New book now out: The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age

This book has now been published. It is available from the Polity website here. A video of me giving a talk about the book is here.

Here is the list of contents:

Introduction

1 Conceptualizing Humans, Animals and Human–Animal Relations

2 Animal Enthusiasts, Activism and Politics in Digital Media

3 The Quantified Animal and Dataveillance

4 Animal Cuteness, Therapy and Celebrity Online

5 Animal Avatars and Zoomorphic Robots

Conclusion: Reimagining Human–Animal Relations

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter, explaining the main themes and issues discussed in the book:

The Internet of Animals is the first book to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to consider how digital technologies are contributing to human-animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It builds on and extends a growing interest in social and cultural inquiry in: i) the digitization and datafication of humans and other animals with and through new digital media and ‘smart’ devices; ii) the affective and embodied relationships between humans and other animals; iii) the health and environmental crises in which human health and wellbeing are inextricably entangled with other animals and living creatures; and iv) more-than-human theoretical perspectives. The book delves into the ways that animals across a range of species and in a multitude of spaces are represented and incorporated into various forms of digital technologies, and the consequences for how we think and feel about as well as relate to and treat other animals.

Across the book’s chapters, the broader socioeconomic, cultural, biological and geographical contexts in which these technological interventions have emerged and are implemented are carefully considered. Many animal species are becoming threatened by catastrophic changes to their habitats and lives caused by humans, such as ecological degradation and pollution; climate change, global warming and extreme weather events; and the clearing of forests to make way for industries or the expansion of cities. Animals’ health and wellbeing have been severely undermined by these human-wrought crises, including exacerbating their exposure to disease, depriving them of their usual food sources, disrupting breeding cycles, accelerating species extinction and contributing to biodiversity loss. Industries devoted to the mass production of digital technologies (mobile and other computing devices, Wi Fi devices and digital data storage facilities) and to energy generation to power these technologies, together with the accumulation of non-degradable ‘e-waste’ from discard devices and contribution to landfill toxins, make a massive contribution to these detrimental effects on planetary health. Digital media play a major role in drawing publics’ attention to cases of animal mistreatment and cruelty, but also contribute to the objectification of animals and the vilification of species deemed to be threats to human welfare or the economy, requiring tight containment or extermination.

… Throughout the book I analyse the content and use of these devices, software and media from a sociocultural perspective, identifying implications for human-animal relationships and for generating ideas about future developments for digital technologies that have the potential to contribute to both human and nonhuman animal flourishing across the world. I argue that the ways in which animals are portrayed, monitored and cared for by humans using digital media and devices have significant implications for how humans and animals will live together in the near future: including human and animal health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and activism, and industries related to digital technology development, animal care, animal protection, food production and consumption as well as smart farming, smart homes and smart cities.

… a series of questions are addressed, as follows: How are human-animal relationships changing, and how are digital media and devices contributing to this change? What do humans and other animals lose and gain when animals are digitized and datafied? What are the implications of a more-than-human approach for ethical and caring relationships between humans and other animal species? What are the implications for both human and animal health and wellbeing – and at a larger scale, for planetary health?

In addressing these questions, I engage with the expanding body of more-than-human theory that focuses on the embodied and multisensory dimensions of people’s encounters with digital technologies and digital data, and the affective forces and capacities that are generated with and through these relationships. My approach to digitization and datafication recognises that digital technologies and digital data are vibrant agents in the lives of humans and animals, configuring animal-human-digital assemblages that are constantly changing as technologies come together with humans and animals in place, space and time.

… Chapter 1 introduces the foundational concepts and theoretical perspectives on human-animals relations offered from relevant scholarship across the humanities and social sciences and discusses how they contribute to the key issues and themes discussed in the book. The next four chapters focus on specific ways in which animals are portrayed in digital media and monitored with the use of ‘smart’ technologies. Chapter 2 addresses the topic of animal activism and other political issues concerning humans’ treatment of and relationships with animals, including contestation and conflicts between actors in this online space. In Chapter 3, the plethora of rationales, imaginaries and practices configuring the dataveillance of animals are examined: including those devices designed for caring for pets or protection of wildlife as well as technologies incorporated into ‘smart farming’ initiatives. Chapter 4 focuses on the affective dimensions of cuteness and celebrity as they are expressed in relation to animals in digital media, as well as the positioning of animals as therapeutic objects. The representation of animals in computer games and zoomorphic robots are the subject of Chapter 5. While these digital technologies may seem quite distinct from each other, the strong influence of Japanese culture is evident in both modes for digitizing animals. The brief conclusion chapter summarise the main points made in the book and provokes thinking about the futures of the Internet of Animals, with a particular focus on the use of digital technologies in arts-based initiatives that seek to attune humans to their role as merely one animal species in complex multispecies ecosystems.

