Paper long abstract:

In 2005 three videos on promoting Ambient Assisted Living were published by an international network for age care services. Seven years later the same institution published a new, "updated" corpus of promotional videos on the same matter. These two video-corpora allow a comparative investigation on how knowledge/technological orders and social orders are co-produced in making the future of Ambient Assisted Living in these videos. I explored in a case study how making the future in videos can be understood as a site of co-production, where relations between different (human and non-human) actors become established and fixated. The videos themselves can be seen as "scripted scripts", organized strategically to mobilize and situate actors accordingly. The structure, make-up and narrative of the videos are dedicated to establish a future-vision of aging and eldercare in context of innovation-technologies. Investigating these aspects allows shedding light on how actor-relations are imagined in order to realize the promoted technologies. Definitions of concepts - such as health, normalcy, well-being and aging - and of actor's identities are co-produced in making the future of AAL in these videos. Tracing back these "virtual act(ion)s of definition" then allows to situate the communities the video's authors realized in the videos. Choosing a comparative approach of analysis further allows understanding how practices of co-production in making the future of AAL change, facing progress in development.