Juxtaposition

Not Jeans.....Anthropology!!

What is the relationship between these 2 artefacts?

One is what I was playing with today and piloting. It is a Wi Fi enabled data acquisition handheld device. It can read smart cards and also barcodes and is programmable.

The other is a book! It is a book by Claude Levi -Strauss - an eminent French anthropologist, ethnographer (debateable?) and structuralist (philosopher). He died at the grand old age of 101 ..

I now need to link the two. One is used for monitoring and control and can rapidly capture large amounts of personal details, store this anywhere in the world and the information can be retrieved for use for any number of purposes. We try to make the data secure and protected however. The book is used for reading and learning about humans, culture and ultimately our autonomy or freedom. The original ideas were based on ethnographic studies of Indian tribes in the Amazonian rain forests. This then later evolved into studies of improvisation with tools at hand (bricolage).

So - is the book the antidote to the machine?