My publications for 2022

Authored books

• Lupton, D. (2022) COVID Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge.

Edited books

• Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds) (2022) Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.

• Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds) (2022) Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge.

Book chapters

• Lupton, D. (2022) The sociology of mobile apps. In Rohlinger, D. and Sobieraj, S. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. New York: Oxford, pp. 197-218.
• Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (2022) Thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning: bringing creative methods into health education. In Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds), Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Lupton, D. (2022) Data: the futures of personal data. In The Routledge Handbook of Social Futures. London: Routledge, pp. 117-125.
• Lupton, D. (2022) Digital health. In Monaghan, L. and Gabe, J. (eds), Key Concepts in Medical Sociology, 3^rd edition. London: Sage, pp. 241-246.
• Lupton, D. (2022) The sociomaterial nature of the body and medicine. In Scrimshaw, S., Lane, S., Rubenstein, R. and Fisher, J. (eds), Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine, 2^nd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, pp. 103-121.
• Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2022) Beyond ‘wicked Facebook’: a vital materialism perspective. Emotional Landscapes, Dystopia and Future Imaginaries. In McKenzie, J. and Patulny, R. (eds). Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 34-51.
• Lupton, D., Clare, M. and Southerton, C. (2022) Digitized and datafied embodiment: a more-than-human approach. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M. and Müller, C.J. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 1-23.
• Pink, S., Ruckenstein, M., Berg, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) Everyday automation: setting a research agenda. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1-19.
• Lupton, D. (2022) The quantified pandemic: digitised surveillance, containment and care in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 59-72.
• Southerton, C., Clark, M., Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) The futures of qualitative research in the COVID-19 era: experimenting with creative and digital methods. In Matthewman, S. (ed), A Research Agenda for COVID-19 and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 155-174.
• Lupton, D. (2022) Health zines: hand-made and heart-felt. In The Routledge Handbook of Health and the Media, edited by Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. New York: Routledge.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, 25(10), 1147-1160.
• Lupton, D. (2022) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 27(5), 516-528.
• Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2022) Coping with COVID-19: the sociomaterial dimensions of living with pre-existing mental health illness during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis. Emotion, Space & Society, 42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100860
• Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) Sociomaterialities of health, risk and care during COVID-19: experiences of Australians living with a medical condition. Social Science & Medicine, 293.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114669 
• Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2022) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, online first.
• Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) Remote fieldwork in homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: video-call ethnography and map drawing methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043774
• Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2022) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, online first.
• Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) ‘What happens next? Using the story completion method to surface the affects and materialities of digital privacy dilemmas. Sociological Research Online, 27(3), 690-706.
• Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2022) Research-creations for speculating about digitised automation: bringing creative writing prompts and vital materialism into the sociology of futures. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(7), 754-766.
• Lupton, D. (2022) Understandings and practices related to risk, immunity and vaccination during the Delta variant COVID-19 outbreak in Australia: an interview study. Vaccine: X, 11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvacx.2022.100183
• Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) App stories: how mobile apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, online first. 
• Rich, E. and Lupton, D. (2022) How sociomaterial relations shape English secondary students’ digital health practices: beyond the promissory imaginaries. Social Science & Medicine, 311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115348
• Lupton, D. From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: crucial new directions for planetary health. Digital Health, 8. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221129103
• Lupton, D. (2022) Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: a visual essay. Thesis Eleven, 171(1), 36-65.

Arguing on Facebook about COVID: a case study of key beliefs, rationales and strategies

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, social media platforms have become well-known for both disseminating misinformation and conspiracy theories as well as acting as valuable information sources concerning the novel coronavirus and governments’ efforts to manage and contain COVID. Facebook in particular – the world’s most popular social media site – has been singled out as a key platform for naysayers such as anti-vaccination exponents and ‘sovereign citizens’ to express their resentment at containment measures such as lockdowns, quarantine and self-isolation regulations, vaccination mandates and face-covering rules.

What rationales and beliefs underpin these arguments? How and to what extent are they contested or debated on Facebook? What rhetorical strategies are employed by commentators to attempt to persuade others that their views/facts are correct?

To explore these questions, I chose a case study of a short video (2 minutes 5 seconds long) shared by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Facebook on 19 February 2022. I came across the video three days after it was published on the platform as part of my routine Facebook use. It turned up in my feed because a Facebook friend of mine had shared it (which it how the average Facebook user is presented with content from organisations like WHO if they don’t follow these accounts themselves.) I noticed how much engagement this post had received in those three days. There were 6,000 reactions: including 5k likes but also 551 laughing face emojis (suggesting viewers found the video content risible), 1.2k comments, 2.2k shares and 244k views. I decided to delve into the comments thread to see what people were saying in response to the video.

