now it is transforming human behaviour. For some, pervasive computing offers a powerful vehicle of introspection and self-improvement. For others it signals the arrival of a dangerous 'control society' in which surveillance is no longer the prerogative of discrete institutions but a simple fact of life. In Computable Bodies, anthropologist Josh Berson asks how the data revolution is changing what it means to be human. Drawing on fieldwork in the Quantified Self and polyphasic sleeping communities and integrating perspectives from interaction design, the history and philosophy of science, and medical and linguistic anthropology, he probes a world where everyday life is mediated by a proliferating array of sensor montages, where we adjust our social signals to make them legible to algorithms, and where old rubrics for gauging which features of the world are animate no longer hold. Computable Bodies offers a vision of an anthropology for an age in which our capacity to generate data and share it over great distances is reconfiguring the body–world interface in ways scarcely imaginable a generation ago. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface: Registers Instrumentation Registers Experience Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Bodies Boundaries Configurationality Dynamism What is a dyad? Creatures of movement Chapter 2 Rhythms Frameworks Rhythm Rhythmic gating Walking and exploring We are not REPLs Chapter 3 Modalities Putting a face to the raster What is Data? What are data? Why is it so difficult to say what Data is? Why did we start with sensory substitution devices? What does sensory substitution feel like? Surveillance ecosystems Smart everything? Chapter 4 Data Cultures of data Human displacement Mobile behavior tracking Sentiment analysis Actigraphy: From subjects to users Chapter 5 Niches Niche construction Impedance Why put niche construction at the center? Six faculties of interface-making Big changes Chapter 6 Clocks Sleep. Dreaming. Trance Sleep needs Freerunning Catching the beat From chronotherapeutics to chronoactivism Delamination Trance. Splitting Chapter 7 Faces Persona Frontality Perianthropometric Face recognition The frontal niche Thin slices The big We Chapter 8 Plenum Reduction Gamification The animate Postscript: Precarity L’s question Notes Postscript: Precarity Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 References Index