My new book: Risk, 2nd edition

My latest book was published recently. It is the second, fully revised edition of  Risk, a volume I contributed to Routledge’s Key Ideas in Sociology series. The first edition appeared in 1999, so it was interesting to see how much had changed in the theoretical and empirical landscape of the sociology of risk in the ensuing years.

In the first edition of Risk, I identified three major theoretical perspectives on risk in social and cultural theory. The first approach draws upon the work of Mary Douglas to articulate the ‘cultural/symbolic’ perspective on risk. The second approach is that of the ‘risk society’ perspective, based on the writings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The third approach covered is that of the ‘governmentality’ perspective, which builds on Michel Foucault’s work.

No major theoretical perspectives have emerged since the first edition, but there have been some extensions of these established perspectives. The second edition adds discussion of new work by Beck and Giddens and governmentality writers in relation to the newly emerging threats of the twenty-first century, such as climate change, extreme weather events, terrorism and global financial crises. Beck’s recent writings on cosmopolitanism and world risk society are incorporated, as are those by Giddens on fundamentalism in relation to terrorism, and climate change politics.

New thoughts by governmentality scholars such as Mitchell Dean on precautionary risk are also covered. Precautionary risk is an approach that has recently emerged in neoliberal societies to deal with apparently incalculable and unpredictable risks. This strategy attempts to deal with great uncertainty about how to calculate and manage catastrophic risks, to govern the ungovernable threats of this new century that challenge neoliberalist ideals of progress, rational management and control.

As well as these theoretical directions, the book also includes discussion of many empirical research studies on risk published since the first edition, undertaken by researchers in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Scandinavia. One change in the second edition is that I place more of a focus on the notion of risk and suffering, an aspect that did not receive much attention in the first edition. Scholarly and policy representations of risk often tend not to acknowledge the emotional dimensions  of feeling threatened by risk: the anxiety, fear and despair that  may accompany such experiences.

The new edition also includes discussion of the writings of my colleague and co-author John Tulloch (see Tulloch and Lupton, 2003), who was a victim of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. John has written about his unique position as a well-known scholar of risk and as someone who became the ‘face of the London bombings’ in the news media. He found himself in the difficult position of being used by Tony Blair’s government to support its anti-terrorist legislation even though he trenchantly opposed it. As such, John was able to critique political attempts to contain and control risk and media conventions of portraying risk.

Cashing in on patients’ experiences: the commodification of patient support and opinion websites

English: The PatientsLikeMe Profile of Stephen Heywood, brother of the co-founders of the company, who was diagnosed with ALS when he was 29 years old. This profile describes his experience with the disease including his functional rating scale, treatments, symptoms, breathing capacity, and weight. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As part of the digital health phenomenon, a plethora of interactive digital platforms have been established in recent years to elicit lay people’s experiences of illness, medical treatments and healthcare. These include such sites as PatientsLikeMe, Smart Patients, Health Unlocked, CarePages and Cure Together, as well as many condition-specific sites.

The function of these platforms, as expressed on the main pages of their websites, is to provide the tools and forums whereby patients and caregivers, and in cases medical practitioners, can share their experiences with others, benefit from the support and knowledge of other contributors, comment on healthcare providers and contribute to large aggregated data archives as part of developing better medical treatments and services and conducting medical research. However what may not always be readily apparent to the users of these platforms are the growing commercial uses by some of the platforms’ owners of the archives of the data they contribute.

I have just published a working paper (available here) in which I discuss what I term ‘the digital patient experience economy’. This term relates to patients’ online accounts and details of their medical conditions and their ratings and opinions of healthcare providers and institutions having become valued not only for the support and information they offer to other patients but also for the increasing commercial value they have for other actors. These data have become treated as another form of digital intellectual property, owned not by the patients themselves but by the companies that encourage patients to upload their experiences that accumulate in the data archives they own and over which they have control. While some of these platforms are not-for-profit and operate solely as forums for patients to interact with each other or to report their experiences with healthcare providers (for example, Patient Opinion), a growing number have been established by companies seeking to profit from the harvesting of these data and on-selling them to their clients.

Lay people’s experiences and opinions as they are expressed in digital media forums, with all the suffering, hope, despair, frustration, anger and joy that are often integral aspects of coping or living with a medical condition or surgical procedures, have become commercial properties for market exchange. They are not offered and nor do they receive financial compensation for providing their experiences. The value they derive is non-commercial, while the exchange value of the data they upload is accumulated by the for-profit companies that provide the platforms for patients to share their experiences or trawl the web to harvest the data and render it into a form that is valuable for commercial entities.

As I argue in the working paper, patients may benefit in many ways from the affective labour in which they engage as part of contributing to these websites. Research suggests that many patients appreciate the greater access to information about their conditions and the emotional support, opportunity to express themselves, feeling part of a community and greater sense of control over their illness that they may gain from their participation in such forums. They may further gain satisfaction from contributing to scientific research, the production of better understanding of their condition or the provision of facilities or improved healthcare that may benefit themselves or others with their condition.