WHO’s official Facebook page has a huge follower base: at the time that I viewed this video, their page listed over 14 million likes and over 38 million followers. It is clearly a highly trusted Facebook presence. Many of its posts have thousands of reactions (the use of emojis to respond to posts), likes, comments and shares. WHO shares content at least once a day and often more frequently: most of this content is made by WHO itself in its role to communicate preventive health messages globally. In reviewing their latest content, it is evident that WHO has a very busy and accomplished team making their social media content.

The video featured two WHO experts: Dr Mike Ryan (pictured above from the opening section of the video) and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, both of whom feature regularly in WHO’s social media content. Ryan was introduced in a caption as ‘ED, WHO Health Emergencies Programme’ and Van Kerkhove as ‘COVID-19 technical lead, WHO Health Emergencies Programme’.

In this video, both people spoke to camera as if to an unseen interviewer, explaining why they were concerned about governments beginning to loosen COVID restrictions too quickly.

The written introduction to the video stated:

Some countries are lifting all public health and social measures despite high numbers of COVID-19 cases/deaths. Dr Mike Ryan and Dr Maria Van Kerkhove explain why a slow approach is better.

Ryan and Van Kerkhove went on to use simple English to acknowledge that there is a strong desire on the part of governments and citizens to ‘open up’ and remove all COVID restrictions and ‘go back to normal’. They warn, however, that such actions could lead to the pandemic continuing ‘much longer than it needs to be’ due to ‘the political pressure to open up’ in ‘some situations’, and that replacing abandoned control measures would be difficult if a new variant emerged. Ryan and Van Kerkhove emphasise the importance of ‘a slow, step-wise approach’ to lifting COVID restrictions rather than an ‘all-or-nothing approach’ that ‘many countries’ are adopting at this point in the COVID crisis.

Both speakers are careful not to single out individual leaders or governments for criticism in these quite vague statements, leaving it up to the viewer to make a judgement about exactly to which ‘situation’ they are referring. These experts also ‘acknowledge uncertainty’ and that their concerns may be unfounded but emphasise the need for caution. They note that they do not ‘blame anyone’ for feeling confused, given the continual flux in governments’ COVID measures. Van Kerkhove ends by stating firmly that ‘you [the video viewers] have control over this’ regardless of government actions and then Ryan chimes in by asking ‘every individual just to look at your situation’ and ‘be smart, protect yourself, protect others, get vaccinated and just be safe and careful’.

There’s a lot that could be said about the statements made by these two WHO experts in this video: the veiled critique of ‘many countries” government actions and health communication efforts, the focus on individual responsibility in the face of government inaction and lack of responsibility. But I wanted to direct my attention to the more than 1,000 comments Facebook users wrote in response to this video.

I noticed first that comments came from all over the world – evidence again of the global reach and popularity of Facebook. When commentors were responding to each other, therefore, there were many examples of someone in Asia, South America or Africa engaging with Facebook users located in the USA, Australia, Canada, Europe or the UK.

Another observation was that a vigorous debate was occurring in the comments section, with supporters of the video’s messages seeking to argue with those who decried what they saw as an overly cautious or even unscientific argument from the WHO experts. Those who did not support the WHO’s points made such arguments as (my paraphrasing):

• opening up will help the economy – people need jobs
• people’s lives need to get back to ‘normal’
• most populations are now adequately vaccinated, so there is no need for further restrictions
• governments are lying to their citizens and spreading false information as a way of exerting greater control over them
• the novel coronavirus does not exist and nor does COVID
• it is risk to one’s health to wear masks for prolonged periods of time
• other health conditions kill more people than COVID
• COVID mass testing and mass vaccination have been conducted as a profit-making enterprise serving Big Pharma and governments
• WHO’s facts are wrong and they are spreading lies and fear, trying to promote their own interests for political purposes
• WHO has shown little leadership during the pandemic and is ineffectual
• face masks give a false sense of security and are useless as a preventive measure
• people who follow government restrictions are being controlled and can’t think for themselves
• the pandemic has been going on for two years and governments and health agencies like WHO are still not controlling it adequately
• the person commenting does not like to feel forced to do anything by government authorities, especially if restrictions/mandates do not help the situation (in their view) – ‘my body, my choice’
• even vaccinated people can still become infected with or transmit the coronavirus, fall ill or die of COVID – they are therefore pointless
• COVID is ‘real’ but controllable like influenza or no worse than the common cold
• governments who continue to impose restrictions/mandates are ‘Socialist’
• people’s immune systems can be strengthened without vaccines due to basic health promoting strategies
• people are dying from being given too many COVID vaccines (including children), not from the disease itself
• vaccines are ‘bioweapons’
• the medical establishment and the government are forcing COVID vaccines on people and hiding evidence of their serious side-effects
• there is a difference between ‘dying with COVID’ and ‘dying from COVID’ – governments and health agencies are deliberately obscuring this
• people need to be freed from living in fear
• scientists and medical experts are controlled by governments to serve political agendas
• ‘commonsense’ practices such as eating a healthy diet, taking Vitamin D and washing hands regularly will adequately protect against COVID

