Banca de DEFESA: ELIAS CUNHA BITENCOURT

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
DISCENTE : ELIAS CUNHA BITENCOURT
DATA : 30/04/2019
HORA: 14:00
LOCAL: FACULDADE DE COMUNICAÇÃO - UFBA
TÍTULO:

SMARTBODIES. BODY, WEARABLE TECHNOLOGIES AND ALGORITHMIC PEFORMATIVITY

An exploratory study on the heuristic modes of being a body on Fitbit platform

PALAVRAS-CHAVES:
PÁGINAS: 250
GRANDE ÁREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
ÁREA: Comunicação
SUBÁREA: Teoria da Comunicação
RESUMO:

This thesis explores the relationship between body and wearable technologies, searching into the agencies that emerge from these associations and that produce the datafication experiences of physical activities. Fitbit was chosen as an empirical object because it ranks among the top three companies in the global wearables market. The main themes of 221,388 thousand (47.4% of the 466,758 thousand) discussion threads available in the social network of the brand, were analyzed. From this universe were also extracted 542 testimonies regarding body monitoring experiences of 288 users. In addition, the two most popular Fitbit products were examined – Charge HR in 2015 and Charge 2 in 2016-2017 –; as well as patent documents, privacy terms, press releases, financial reports and advertising content available on the platform website. The procedures adopted involved digital data capture tools (web crawlers) and content-focused analysis protocols in Atlas.ti software. Supported by the principles of the Actor-network theory and on the new materialism approaches, our perspective defines body and smart things not in terms of what they are but in terms of the actions they both do together under the algorithmic mediation. By the exploration of Fitbits ’computational procedures and the user monitoring practices identified we propose that the wearable devices establish body connections that are particularized by three central characteristics: the algorithmically performative aspect of relation; the machine learning capacity and mimicry of the actions produced during interactions; and the experimental and heuristically controlled nature of the experiences of use. Our thesis is that these particular ways in which these associations act create the conditions for bodies and smart things to be built trough processes of mutual learning, also producing what we propose to call Smartbodies: a (bio)infocomunicational instauration that are carried out by the body’s sensitization to the digital methods of capturing, analyzing and visualizing data implemented by wearable computing. The Smartbody represents two important practical consequences of the relationship between digital technology and the body nowadays. The first one concerns the translation of bodily acquisition experiences into digitally traceable events. The second one refers to the bodily instaurations that emerges when bodies begin to learn to be affected by the algorithmic methods and then start to interact with the world through computationally modeled repertoires. Faced with the increasingly diluted presence of these smart technologies in everyday life, it is expected that the investigative approaches adopted in this work may provide a theoretical-methodological instrument for future analysis of other communication phenomena in digital culture.

MEMBROS DA BANCA:
Presidente - 1218133 - ANDRE LUIZ MARTINS LEMOS
Interno - 1675144 - JOSE CARLOS SANTOS RIBEIRO
Externo ao Programa - 1432121 - LEONARDO FERNANDES NASCIMENTO
Externo à Instituição - CARLOS FREDERICO DE BRITO D'ANDREA - UFMG
Externo à Instituição - ANDRÉ DE FARIA PEREIRA NET - UERJ