However many contributors may not be aware of the ways in which the data they upload may be harvested for commercial purposes. The overt rhetoric of the for-profit platforms on their main pages emphasises patient support and the democratic sharing of data for the good of all. The information about how these data are monetised for the benefit of the platforms’ owners is often buried in ‘terms and conditions’ or ‘privacy policy’ pages that people who join as members may not bother to read or may not fully understand.

The use value of the data produced by contributors is restricted by the limits imposed by the platform they are using. Indeed it can be extremely difficult for people to retrieve for their own purposes the data they upload to patient experience platforms, enter as part of their electronic medical records or that are generated as part of their participation in clinical trials. Contributors’ efforts to collate their own small data aggregates may be frustrated in the face of the interests of commercialised big data: hence the recent development of the Small Data website, designed to assist them to gain access to their data.

We know little about to what extent the people who contribute to these sites are aware of how their data are used by third parties, commercially or otherwise; how they feel about this use if they are aware of it; how they experience the sites as users; and to what extent they may wish to gain access to their own data for their own purposes. I argue, therefore, that patients’ opinions and illness narratives may be expressed in more diverse and accessible forums than ever before, but simultaneously they have become exploited in novel ways in the era of digital health.

Theorising mHealth and the quantified self

I have published several posts on this blog now about mHealth and the quantified self (see them here). I have also written two scholarly publications that have been published in academic journals discussing this topic in greater depth. In the first article I looked at how theories of surveillance society and the cyborg body could be applied to understanding the use of digital health technologies as they are used for health promotion, and also discussed privacy, intimacy and ethical issues (see here for details of the first article, the full version of which is open access).

The latest article is entitled ‘Quantifying the body: monitoring, performing and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies’, published in Critical Public Health (see here for details). It builds upon the previous article by bringing in discussion of the quantified self movement. Here is the abstract:

Mobile and wearable digital devices and related Web 2.0 apps and social media tools offer new ways of monitoring, measuring and representing the human body. They are capable of producing detailed biometric data that may be collected by individuals and then shared with others. Health promoters, like many medical and public health professionals, have been eager to seize the opportunities they perceive for using what have been dubbed ‘mHealth’ (‘mobile health’) technologies to promote the public’s health. These technologies are also increasingly used by lay people outside the professional sphere of health promotion as part of voluntary self-tracking strategies (referred to by some as ‘the quantified self’). In response to the overwhelmingly positive approach evident in the health promotion and self-tracking literature, this article adopts a critical sociological perspective to identify some of the social and cultural meanings of self-tracking practices via digital devices. Following an overview of the technologies currently available for such purposes I move on to discuss how they may contribute to concepts of health, embodiment and identity. The discussion focuses particularly on how these technologies promote techno-utopian, enhancement and healthist discourses and the privileging of the visual and the metric in representing the body via these devices.

My current research is moving from a focus on health promotion to the construction of patienthood in digital health discourses. I’m looking at how patients are being encouraged to engage in self-monitoring and self-care activities to reduce healthcare costs, and the commodification of patients’ accounts of their experiences of illness and healthcare on social media platforms designed to elicit patient opinion.

Moving attachments: our emotional relationship with mobile digital media technologies

I recently read an article by Dave Beer in which he discussed the current lack of academic research and theorising about the emotional attachments users of the new mobile media develop with their devices. I agree that there is rather a dearth of writing about the ways in which we use and relate to new mobile media. I was frustrated, for example, to read a new edited book recently entitled Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion that focused on the topic of affect and digital technologies and to find that none of the contributions dealt with the affective dimensions of the technologies themselves. The focus, instead, was on the content produced via the technologies (their texts and images) and how affective states were reproduced and circulated online: for example, racist, violent and misogynistic material shared via social networks. While this book certainly provided interesting material on ‘digital structures of feeling’ there was little discussion of the ways in which digital technologies themselves as material objects and their embodied use are part of these structures.

This is a subject in which I have long had an interest. I have written extensively both on the topic of emotions, selfhood and embodiment (published in my book The Emotional Self ) and on the sociology of computer technologies. In the 1990s, I penned some articles on various aspects of the affective relationship we have with what were then emphatically ‘non-mobile’ digital technologies: the chunky desktop personal computer (PC). My argument was that using these PCs we developed a relationship with them that borders on the anthropomorphic.

One such piece was an essay entitled ‘The embodied computer/user’ (Lupton, 1995), where I explored the emotions that may be evoked by the PC not working or taking over one’s life, including  frustration, hostility and fear, and the tendency for users to describe their PCs as ‘friends’, ‘work companions’ or even ‘lovers’. With Greg Noble (Lupton and Noble, 1997) I then conducted some empirical research using interviews to address the ways in which the users of desktop computers incorporated their technologies in the context of the academic workplace. Our findings showed that PC users tended to evince an ambivalent position between seeing their PCs as humanoid and resisting this. Some people gave their PCs human names, or ascribed a gender or personality to them, describing them as spiteful, sexy, grumpy, intelligent or stupid. One person remarked that she saw her PC as ‘part of me’, ‘an extension of myself’.