People who supported the points made by the WHO experts in the video tended to be reactive in their comments, responding to the naysayers using such rationales as:

• COVID is a real threat and has killed many people – we still need to be cautious to protect ourselves and others
• even though the situation seems to be improving in many countries, new variants could emerge that could pose major challenges
• scientific and medical knowledge and expertise should be trusted over other information sources
• many people are still dying
• opening up too quickly will lead to many more deaths globally
• vaccines do protect against serious disease and death and everyone should accept them: the benefits outweigh any risk
• face masks are important protective agents against infection (just as shoes, for example, protect against foot injuries)
• people who don’t want to conform to COVID restrictions/mandates are being selfish and don’t understand the importance of self-sacrifice to protect others
• wearing face masks and getting vaccinated are small sacrifices to make for the greater good and saving others’ lives as well as self-protection
• economies are damaged if too many workers become ill from COVID and can’t go to work
• the person commenting still feels at high risk from COVID and is happy to continue to engage in preventive measures such as wearing masks and accepting vaccination
• young children have not yet been protected by COVID vaccination in many countries and therefore are vulnerable to infection
• mass vaccination programs have worked well globally to protect people against other serious diseases, such as polio
• people who support dropping all restrictions are engaging in magical thinking or do not want to face reality
• low income countries do not have enough medical support to help people who become ill with COVID
• countries should work together in a global response to COVID rather than simply pursing nationalistic interests

Rhetorical strategies on the part of both ‘sides’ of the argument included:

• giving examples from their own lives/health (e.g. they had avoided COVID because of wearing face masks and getting vaccinated or they avoided COVID because their immune systems were naturally strong and not weakened by vaccines)
• describing the situations of people they knew personally (e.g. those who died from COVID vaccines or those who died because they refused COVID vaccines)
• urging people to ‘do their research’ or ‘due diligence’ and not just rely on television, social media or what their friends tell them
• accusing those who are disagreeing with them of ‘lying’, ‘making up facts to suit their agenda’, as ‘stupid’ or simply gullible (to either misinformation or in believing the science)
• providing hyperlinks to articles or blog posts outside of Facebook to support their claims and urging others to read them as part of educating themselves about the ‘facts’
• claiming ‘truth’ in response to ‘non-truths’, ‘lies’ or ‘fake news’
• contrasting the value of all human lives versus the value of individual freedom
• the use of large numbers to support the validity of the arguments

As just one example of a pithy exchange between two commentators:

Commentator 1: We can’t stop living.

Commentator 2: 900,000 Americans have.

These findings demonstrate the kinds of beliefs and rationales underpinning Facebook users’ concepts of COVID risk and their attitudes towards COVID restrictions. Both sides received ardent support from others. Comments sometime descended into ad hominem attacks but most of the content was focused on presenting opinions or ‘facts’ and responding to these arguments with counter-claims. Most of the commentators attempted to act as educators, challenging the misinformation or extreme views put forward by the naysayers. Emotions ran high as people defended their position or accused others of stupidity, blindness to the truth or making up facts. Some extreme misinformation positions and conspiracy theories were advanced (e.g. ‘the holy blood of Jesus Christ is our only protection’) but many arguments concerned topics such as whether vaccines were necessary or effective (and how many there should be) or raised issues around the politics of COVID control.

The main insight from this single case study of COVID commentary in response to a peak health agency’s video posted to Facebook is that there was little evidence of an echo-chamber or filter bubble where only one main viewpoint was put foward. Instead, vigorous debate and contestation about ‘the truth’ went on in the comments section, suggesting an open forum for many opinions to be aired. However, it was also clear that people’s opinions or beliefs were not challenged in and through the debates or comments. Despite all the argumentation and presenting of examples from personal experience or hyperlinks to other material, no consensus or acceptance of other people’s opposing views was evident in these comment threads.

