Collection
Digital bodies: Pleasure, pain, and society
This topical collection aims to study the effects of new digital technologies on pain, pleasure, and society by focussing on the interactions between bodily sensations and new digital systems. We live in a world where digital technologies constantly mediate our actions. Many of these technologies focus on the body and the bodily sensations of people by interacting and tracking them. Moreover, digital technologies can detect or predict bodily sensations such as pain and pleasure and are designed to monitor and act according to what people feel. These new devices need to be addressed from a multidisciplinary perspective to analyze their different effects on society. This topical collection questions how technology, including emerging applications, shapes the way we live our bodily sensations. It studies the way these technologies affect the meaning of our experiences and their value. Going further, it aims to examine the impact of technology on our bodies besides the simple fact of detecting, analyzing, and quantifying their expressions. Can we, for example, imagine digital technologies capable of interacting with bodily sensations? Can we design technologies that make pleasure and pain a shared experience within a social group? Can new technological designs enable new ways of sharing pain and pleasure? This topical collection also seeks to interrogate critical ethical issues. If body sensations are externalized and exposed to others through information technology, one must ask questions that are now classic in information technology ethics, such as privacy, autonomy, and trustworthiness. Moreover, we still have to ask new questions, for example, about possible forms of epistemic injustice where a machine is trusted but not people when they talk about their state of pain, and about the fact that distributed body sensations of pleasure could have an impact on the very concepts of love, friendship, and sharing. This topical collection is particularly interested in articles concerned with the ontological status of pleasure and pain and the ethical, social, and political questions concerning the use of digital technologies in relation to pleasure and pain.
Editors
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Nicola Liberati
Nicola Liberatifocusses on pleasure and digital technologies. He studies the effects of emerging digital technologies on intimacy and emotionsHe holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and he is an Associate Profes sor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Before moving to China, he worked in Japan (JSPS) and in the Netherlands with Prof. Verbeek. In 2016, he was elected Co-chair of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, and he won international prizes like the MASH’D Full Paper Award at the world-leading conference on AR ISMAR2015.
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Stéphanie Gauttier
Dr Stéphanie Gauttier's research focuses on the adoption of emerging technologies, their relation to the body and wellbeing. She is the "Information Systems for Society" Research Team Leader and an Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management. Stéphanie has led funded projects on measuring stress at work with wearables on reducing pain and fatigue at work She has also co-created a platform on sensory augmentation (Re:making sense). Stéphanie has published about 20 journal and conference papers; and book chapters.
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Alberto Romele
Alberto Romele He is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication and Media, Sorbonne Nouvelle University (IRMECCEN Lab). Previously, he has been researcher and professor in several European institutions. His research focuses on digital hermeneutics and the critique of the imaginaries concerning Artificial Intelligence and other emerging and disruptive technologies. Alberto is the author of the monograph Digital Hermeneutics (Routledge 2020).