I am still very interested in these dimensions of digital technology use (see here for a recent journal article and here, here and here for my blog posts on mHealth technologies and the quantified self). Digital technologies now have far more of a capacity to be intimately involved in our lives. Now, more than ever, as the new digital technologies become ever more mobile and wearable, as we carry them on our bodies throughout the day or even wear them at night (in the case of self-tracking headbands with embedded sensors designed to monitor sleep patterns): indeed as some can now be swallowed or stuck upon the skin as paper-thin patches to measure bodily functions, they are becoming even more a part of us, part of our bodies as prosthetics of the self, part of our identities as they store more data about our experiences, our social relationships and encounters and our bodily functioning.

There are moments when we become aware of our dependence on technologies, or find them annoying or difficult to use, or lose interest in them. As I have remarked in an earlier post on self-tracking technologies for health purposes, some people find wearable self-tracking devices not fashionable enough, or not water-proof enough, or too clunky or heavy, or not comfortable enough to wear, or find that they get destroyed in the washing machine when the user forgets to remove them from their clothing.

A blog post by designer Jennifer Darmour made similar observations, arguing that the aesthetic dimensions of wearable technologies have been little addressed. If these technologies remain too obvious, she argues, ‘bolting’ these devices to our bodies (an unlikely Frankenstein metaphor) and therefore obviously proclaiming ourselves as cyborgs will ‘distract, disrupt, and ultimately disengage us from others, ultimately degrading our human experience’. Darmour asserts that these objects need to be designed more carefully so that they may be ‘seamlessly’ integrated into the ‘fabric of our lives’. Her suggested ways of doing this include making them look more beautiful, like jewellery (broaches, necklaces, bracelets, rings), incorporating them into fashionable garments, making them peripheral and making them meaningful: using colours or vibrations rather than numbers to display data readings from these devices.

Another blogger has remarked upon the emotions that wearing digital self-tracking devices may provoke in people. Putting on a self-tracking device makes some people feel athletic, some fashionable, others fat and self-conscious about their bodies. Others feel safer and develop a greater sense of security about having their health monitored by these devices. Here again it was noted that the design of the device – its ‘look’, its conspicuousness or lack thereof  – may be integral to how people feel when they wear it.

Researching and theorising the affective dimensions of the configuration of user/mobile device potentially brings together the literatures on affect and emotion, embodiment, actor-network theory, media and cultural studies, the anthropology of material culture, digital cultures, digital sociology, digital anthropology and social computing. One way forward is to tap into the literature on the domestication of technologies emerging from media and cultural studies. This perspective is interested in how we ‘domesticate’ or ‘appropriate’ the technologies we use: that is, incorporate them into our everyday lives. I drew upon some of this work in my earlier research described above, and think that it still has much to offer in relation to understanding our affective attachments to our new digital technologies.

The material culture literature is also relevant to understanding how things in our lives are appropriated, incorporated and domesticated, how meaning and significance is invested in objects, and what the affective dimensions of this may be (see, for example, Miller’s The Comfort of Things and Turkle’s Evocative Objects, and my chapter on ‘emotion, things and places’ in The Emotional Self). So too, the work of Bourdieu, particularly his writings on the habitus, or the habitual practices of everyday life as they contribute to embodiment and subjectivity, may usefully be applied to understanding the interaction of bodies/selves with technologies. The actor-network approach to theorising the ways in which material objects join with fleshly bodies, other people’s bodies, other living things, ideas and practices to configure dynamic assemblages can potentially contribute to theorising and researching the affective dimensions of digital object use.

Computer science is well ahead of sociology when it comes to exploring what is termed in that field ‘social computing’ or ‘human-computer interaction’. The focus for computer scientists is in recognising that users interact with computerised technologies in often emotional ways (sometimes described as the subfield of ‘affective computing’), and to incorporate that recognition into designing systems and technologies that are accepted by users as useful, meaningful and a positive rather than frustrating experience.

Much remains to be explored, including the following questions: What does it feel like to carry, wear and use a mobile digital device? How much does their appearance and size matter? How are these devices incorporated into the habits and practices of everyday life (the habitus)? What are the practices of appropriation? How are they resisted? How do these devices configure users’ bodies and sense of selfhood and what are the emotional dimensions of this? What are the enabling and constraining aspects of their use? How do users adjust to giving up one device for another? How do they feel if the technology stops working? What are the interactions between the feelings configured and circulated via the texts and images produced by these devices and the physical material objects themselves?

References

Lupton, D. (1995) The embodied computer/user. Body & Society, 1(3/4), 97—112.

Lupton, D. and Noble, G. (1997) Just a machine? Dehumanizing strategies in personal computer use. Body & Society, 3(2), 83—101.

Why I blog

Recently I did a short audio interview with Mark Carrigan for his digital sociologist series about my academic blogging (you can listen to my answers here). Responding to Mark’s questions have made me think some more about the reasons why I blog as part of my academic work. Here are some:

• I enjoy it! At the risk of outing myself as a word nerd, I love writing about ideas and investigating social life, which is why I chose to become a sociologist. My blog gives me the opportunity to do this writing in a different way from the usual academic format.
• Academic blogging is a refreshing alternative to writing long, detailed academic pieces – journal articles, book chapters and books. It takes many hours of dedicated attention and focus to produce these pieces of writing. Once written, they must go through the review and publication process, which again takes months or even years. In contrast, I can quickly write a blog post, finish it, press the ‘Publish’ button and it is immediately out in the world.
• Related to this is the notion of control over my work. When I write a blog post and publish it, I have full control over its content and form.
• I can use the blog to present ideas that would otherwise not have a forum. For example, I have written quite a few ‘how to’ posts in relation to using social media for academia and tips for conducting academic research. These posts are not traditional academic pieces and would not have a place for publication and sharing if it were not for the blog.
• Blogging affords me the opportunity to comment very quickly on current social issues, a far cry from the long lead times of traditional academic publishing (see, for example, my post on Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, which I wrote and published within 24 hours of the announcement).
• I can use the blog for research purposes in various ways. First, to present some ideas I am currently working on in their early form. Second, to outline some of the findings of an academic piece that has been completed and published. Third, to respond to or comment on other academics’ work.
• Blogging gets my ideas out from behind paywalls and makes them accessible to everyone. It therefore allows for an exchange of ideas not just between academics but with anyone who cares to engage. Sociologists write about ‘society’. What we research is about people, and with blogging, it can for and with people too. As academics we should be sharing our ideas and research with everyone, not just those who can access our work in university libraries or can pay for it.
• While blog posts do not go through the standard processes of academic review and quality control, blogging provides a form of ‘post-publication’ review. People can read, comment on, share, tweet or blog about, reblog or cite the material, all of which are forms of engagement and commentary on the work.

The negative aspects of blogging? The only one I have yet identified is the additional time commitment required. For the reasons outlined above, I believe this is a small price to pay.

Infant embodiment: how we think about and treat babies

The future King Louis XIV as an infant with his wet nurse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My article entitled ‘Infant embodiment and interembodiment: a review of sociocultural perspectives’ has been published in the latest issue of the journal Childhood. In the article I argue that the ways in which we think about and conceptualise infants’ bodies have been little explored, despite what is now a huge literature on the sociology and anthropology of the human body. Much of this literature addresses adults’ bodies; some of it looks at the embodiment of adolescents; a smaller proportion has discussed young children’s bodies. But very few academic articles or books have devoted specific attention to the youngest humans of all: those aged under two.

One exception is the American writer Jean Liedloff’s book The Continuum Concept, first published in 1975. In the book she describes her observations of child rearing practices of the Yequana, an indigenous tribe living in a jungle region of South America, with whom she lived for two and a half years. Liedloff found that these native Americans engaged in constant physical contact with their infants – they slept with their babies, breastfed them on demand for several years, and carried them everywhere in their arms or a sling, never putting them down on the ground until the infant began to crawl.

Another book-length analysis of infant-care practices is The Myth of Motherhood (1981). French historian Elizabeth Badinter details her research in this book into a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France when aristocratic and middle-class women commonly farmed out their newborn infants to wet nurses. These wet nurses were paid to breastfeed and care for the baby, in most cases for several years. While infants of the aristocracy were usually cared for by the wet nurse at home, those of the more populous middle-class were simply sent to live with the wet nurse’s home. In both cases, the wet nurse became the ersatz mother and the actual mothers had little or no contact with their infants. Although many of these infants died due to extreme neglect on the part of their wet nurses, who usually had many infants to feed and care for, the practice continued to be extremely fashionable among members of French society who could afford it.

These two books, vastly different in terms of the human societies and the practices of infant care they describe, are similarly instructive: in detailing these diametrically opposed approaches to infants and infant care, they highlight the contingent and varying ways in which societies and cultures think about and treat their very youngest members. The one, focusing on a contemporary non-developed society that had had little contact with western ideas and practices, and the other, on a privileged social stratum in a western society some centuries ago, demonstrate that notions of appropriate infant care and ways to treat the infant body are constructed via social, cultural, historical and political processes. Infant bodies are gestated and born, but in conditions that are always subject to change in terms of how these bodies are conceptualised and treated by others, which has implications for how infants themselves experience their bodies.

In my article I discuss these aspects of infant embodiment. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) on the phenomenology of embodiment, I make the point that infants’ bodies are always interembodied, or experienced in relation to others’ bodies. Indeed the care bestowed upon infants by their mothers extends the intersubjective and interembodied relationship that developed in the womb. I adopt the terminology used in a fascinating article by anthropologist Tahhan (2008) of ‘skinship’. This concept of ‘skinskip’ relates to the embodied closeness we feel to others’ bodies via acts of intimacy, physical proximity and caring that may involve blurring the boundaries between bodies and selfhoods. I think that it has great relevance to how caregivers relate to infants and goes some way to explaining the positive dimensions of concepts of infants’ bodies. Although she does not use the term, skinship is one aspect championed by Liedloff in The Continuum Concept in her describing of the benefits of constant physical contact with infants.

Via interembodiment, or skinship, carers’ and infants’ bodies interact, intermingle and are interdependent. This interdependence can be challenging and confronting in the context of contemporary western societies, where bodies are generally understood as ideally autonomous and separate from each other. While caring for an infant can be very pleasurable and sensual, it can also be extremely demanding and frustrating. It is socially unacceptable to admit this openly, but such a perspective finds expression in baby-care books such as those by Gina Ford, a British ex-nanny whose books on producing a ‘contented baby’ are bestsellers in the Anglophone world. Ford advises parents as to the importance of rigid scheduling of feeding, sleeping and even cuddling to ensure a ‘contented baby’ who does not wake its parents at night or encroach overly on their autonomy.

