Dreams come true: Mediated socialities and memories

Since the publication of Haraway’s celebrated work on cyborgs, through the works of Latour and Akrich, among others, much has been said about the intersections betweeen bodies and technologies, about the limits of the human and the entrance in the ‘post-human’ and about the processes of embodiment/disembodiment of the Computer Mediated Communication.

This proposal aims to investigate the proccesses of embodiment and/or disembodiment both theoretically and empirically. We propose the term 're-embodiment' to approach the intersections of bodies and technologies in everyday life. Once thought like science-fiction products, many of the technologies that are available have been incorporated to the human forms of sociability through processes of re-appropriation and domestication that have been extremely fast. The fictional has become an everyday device. The machines that accompany us today shape human imaginaries now.

We aim to analyze the construction of socialities and memories departing from the possibilities favoured by Web 2.0 (and 3.0) and from an ethnographic (and autoethnographic) approach to the uses and conceptualization of technological devices. We will particularly centre in the case of mobile phones and their use in the construction of new forms of localized/deslocalized ‘social networks’ that are organized around the concepts of shared experience, exposition/exhibition of personal practices and around the construction of collective memories. We will discuss the connection of these CMC ‘social networks’ that have  ‘occupied’ the name of the sociologically well established (and defined) term with offline social networks. Both settings of human relation are part now of human socialities and have been incorporated to everyday life.

We will propose here that the actual bodies ‘attached’ to mobile phones that accompany us all the time can be labelled as technobodies as  many of the previously ‘human’ features (such as remembering) have been transferred to these devices.