My 2021 publications

Books

Lupton, D., Southerton, C., Clark, M. and Watson, A. (2021) The Face Mask in COVID Times: A Sociocultural Analysis. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Edited books and special issues

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds) (2021) The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge.

‘In and beyond the smart home’ special issue. Convergence (volume 27, issue 5), 2021.

Journal articles

Lupton, D. (2021) Young people’s use of digital health in the Global North: narrative review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, available online at https://www.jmir.org/2021/1/e18286/

Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2021) The thing-power of the Facebook assemblage: why do users stay on the platform? Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 969-985.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. Cultural Sociology, 15(1), 3-21.

Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2021) Tactics, affects and agencies in digital privacy narratives: a story completion study. Online Information Review, 45(1), 138-156.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. Media International Australia, 178(1), 136-150.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Things that matter’: poetic inquiry and more-than-human health literacy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(2), 267-282.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘The internet both reassures and terrifies’: exploring the more-than-human worlds of health information using the story completion method. Medical Humanities, 47(1), 68-77.

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, online first doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2021.1890570

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Sharing is caring’: Australian self-trackers’ concepts and practices of personal data sharing and privacy. Frontiers in Digital Health, 3(15). Available online at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2021.649275/full

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) Learning about COVID-19: a qualitative interview study of Australians’ use of information sources. BMC Public Health, available online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10743-7

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Honestly no, I’ve never looked at it’: teachers’ understandings and practices related to students’ personal data in digitised health and physical education. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 281-293Hjorth, L. and Lupton, D. (2021) Digitised caring intimacies: more-than-human intergenerational care in Japan. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(4), 584-602.

Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2021) Towards more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, 21(4), 463-480.

Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) The COVID digital home assemblage: transforming the home into a work space during the crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1207-1221.

Downing, L., Marriott, H. and Lupton, D. (2021) ‘Ninja levels of focus’: therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotion, Space & Society, 40. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100824

Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2021) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, online first, doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2021.1958045

Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2021) Pandemic fitness assemblages: the sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis. Convergence, 27(5), 1222-1237.

The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. Kickbusch, I., Piselli, D., Agrawal, A., Balicer, R., Banner, O., Adelhardt, M., Capobianco, E., Fabian, C., Singh Gill, A., Lupton, D., Medhora, R. P., Ndili, N., Ryś, A., Sambuli, N., Settle, D., Swaminathan, S., Morales, J. V., Wolpert, M., Wyckoff, A. W., Xue, L., Bytyqi, A., Franz, C., Gray, W., Holly, L., Neumann, M., Panda, L., Smith, R. D., Georges Stevens, E. A., & Wong, B. L. H. (2021) The Lancet and Financial Times Commission on governing health futures 2030: growing up in a digital world. The Lancet. Available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621018249

Lupton, D. (2021) ‘All at the tap of a button’: mapping the food app landscape. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(6), 1360-1381.

Petrie, K., Deady, M., Lupton, D., Crawford, J., Boydell, K. and Harvey. S. (2021) ‘The hardest job I’ve ever done’: a qualitative exploration of the factors affecting junior doctors’ mental health and wellbeing during medical training in Australia. BMC Health Services. Available online at https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07381-5

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2021) Self-tracking. In Kennerly, M., Frederick, S. and Abel, J.E. (eds), Information: Keywords. Columbia University Press, pp, 187-198.

Lupton, D. (2021) Afterword: future methods for digital food studies. In Leer, J. and Krogager, S.G.S. (eds), Research Methods in Digital Food Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 222-227.

Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (2021) COVID Society: introduction to the book. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 3-13.

Lupton, D. (2021) Contextualising COVID-19. In Lupton, D. and Willis, K. (eds), The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 14-24.

Other publications

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

Watson, A., Clark, M., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2021) Fieldwork at your fingertips: creative methods for social research under lockdown. Nature Career Column, 3 March 2021. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00566-2

Lupton, D., Pink, S. and Horst, H. (2021) Living in, with and beyond the ‘smart home’: introduction to the special issue. Convergence, 27(5), 1147-1154.

My publications in 2016

 

Books

Lupton, D. (2016) The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Edited special issues

Digitised health, medicine and risk’, Health, Risk & Society (volume 17, issue 7-8), 2016 (my editorial for this issue is available here).