From this perspective the infant is positioned as an ‘uncivilised’, close to animalistic, being who requires much training to render its behaviour acceptable for entering human society. Establishing the autonomy and individuated embodiment of the infant is a priority, and the recommended bodily practices accord with this goal. The discourse of ‘training’ the infant, as if it were an animal, to conform to adults’ expectations and their ideals of autonomy and independence is common in these accounts.

As I contended in a previous post, there is often a blurring of categories between young children and animals. While companion animals such as dogs and cats have progressively become represented as child-substitutes and treated as if they are children, infants and young children in turn are often represented culturally as animalistic, not fit to occupy the ‘civilised’ spaces outside the domestic sphere such as the café, restaurant or aeroplane.

The relationship that we have with infants, therefore, can be paradoxical and ambivalent. At the same time as infants are viewed as increasingly precious, adorable and vulnerable, requiring and inspiring large amounts of caring and attention, they are also considered to be overly demanding, detracting from our own independence and right to autonomy.

References

Badinter, E. (1981) The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct. London: Souvenir Press.

Liedloff, J. (1975/1989) The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost. London: Penguin.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception (translated by C. Smith). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Tahhan D (2008) Depth and space in sleep: intimacy, touch and the body in Japanese co-sleeping rituals. Body & Society, 14(4), 37—56.

Social media for academia: some things I have learnt

2012 was the year of my big experiment: trying out various forms of social media for academic purposes. I was in many ways a social media novice when I began, as I had only really dabbled in Facebook, Academia.edu and LinkedIn before my period of experimentation began. But around the middle of last year I made the decision to jump in with both feet and try as many social media platforms as I could, all in the name of sociological experimentation as well as personal interest in what I could achieve using these tools.

Here are some of the things I have learnt thus far:

• Twitter is an invaluable tool for academics. Through using Twitter I have made wonderful connections with a range of people I never would have encountered otherwise across a diversity of countries. I have had fascinating conversations in real time not only with other sociologists but also bioethicists, philosophers, nutritionists, anthropologists, fat activists, medical practitioners, graduate students, health care administrators, people working in digital technology development for medicine and  health  … the list goes on. Using Twitter I have been able to share not only links to my own research and blog posts, but also to many other news items, blog posts and academic articles and have benefited enormously from other people’s sharing of such information.
• Starting my own blog has also been a great decision. My posts have allowed me to share some thoughts quickly and easily with anyone who cares to read them, and to engage in a conversation with those who have taken the trouble to comment. Allowing my research and ideas to reach a much wider readership has been a major benefit of blogging.
• I discovered Pinterest, and have used it extensively to gather material for research purposes. Several of my recent publications have now included hyperlinks to one or more of my Pinterest boards to allow readers to view the materials to which I refer. I recently presented at an academic conference using two of my Pinterest boards simply by calling up the links on the laptop provided on the podium and showing relevant images as I talked.
• I have found that uploading my PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare works well to give others ready access to them. I now try to upload the slides to SlideShare before my presentation, so that when I deliver it I can include in my final slide the links not only to my blog and Twitter account, but also to the SlideShare of the talk I had just presented. Audience members can then access the slides immediately if they so desire. I then tweet the link so anyone else who might be interested can take a look.
• Curating tools like Delicious, Scoop.it or Bundlr are essential for collecting posts and news items from the web under topics that you have specified. Here again these collections can be used in academic publications as useful links to further information. You can also tweet the links or post them on Facebook etc. so that others know about them.
• Specialist Facebook pages can be made to link to others working on or interested in a topic and build a community. I made three such pages last year.
• Storify is a useful tool that you can use to quickly gather material from the web, including Twitter posts and Instagram images, and collate a ‘story’ by bringing a diverse array of such material together. I made several ‘stories’ last year using this tool, several of which I have used in the same way as I have used my Pinterest boards and Scoop.it and Delicious collections, by gathering research material and also linking to the ‘stories’ in my publications. As part of researching my new book The Social Worlds of the Unborn (due to appear later this year in the Palgrave Pivot series) for example, I made a Storify on news coverage of the announcement of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy late last year. I was able to tweet the link to the Storify the day after the announcement, then use a link to it in a blog post and have included it in my new book as well (along with links to my relevant Pinterest boards and Scoop.it collections on the unborn).
• A curating tool that you can program to automatically bring together articles from certain websites or by topic is a boon. I use Prismatic for this.
• I have also learnt about ‘strategic tweeting’: that is, selecting the best time of the day to tweet when people will be likely to be checking their feed, taking into account different time zones. Although I am based in Australia I have many followers in the northern hemisphere, so I have learnt to allow for this when tweeting. If there is something that you really want to catch people’s attention with, you will probably have to tweet it several times at different times of the day or on different days.
• You can use the ‘altmetrics’ provided by social media tools (eg. number of Twitter followers, number of views of your blog) along with the more usual metrics on citations produced by Web of Science or Google Scholar to demonstrate in job or grant applications that you are participating in engagement with the public as well as making an impact on your field.

Using the tools I mention above has allowed me to keep on top of developments in my current areas of research interest, many of which are rapidly changing as new research or technologies emerge.

As a final observation: I have learnt that the immediacy and range of digital publishing is a feature that no academic should discount. If you want your research findings and ideas to stay behind paywalls, accessed largely only by the relatively small number of academics in your field, and wait for months or even years for even these readers to be able to do so while your material proceeds through the publication process, then avoid using social and other digital forms of publishing. If you would like to see your findings and ideas instantly available to a wide range of readers, then using digital media is the way to go.

See also my previous posts A sociologist’s adventures in social media land and Digital sociology part 2: professional digital practice.

Living the quantified self: the realities of self-tracking for health

The end of 2012 and the dawning of a new year brought with it a multitude of news reports and blogs on the phenomenon of the quantified self or using self-tracking tools for health promoting purposes. Much hype has been generated around ‘digital health’ or ‘mHealth’ technologies, or mobile digital devices such as smartphones and wearable materials with embedded sensors that are able to connect to device apps or websites and download the data collected. These technologies include thousands of health-related apps for smartphones, tablet computers and iPods that can keep track of the user’s food and alcohol consumption, physical activity, body weight, ovulation cycle, stress levels, mood, sexual activity and many other physical functions and habits. It has been argued that by using such apps the smartphone can become a ‘”soulmate device” that knows your body better than you know it yourself’.

There are also an increasing number of specifically designed devices such as the Fitbit, Jawbone’s Up, Nike Fuelband and Zeo headband and various brands of adhesive patches that are available for self-tracking. All of these are designed to be worn upon the body to automatically collect data on bodily functions such as physical activity, pulse, heart rate, body temperature, calories burned and sleep patterns. Some can be worn 24 hours a day to provide constant readings of biometrics. Digital body weight scales, blood oxygen saturation monitors and blood pressure monitors that link to smartphones are also on the market. To motivate users, some devices include ‘gamification’ strategies. These use built-in reward or docking systems so that points or real money can be collected or paid if various commitments (to regular exercise or weight loss goals, for example) are either met or unmet, as well as websites where one’s metrics can be compared competitively against those uploaded by other users.

Nike+ FuelBand (Photo credit: LoKan Sardari)

The combination of New Year resolutions season, predictions for digital innovation in 2013 and the reporting of the new technologies that were showcased at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has contributed to the recent intensified focus on self-tracking for health reasons. Self-tracking mobile devices, apps and gadgets were reported as the new way of ensuring resolutions to lose weight or engage in more exercise would be accomplished (see here and here). They were frequently mentioned in lists of trends to watch in digital health technologies in 2013 (see here and here). Weird and wonderful devices such as self-tracking devices for dogs to wear to monitor their exercise levels, smartphones that could detect bad breath and other odours and a ‘smart fork’ embedded with sensors that could warn people they were eating too fast all received media attention in the early days of 2013.

I have written elsewhere about the ways in which self-tracking for health and the quantified self movement may be theorised sociologically, drawing attention to some of the ethical, moral and political issues (see here and here for previous blog posts on the topic and here for a lengthy academic article). Little academic research has yet been published on how people are taking up this approach to health promotion as part of their everyday lives. But accounts are beginning to appear in news stories and blog posts that have begun to explore the lived experience of self-tracking.

On the positive side, several self-trackers have reported that they feel more in control of their health using digital devices and have argued that there are many benefits to quantifying the self. Many people have discovered that tracking of their food intake and body weight has allowed them to achieve weight-loss goals. One success story is that of Dan Hon, who has type 2 diabetes and uses the Nike Fuelband and the Fitbit to monitor his physical activity levels as well as a digital blood glucose meter and weight scales. He reported that the combination of these technologies had allowed him to reduce his blood sugar levels to normal and that he had ‘healed myself through data’ (see here for his story). Another user experiencing problems with sleep used a Zeo headband to track his sleep patterns and experimented with taking magnesium supplements, giving up caffeine and changing the lighting in his room to see which of these factors affected his sleep. Using the data downloaded from the headband he eventually worked out how to best achieve a good night’s sleep. Other people with a diverse range of health problems have used self-tracking devices to monitor medical treatments for acute diseases or chronic conditions, evaluate the moods created by eating certain foods, track their alcohol consumption  and many more aspects of their bodily functions, health and illness states. Patients have also been able to ‘crowdsource’ the data they have collected on websites such as PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether, allowing the massing of data for a better understanding of what treatments are effective (see here and here for overviews).

Image via CrunchBase

Also beginning to emerge are accounts by people who have tried self-tracking for health reasons but have become disenchanted with the practice. As these stories demonstrate, the realities of quantifying the self do not always meet expectations. The devices do not share data with each other, so it is impossible to track different activities using more than one device and then produce statistics that combine the data collected. Some users find them inconvenient or uncomfortable to wear. Some people quickly become bored with the effort involved in self-tracking. It has been reported that the devices are often not compatible with some types of smartphones.

