Computable bodies : instrumented life and the human somatic niche / Josh Berson.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed July 23, 2015).

"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"-- Provided by publisher

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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 dataHuman 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

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide