Marie Poux-Berthe
Last Name
Poux-Berthe
First name
Marie
5 results
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
- Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Ageing, loss and AI: the ethics of deadbots from the perspective of older adults(2024-10-05)This paper proposes to bring older adults' perspectives and experiences of loss to critically reflect on the role that the deadbot, and digital and AI technologies more broadly, can play in coping with loss today. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the digitisation of death-related practices in recent decades, from the democratisation of grief and mourning practices enabled by social networking sites to the rise of a digital afterlife industry. In both academic and media debates, the digital innovation of the deadbot - also referred to as thanabot or ghostbot - has raised fascinating ethical questions about mourning processes or postmortem privacy. In the context of an ethnographically informed research on how older adults' perspectives and experiences with technology can redefine the relationship between ageing and technology in France, this paper aims at presenting how discussing the deadbot with older adults interrogates contemporary relationships with the dead. With theoretical support from Despret's (2017) work, it analyses how older adults' experiences of loss rehabilitate other modes of existence for the dead, as well as creative, subtle and non-technological ways of relating to the dead for the bereaved. This paper contributes both to debates about digital death, by contextualising the deadbot through a critical and non-sensationalist approach, and to conversations about ageing and technology, by valuing older adults' subjective views of AI.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Negotiating alternative AI futures: a critical engagement with European civil society organizations, tech entrepreneurs and journalists(2024-09-26); ; ; With the popular diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in our society pushed by the rise of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, the critical debate around AI has exited expert and technical circles. The existing debate on AI is often hyped and polarized and characterized by either catastrophic or utopian points of view, which are directly overshadowing the discussion of the social disorder emerging from the concrete harms for which AI systems are already responsible (Barassi et al., 2022). Currently, most of the debate around AI is thus driven by the discussion of "existential threats" which are mostly speculative in nature, and not by a coming to terms with already documented and visible issues, such as discrimination, biases, or data (in)justice perpetuated or amplified by prone-to-errors algorithmic systems (Ryan-Mosley, 2023). With the aim of writing an "history of the present" (Aradau and Blanke, 2021) of the social construction of AI in this crucial moment, in this paper, we thus investigated how three crucial social groups are coming to terms with the fallacies of AI systems and how AI "errors" could also serve as starting point for negotiating our possible futures with AI systems (Barassi, forthcoming). Through 105 in-depth interviews with civil society representatives, tech entrepreneurs and journalists based in Europe, this paper aims at 1) mapping the concerns of three of the most engaged groups involved in the debates around AI. Additionally, through the analysis of their views and discussions of the various "errors" of AI, the paper also wants to 2) contribute to the analysis of how the critical responses to AI harms are being currently expressed and negotiated by different critical societal actors. At the same time, the paper also discusses 3) alternative AI futures, where expert views and takes on the technology are addressed towards the building of alternative future scenarios, where both dystopian and techno-fetishist views get challenged in their most evident weaknesses and rhetorical shortcomings. Overall, the paper reacts to hegemonic and normative takes on AI and its futures, looking beyond the utopia/dystopia juxtaposition, which is usually presented as ineluctable by different stakeholders (Bory, 2019). The results presented in this paper emerge from "The Human Error Project", a multidisciplinary research project launched in 2020 with the goal of studying how different social actors are making sense of AI systems through an analysis of where the debates around the errors of these systems are driving our collective and societal construction of AI. Blending anthropology and media studies approaches and methodology, "The Human Error Project" and this paper position themselves among the growing literature and research field of critical data and AI studies.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Ageist technologies, ageist societies? Understanding the discourse about old age and digital technologies in FranceThis paper explores the representation of older people and their relationship with digital technologies in French mainstream media and professional debates during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Among other societal issues that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed in recent years, the place of and the issue of care for older people has received significant attention from politicians, civil society organizations and professionals from the healthcare sector. The mainstream media played a significant role in highlighting the issue and French people have increasingly relied on them to inform themselves. The nature of the problem at hand is twofold. On the one hand, academics demonstrated how the pandemic has revealed the underlying ageism operating in industrial countries (Ayalon, 2020). Others alerted us to how it fostered the harmful ideology of techno-solutionism (Milan, 2020). However, only a few have attempted to examine these issues together (Gallistl et al., 2021).Moreover, the issue at stake goes beyond the pandemic. The population’s ageing has been framed as causing multiple problems on the political, economic and social level. Digital technologies are increasingly promoted as solutions to any type of ‘problems’ (Morozov, 2014). Yet, suggesting a digital answer to the societal challenge caused by the demographic transition is reductive and harmful for older people as well as their younger counterparts. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theoretical work on the representation of ‘the Other’, this paper is situated at the intersection of Critical Age Studies (Hazan, 1994; Katz, 1996) and Science and Technology Studies (Turkle, 2011). It builds on the combined analysis of 200 French mainstream media articles related to the subject of old age and ageing and a digital ethnography of five events which took place in 2021 and 2022. The selected events gathered stakeholders with a political, economic or technological perspective on the subject of old age and ageing with a national or European dimension. Based on the analysis of this data, the paper argues that the French discourse about older people and digital technologies contribute to both ageist representations of old age and fallacious expectations towards technologies.Type:conference speech - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Old age and death in the French news media: from representation to existential limit situations(2025-04-05)Ageism has been identified as a global phenomenon in need of further acknowledgment and critical reflections by both scholars and practitioners (Ayalon, 2020; Ehni & Wahl, 2020; Hopf et al., 2021; World Health Organization, 2021). In the many shades in which ageism is expressed, stereotypes contribute to regimes of representation that essentialize older adults and reduce them to others (Hall, 1997; van Dyk, 2016). One of the prominent ageist stereotypes regards the conflation of old age with death (Gilleard & Higgs, 2013; Hazan, 1994; World Health Organization, 2021). This paper is an invitation for aging and/or media and communication scholars to rethink the death and old age stereotype to go beyond discussions of ageist representations. To this end, I suggest to (re)consider old age and death as limit situations as understood in Existential Media studies (Ess, 2020; Lagerkvist, 2022; Scannell, 2014). Building on Jaspers existential philosophical work, the media scholar Lagerkvist (2022) defines a limit situation as “encounters with death, crisis, guilt, and conflict (…) moments in life that may be transformative if we seize them as we face the limits of what we can control” (Lagerkvist, 2022, p.3). This paper is rooted in the findings of a two-year long ethnographic work, which included a critical discourse analysis of mainstream news media portrayal of aging in France. As I disentangle competing news media narratives about aging and death, I show that approaching the stereotypical association of old age with death as a limit situation has the power of both unveiling the “social arrangements which we impose upon the aged members of our society” that hide behind a stereotype (Hazan, 1994, p.32) and opening an anti-ageist, troubling, fruitful existential understanding of aging.Type:conference speech - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Going beyond ageism? Intergenerational media and technological projects as alternative modes of encounters(2023)This paper explores how intergenerational media projects, in France, can be analyzed as alternative modes of encounters between generations, media and society. In other words, it asks how specific media or technological assemblages can allow and affect encounters between generations. It aims at exploring how we can re-think intergenerational relations drawing on feminist STS, age studies and media studies (Haraway, 1988; Ahmed, 2002; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Being critical about how ageing and digital technologies can relate is fundamental. In this regard, scholars have addressed the risks posed by assuming a straightforward and solutionist relation between the needs of older adults and tech products and services (Gallist et al, 2021; Lipp and Maasen, 2022). Others have alerted on how ageist representations of older adults remain prominent in the imaginaries of developers designing new technologies for older adults and how they can be re-enacted through these products (Oudshoorn et al., 2016). However, it is equally important to examine alternative and careful ways in which ageing and technology can relate (Peine et al., 2021). This understanding is informed by feminist epistemological works which pose how doing careful research asks to address the invisible entanglements constitutive of a matter of care but also to reflect on its possible multiple futures. This paper thus presents the analysis of eight intergenerational media and technological projects identified along a two-year digital ethnography on ageing and technology in France. I ask to what extent entrepreneurs’ varied initiatives to foster a dialogue with older adults can be understood as an attempt to ‘inhabit the distance between’ generations and how their media and technological choices are constitutive of such endeavor. This paper contributes to a feminist theoretical exploration on ageing and technologies. It aims at promoting research that generates care for intergenerational relations through nuanced critique.Type:conference speech