Other users who have tried self-tracking for health have suggested that the intense focus on the body that these devices encourage may place too much pressure on oneself, leading to feelings of failure and self-hatred. It has been argued that intense self-tracking may cause ‘cyberchondria’, leading to people becoming unduly anxious about their health state based on the data they collect. Devices may be used by people such as anorexics to facilitate health-destructive behaviours by engaging in too much obsessive self-tracking. Activities such as walking may become viewed through the lens of the self-tracking device rather than for the other pleasures they may bring, as one commentator wrote of his experiences using a Fitbit while visiting Paris. As he noted, ‘the data mind is hard to shake’, even while immersed in the sights and sounds of one of the most celebrated cities in the world.

Privacy issues are a concern as more and more data are collected by self-trackers. The manufacturers of self-tracking devices are beginning to approach workplaces as a site for encouraging people to use them and compete against each other. There are concerns that people may feel pressured into using them to meet employers’ expectations and that employers may use the data. Other critics have questioned what may happen if health insurance companies begin to expect their clients to use the devices if they wish to avoid higher premiums (see here for an account of these issues). The quality and efficacy of health apps and their potential for harming rather than promoting users’ health have also been questioned, given that they are currently not regulated (see here).

Using digital devices to self-track for health reasons is a very new phenomenon. While stories such as those referred to above are beginning to identify both positive and negative dimensions, it is a practice that still requires much more investigation and analysis in the face of all the hype.

The ‘royal foetus’ as fetish

First Ultrasound (Photo credit: amysinfo)

Within hours of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy being officially announced, references were being made on the internet to a new individual: the ‘royal foetus’. Several spoof Twitter accounts were set up on behalf of this personage, providing ‘live tweets from the royal womb’. Other tweeters commented that the royal foetus was already richer and in a greater position of power than they (see here for my Storify of initial reactions to Middleton’s pregnancy).

While this seems like harmless fun, underpinning these representations of the ‘royal foetus’ is an inexorable move in western cultures towards the infantilising of the unborn, positioning them as already babies well before birth. More so than at any other time in western cultural history, the unborn are considered separate from the maternal body, autonomous, possessing individuality, personality and full moral personhood from embryonic form onwards.

The emergence of the unborn into the public spotlight began with the beautiful images produced by photojournalist Lennart Nilsson (ironically mostly of dead embryonic and foetal specimens) from the 1950s onwards that showed unborn bodies floating serenely in space, seemingly untethered to the maternal body. It has intensified with the growing use of obstetric ultrasound since the late 1970s, a visualising technology that encourages pregnant women and their partners and family members to view the foetus as a little person in its own right, very much distinct from the body in which it is growing.

The image of the unborn has become a commodity. Since the development of 3/4D ultrasound marketed solely for ‘bonding’ purposes, potential parents are invited to begin their ‘baby albums’ with these ultrasounds, which are often widely shared with friends and family via social media platforms. Ultrasounds are now used in a range of goods, including advertisements, canvas art, scrapbooking materials, specialised photo frames, baby shower invitations, jewellery and maternity t-shirts (see here for my Pinterest collection ‘The Ultrasound as Cultural Artefact’).

The gradual disappearance of the maternal body as it gives way to the fetishising of the foetus has occurred at the same time as pregnant women are positioned as being ever more important to the health and optimal development of their unborn (Lupton, forthcoming). It seems that dominant representations of the pregnant body either erase it completely, as in the visual imagery of the autonomous foetus, or position it as engulfing and threatening to the unborn. Pregnant women must negotiate these two paradoxical portrayals. Kate Middleton will do so in the context in which hers will be the most public pregnancy in the world. She will be under intense scrutiny to provide the ‘royal foetus’ with a uterine environment worthy of its rank.

Reference

Lupton, D. (forthcoming) The Social Worlds of the Unborn. Houndmills: Palgrave.

30 tips for successful academic research and writing

Next month I am running a workshop on academic publishing for early career academics. As part of preparing for the workshop I jotted down some ideas and tips to share with the group which I thought I would post here. In the process of writing 12 books and over 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters over a career which has mostly been part-time because of juggling the demands of motherhood with academic work, I have developed some approaches that seem to work well for me.

These tips are in no particular order, apart from number 1, which I consider to be the most important of all.