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2016) Digitized health promotion: risk and personal responsibility for health in the Web 2.0 era. In Davis, J. and Gonzalez, A. M. (eds), To Fix or To Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine. New York: New York University Press, pp. 152—76. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital risk society. In Zinn, J., Burgess, A. and Alemanno, A. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 301—9. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) You are your data: self-tracking practices and concepts of data. In Selke, Stefan (ed.), Lifelogging: Digital Self-Tracking: Between Disruptive Technology and Cultural Change. Zurich: Springer, pp. 61—79. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital health technologies and digital data: new ways of monitoring, measuring and commodifying human bodies. In Olleros, F. X. and Zhegu, M. (eds), Research Handbook of Digital Transformations. New York: Edward Elgar, pp. 84—102. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Personal data practices in the age of lively data. In Daniels, J., Gregory, K. and McMillan Cottom, T. (eds), Digital Sociologies. London: Policy Press, 335—350. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) ‘Mastering your fertility’: the digitised reproductive citizen. In McCosker, A., Vivienne, S. and Johns, A. (eds), Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture. London: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 81—93. (A preprint version is available here.)

Journal articles

Thomas, G.M. and Lupton, D. (2016) Threats and thrills: pregnancy apps, risk and consumption. Health, Risk & Society, 17(7-8), 495—509.

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital companion species and eating data: implications for theorising digital data-human assemblages. Big Data & Society, 3(1), online, available at http://bds.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053951715619947

Lupton, D. (2016) Towards critical health studies: reflections on two decades of research in Health and the way forward. Health, 20(1), 49—61.

Michael, M. and Lupton, D. (2016) Toward a manifesto for ‘a public understanding of big data’. Public Understanding of Science, 25(1), 104—116.

Lupton, D. (2016) The diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance. Economy & Society, 45(1), 101—122.

Lupton, D. (2016) The use and value of digital media information for pregnancy and early motherhood: a focus group study. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 16(171), online, available at http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0971-

Lupton, D., Pedersen, S. and Thomas, G.M. (2016) Parenting and digital media: from the early web to contemporary digital society. Sociology Compass, 10(8), 730—743.

Lupton, D. and Pedersen, S. (2016) An Australian survey of women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps. Women and Birth, 29, 368—375.

Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Lupton, D. and Heyes Labond, C. (2016) The affective intensities of datafied space. Emotion, Space and Society, 21, 33—40.

Pedersen, S. and Lupton, D. (2016) ‘What are you feeling right now?’ Communities of maternal feeling on Mumsnet. Emotion, Space & Society, online ahead of print: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175545861630010X

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital media and body weight, shape, and size: an introduction and review. Fat Studies, online ahead of print: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21604851.2017.1243392

Lupton, D. (2016) Lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies. Leisure Studies, 35(6), 709—711.

 

 

Fat, thin and fit bodies in digital media

 

I have just completed an introduction for a special issue of the journal Fat Studies on digital media and body weight, shape and size. Here’s an edited excerpt from the introduction. (Update: the introduction has now been published, and can be viewed here.)

Numerous researchers have called attention to the ways in which often very negative portrayals of fat embodiment circulate in the popular media. Despite the growing presence of attempts to counter these portrayals, online representations of fat bodies that seek to challenge accepted norms and engage in fat activist politics continue to be far outnumbered by those that continue to stigmatize and shame fat people and portray thin bodies as more desirable, healthy and attractive. A content analysis of the representation of “obesity” on YouTube (Yoo and Kim 2012) found that highly negative representations of fat people were common, as were those that attributed personal responsibility for body weight (such as showing fat people eating unhealthy food) and made fun of fat people. Another study of YouTube videos using the search term “fat” (Hussin et al. 2011) revealed that many highly-viewed videos included content that devalued fat people. Men were targeted for fat stigmatization twice as often as women, and white people were the targets far more frequently than other ethnic or racial groups. The antagonists engaging in active shaming or vilification of fat people were also overwhelmingly white men.

My own search for the term “fat people” on YouTube in September 2016 returned many top-ranked videos in which fat people are held up to ridicule and scorn. These bore such titles as “Fat People Fails,” featuring fat people falling over, breaking furniture or otherwise publicly humiliating themselves as well as “The Top Fattest People in the World,” and “Fat People Cringe,” all featuring fat bodies in the style of the freak show. These videos all have millions of views. A Google search for “fat memes” similarly found memes that not only stigmatize fat bodies but are blatantly abusive and often cruel. Just some examples I came across include unflattering images of fat people with texts such as “I’m fat because obesity runs in my family. No-one runs in your family,” “I’m lazy because I’m fat and I’m fat because I’m lazy,” and “Sometimes when I’m sad I like to cut myself … another slice of cheesecake.” When I looked for “fat GIFs” on the GIFY platform, here again were many negative portrayals of fat people, including cartoon characters like Homer Simpson as well as real people, again engaging in humiliating bodily performances. Many of these GIFs showed people jiggling their abdomens or dancing to demonstrate the magnitude of their flesh, belly flopping into swimming pools, eating greedily, smeared with food and so on. Here again, fat white men predominated as targets of ridicule.

