Event overview
A talk by Professor Franck Cochoy, from the Centre d’Etude et de Recherche Travail Organisation Pouvoir (part of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique)
STS did a terrific job in exploring the sociology of technical devices, but in so doing they somewhat tended to neglect the properties of human subjects. I would like to bring a better symmetry in the analysis, in focusing on some market dynamics that bring devices and dispositions together. More precisely, I would like to focus on a particular disposition – curiosity – and the technologies market professionals developed as a means to seduce consumers. The idea is that better than any other disposition, curiosity helps to understand how market professionals and technologies, in playing on human subjects’ inner states, may reinvent their very identity and behavioral logic. I will show that from the Genesis to the curiosity cabinets of the 15th-18th centuries to the modern shop windows and the “teasing” strategies of today’s advertising, seducers and merchants have constantly built “curiosity devices”, that helped ordinary persons to become curious and/or consumers, to free themselves from previous action schemes such as routine and tradition, but also to behave along other action patterns than interest and calculation which we know better. The contemporary commercial game introduces a real market of consumer drives, where “Blue Beard’s curiosity” ends up facing a real “rainbow market” of competing dispositions.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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16 Mar 2011 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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