1. Choose something to research/write about that you are passionately interested in. I find that most of my research and writing tends to spring from wanting to find out more or understand more about a particular phenomenon that intrigues me. In explaining it to myself I end up explaining it to others, hopefully in a new and interesting way that is worthy of publication.
2. Be organised – planning time use is essential when there are many demands on your time.
3. Make sure that you set aside one or more periods of time each week when you devote yourself to research and don’t let other demands impinge on this time.
4. So I can easily see what I need to do and by when, I use a white-board with a ‘to do’ list with tasks listed monthly and their deadlines. I rub off tasks as I complete them (usually with a great sense of accomplishment!). Very low tech, I know, but effective as a visual reminder.
5. Plan your research in chunks: this morning, today, this week, this month, next few months, this year, next three years. Have a clear idea for what you want to achieve in these time periods and try to stick to this as much as you can.
6. I don’t tend to think more than a year ahead when it comes to research outcomes I want to achieve, but I find it helpful to write up at least a one-year research plan at the beginning of each year. Some people may also want to prepare a 3- or 5-year research plan.
7. Be strategic about every bit of research time available. Think about the best use of your time. Difficult cognitive tasks requiring intense thought often need a lengthy period of time, so plan to do these when this is available to you. Easy or less time-intensive tasks such as correcting proofs, editing or formatting a journal article or chapter for submission or reading some materials and taking notes can be fitted in smaller periods of time.
8. Use whatever research time you have to do something, however small the task.
9. Make a start. Once you have an idea for a piece of writing, create a file for it on your computer and write down anything, however rough and however brief, even if it is just a provisional title and some notes about possible content. It can always be polished and developed later or even discarded if you decide eventually not to go ahead with the idea.
10. Organise your writing into different computer files: articles in progress, submitted articles, accepted articles, conference papers, blog posts, book proposals, grant applications etc.
11. Organise your PDF journal article collection under topics in files on your computer.
12. If you are feeling unenthusiastic or have hit a wall – leave that piece of writing for a while and work on another piece of writing.
13. If no external deadline has been set, set yourself deadlines and try to meet these as much as you can, so that you can then move on to the next piece of writing.
14. Use your writing in as many different ways as you can – conference papers, articles/chapters, books, blog posts. Turn the small (unrefereed) pieces into bigger (refereed) pieces whenever you can and vice versa. What starts out as a blog post can be later developed into an article, for example. Conversely some of the main arguments of an article can be used in one or more blog posts.
15. Never let a conference/seminar paper stay a conference/seminar paper – turn it into an article/book chapter as soon as you can. If there is simply not enough substance for a piece that is the length of a journal article or book chapter, consider polishing and referencing the paper appropriately. Once it is at a standard where you consider it ready to be available to others, publish it on your university’s e-repository as a working paper. That way, anyone will be able to access the paper digitally and reference it.
16. Decide on an appropriate journal as you are writing an article and tailor the argument/length to the journal’s requirements before you finish it.
17. Once you think that you have finished a piece of writing and are ready to submit it, put it aside for a least a day and come back and read it again with fresh eyes. You will most probably notice something that could be improved upon. Once you have done this and are feeling happy with the piece, go ahead and submit. As another commentator has argued, you need to conquer your fear and send your writing off into the world: ‘we owe it to the words we have written to send them away’.
18. Receiving feedback from academic referees on a writing piece or research proposal can sometimes be demoralising. Don’t let negative comments get you down for long. Grit your teeth and revise and resubmit as soon as you can, however tedious it feels. See this as an opportunity to make your piece the very best it can be. If the article has been rejected, take a good hard look at whether the referees’ comments are valid and if necessary, revise and then submit it to another journal. Remember that all successful academic writers have received negative feedback at times: that is simply part-and-parcel of academic writing and publishing.
19. Rather than simply deleting material when you are editing a piece of writing, make ‘edits’ computer files into which to ‘paste’ this material when you cut it (I make several edits files under topics). You never know when you may be able to use this material somewhere else.
20. Think about how one writing piece can lead to another as you are writing it.
21. Make sure that your abstract is well-written and will lead others to your work (see here for guidelines on writing an effective abstract).
22. Keep on top of the latest research published in the journals you use for your research. One easy way to do this is to sign up to email alerts with the publishers of the journals and you will be notified by them of the contents of each new issue.
23. Inspiration for research can come from many places. Attending conferences and seminars and reading the latest academic literature in your field are all extremely important, but so are other strategies. As a sociologist, I have generated many ideas from listening to good quality radio programs, reading newspapers and my favourite online sites and blogs regularly and engaging in social media such as Twitter and Facebook with people interested in the topics I research (see more on social media at no. 25).
24. Connect, connect, connect. Publicise your research and make connections with other researchers as much as you can. Make contact with others working in areas related to your interests even if they are in different departments or in other universities. Join relevant research networks or start your own.
25. Strengthen your online presence. Think about using social and other digital media to promote your research, engage with the community and make academic connections. Set up a profile on Academia.edu at the barest minimum. Make sure your university webpage is kept up-to-date with your latest publications and research projects. Write blog posts (if you don’t want to commit to your own blog, do guest posts for others’ blogs or for online discussion forums), sign up to Twitter and relevant Facebook pages, put your PowerPoints on SlideShare, make Pinterest boards (see here for my introduction to social media for academics).
26. Use digital bookmarking sites such as Scoop.it, Pinterest, Delicious or Bundlr to save interesting material you have found on the web (see here for a discussion of using tools like these for academic work).
27. Use a computerised online reference manager such as Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley. Get in the habit of loading citations straight into this each time as soon as you come across them.
28. Think carefully about who you collaborate with on research before agreeing to do so. Good collaborators will add immensely to your own work: bad ones will make your life difficult and you won’t be happy with the outputs you produce.
29. Seek out the advice or mentorship of more experienced academics whose research you respect.
30. Take regular walks/runs/bike rides. This will not only keep you physically fit but will also provide a mental space to think through an argument or come up with new ideas. Some of my best ideas have come when I have been in motion and my thoughts are unencumbered.

Further Resources

PhD2Published: http://www.phd2published.com

Writing an article in 12 weeks: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1107

Getting published: what academics need to know (advice about books only): http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/apr/27/getting-published-academics

How to publish your journal paper: http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep02/publish.aspx