Apps are another dominant media form that often focuses on the monitoring, representation and even gamification of human embodiment. As I have argued elsewhere, the ways in which game apps portray social groups can often reproduce and exacerbate negative or misleading stereotypes, including racism, sexism, healthism and norms of feminine embodiment privileging highly-groomed, youthful, physically fit and slim bodies (Lupton 2015, Lupton and Thomas 2015). When I searched the App Annie platform using the term “fat,” a plethora of apps portraying fat bodies in negative ways were identified. These included several game apps that represented fat people as ugly, greedy, lazy and gormless figures of fun who need encouragement to engage in weight-loss activities. Many other apps involve users (who are assumed not to be fat) manipulating images of themselves or others so that they look fat. These include “FatGoo”, marketed by its developers in the following terms: “Gaining weight is now fun! FatGoo is the ultimate app for creating hilarious fat photos of your friends and family.” Others of this ilk include “Fatty – Make Funny Fat Face Pictures,” “Fat You!,” “FatBooth” and “Fatify – Get Fat.” Another fat app genre is that which uses abusive terms to shame people into controlling their diet and lose weight. One example is “CARROT Hunger – Talking Calorie Counter.” It is marketed by its developer as a “judgemental calorie counter” which will “punish you for overindulging.” The app can be used to scan foods for their calorie content. If it judges food as too high in calories, users are abused with insulting epithets such as “flabby meatbags” and even tweets shaming messages about them to their Twitter followers. While such apps may be considered by some as harmless fun, they play a serious ideological role in stigmatizing and rendering abject fatness and fat people.

… Thinspiration is a profoundly gendered discourse. Far more female than male bodies feature in digital images tagged with #thinspiration or #thinspo. I noted earlier that white men tend to be targeted for ridicule in memes and GIFs. Interestingly, my search for “skinny” or “thin” memes and GIFs also hold up white male bodies to derision, this time drawing attention to thin men as lacking appropriate muscular strength. Many memes show half-naked thin men in body-building poses, seeking to highlight their lack of size. When skinny women are featured in memes and GIFS, it is usually in relation to women who falsely claim or complain about being fat or else are sexualized images of young women in swimwear displaying their lean bodies (often tagged in GIFs with #hot #beauty, #perfect and #sexy as well as #thin, #thispo or #skinny). Thin women, these memes suggest, are to be envied because they conform to conventions of female attractiveness. In contrast, thin men are deficient because they fail to achieve ideals of masculine strength and size. The fitspiration or fitspo terms are more recent, but they also take up and reproduce many of the ideals of thinspiration, and similarly have a strong focus on physical appearance and conventional sexual attractiveness. The bodies that are championed in fitspiration are physically toned, active, strong and fit as well as slim (but not emaciated), and are similarly eroticized, with both female and male bodies featuring (Boepple et al. 2016, Boepple and Thompson 2016, Tiggemann and Zaccardo 2016).

References

Boepple, L., Ata, R.N., Rum, R. and Thompson, J.K. (2016) Strong is the new skinny: a content analysis of fitspiration websites. Body Image, 17 132-135.

Boepple, L. and Thompson, J.K. (2016) A content analytic comparison of fitspiration and thinspiration websites. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 49 (1), 98-101.

Hussin, M., Frazier, S. and Thompson, J.K. (2011) Fat stigmatization on YouTube: a content analysis. Body Image, 8 (1), 90-92.

Lupton, D. (2015) Digital Sociology. London: Routledge.

Lupton, D. and Thomas, G.M. (2015) Playing pregnancy: the ludification and gamification of expectant motherhood in smartphone apps. M/C Journal (5). Accessed 22 October 2015. Available from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/1012.

Tiggemann, M. and Zaccardo, M. (2016) ‘Strong is the new skinny’: a content analysis of #fitspiration images on Instagram. Journal of Health Psychology, online ahead of print.

Yoo, J.H. and Kim, J. (2012) Obesity in the new media: a content analysis of obesity videos on YouTube. Health Communication, 27 (1), 86-97.

 

 

When data do not make sense

One of my current areas of research interests focuses on how to conceptualise digital data and the ways in which humans make sense of their personal data. Next week I am attending a workshop in Copenhagen run as a part of a series convened by RMIT’s Data Ethnographies Lab. We are addressing the topic of ‘broken data’, or digital data that for some reason do not work, are considered useless or fail to make sense to the people reviewing them.

Drawing on some of my own concepts of digital data, I have produced the following metaphorical alternatives to that of ‘broken data’.

