::Who::

I am Yann Bona Beauvois. For blog purposes, let me introduce myself both as a Ph.D candidate at the Department of Social Psychology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in Spain and as a researcher at Fractalitats en Investigació Crítica (FIC-UAB).  On a broader sense, my research interests are focused  on technology, power and subjectivity.  Or stated again but differently, on the technological forms of life displayed by the particular assemblages between certain ICT’s and people messing with them.

I have a background in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Social Psychology and I am recently fascinated by the oeuvre of French philosopher Michel Serres which I found really inspiring as his first major work (Hermès series) is about communication and, as we can tell, it turned out that many of his earlier concepts such as the quasi-object, mediator, interference (parasite) or his idea of the collective have been reframed under newer approaches from Actor-Network Theory.

I have been an Assistant Professor at the UAB faculty of Psychology for “Social Communication Psychology” and a TA at the Univesritat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) for “Psychology of power and authoritarian relations”. Some of my publications and participations to congress-related events are listed here.

::What::

I have done previous research on a WiFi co-op located in Barcelona, xsf.coop.net, and now I am participating and highly impressed by people of guifi.net. One of the largest free WiFi networks of the world which started in the country-side of Catalonia, in Gurb, and now extends to cities like Barcelona compromising about 5.900 nodes which account (if we sum up the total linking distances) for 7.125 km!

This blog is a first attempt to organize some data, field-notes, events and uncategorized thoughts related to how people are able to manage urban infrastructures at a metropolitan level changing the ways traditional government and corporate business used to. Therefore, we are planning to give capsule-time posts that will highlight what arrangements are being made regarding WiFi and the production of space, regarding public controversies with wifi practices, wifi uses and non-uses, models of urban governance, models of WiFi management to try to argue for a Citizen Management of Technology which actually  is how I entitled my thesis

::Why?::

Why not?

In 2007 I presented a paper at the Mobile Media Conference in Sydney entitled “Wireless Communities as a sociotechnical infrastructure to inhabit: Becoming expert, becoming a node.” Thanks to this great conference, I met people like Kat Jungnickel which at the time held a blog at http://studioincite.com/makingwifi/. I found her blog really interesting and, when asked if I had one too, then I realised It would not be a bad idea to start posting. (although it took me a year and a half to materialise this idea into ASCII characters…). This is one point, but there is also a restless mind that felt it would be a great oportunity to mess / struggle around with css stylesheets and learn a little more about WordPress. Just like the desire for a blogging overture hoping that it will help for my research.

::Warning(s)::

1) This is not a popular blog nor I am trapped into a need for obtaining ever increasing visitor stats. I will use it, at least at this moment, as a tool for carrying out my thesis. Nevertheless, If you feel like, I am interested in any comment you may have to refine my aims

2) I am not an English native speaker (and writer). In deed, it is not even my second language, which is Spanish (being Catalan the first, and French the third). So I do apologize for any offenses to oxford-grammar-surveyors but I think it is important to state differences amongst English-written works/posts. Having said that, this is also why you will find posts in Catalan, Spanish, French and English or any mixture between them. About language purity, origins, corruptions or misspellings, I highly recommend taking a look at the work of artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

::Acknowledgments::

Thank you for reading. Thank you for not leaving without say hello

[ yannbona AT molekulab DOT net ]