Metaphor 1: if data are liquid, then …

• there can be blockages in data flows
• moving data can become stuck
• contained data can become out of control (like tsunamis or floods)
• liquid data can become frozen

Metaphor 2: if data are lively, or companion species, then …

• alive data can die
• domesticated data can become wild
• fresh data can decompose
• healthy data can become sick

Metaphor 3: if data can be eaten/consumed, then …

• data can become self or considered not-self
• data can be incorporated or not incorporated
• data can be digestible or indigestible
• data can be edible or inedible

 

 

 

 

Lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies

This is a foreword I wrote for a Leisure Studies special issue on digital leisure cultures (the link to the journal version is here).

In the countries of the Global North, each person, to a greater or lesser degree, has become configured as a data subject. When we use search engines, smartphones and other digital devices, apps and social media platforms, and when we move around in spaces carrying devices the record our geolocation or where there are embedded sensors or cameras recording our movements, we are datafied: rendered into assemblages of digital data. These personal digital data assemblages are only ever partial portraits of us and are constantly changing: but they are beginning to have significant impacts on the ways in which people understand themselves and others and on their life opportunities and chances. Leisure cultures and practices are imbricated within digital and data practices and assemblages. Indeed, digital technologies are beginning to transform many areas of life into leisure pursuits in unprecedented ways, expanding the purview of leisure studies.

These processes of datafication can begin even before birth and continue after death. Proud expectant parents commonly announce pregnancies on social media, uploading ultrasound images of their foetuses and sometimes even creating accounts in the name of the unborn so that they can ostensibly communicate from within the womb. Images from the birth of the child may also become publicly disseminated: as in the genre of the childbirth video on YouTube. This is followed by the opportunity for parents to record and broadcast many images of their babies’ and children’s lives. At the other end of life, many images of the dying and dead bodies can now be found on the internet. People with terminal illnesses write blogs, use Facebook status updates or tweet about their experiences and post images of themselves as their bodies deteriorate. Memorial websites or dedicated pages on social media sites are used after people’s death to commemorate them. Beyond these types of datafication, the data generated from other interactions online and by digital sensors in devices and physical environments constantly work to generate streams of digital data about people. In some cases, people may choose to generate these data; in most other cases, they are collected and used by others, often without people’s knowledge or consent. These data have become highly valuable as elements of the global knowledge economy, whether aggregated and used as big data sets or used to reveal insights into individuals’ habits, behaviours and preferences.

One of my current research interests is exploring the ways in which digital technologies work to generate personal information about people and how individuals themselves and a range of other actors and agencies use these data. I have developed the concept of ‘lively data’, which is an attempt to incorporate the various elements of how we are living with and by our data. Lively data are generated by lively devices: those smartphones, tablet computers, wearable devices and embedded sensors that we live with and alongside, our companions throughout our waking days. Lively data about humans are vital in four main respects: 1) they are about human life itself; 2) they have their own social lives as they circulate and combine and recombine in the digital data economy; 3) they are beginning to affect people’s lives, limiting or promoting life chances and opportunities (for example, whether people are offered employment or credit); and 4) they contribute to livelihoods (as part of their economic and managerial value).

These elements of datafication and lively data have major implications for leisure cultures. Research into people’s use of digital technologies for recreation, including the articles collected here and others previously published in this journal, draws attention to the pleasures, excitements and playful dimensions of digital encounters. These are important aspects to consider, particularly when much research into digital society focuses on the limitations or dangers of digital technology use such as the possibilities of various types of ‘addiction’ to their use or the potential for oppressive surveillance or exploitation of users that these technologies present. What is often lost in such discussions is an acknowledgement of the value that digital technologies can offer ordinary users (and not just the internet empires that profit from them). Perspectives that can balance awareness of both the benefits and possible drawbacks of digital technologies provide a richer analysis of their affordances and social impact. When people are using digital technologies for leisure purposes, they are largely doing so voluntarily: because they have identified a personal use for the technologies that will provide enjoyment, relaxation or some other form of escape from the workaday world. What is particularly intriguing, at least from my perspective in my interest in lively data, is how the data streams from digitised leisure pursuits are becoming increasingly entangled with other areas of life and concepts of selfhood. Gamification and ludification strategies, in which elements of play are introduced into domains such as the workplace, healthcare, intimate relationships and educational institutions, are central to this expansion.

Thus, for example, we now see concepts of the ‘healthy, productive worker’, in which employers seek to encourage their workers to engage in fitness pursuits to develop highly-achieving and healthy employees who can avoid taking time out because of illness and operate at maximum efficiency in the workplace. Fitness tracker companies offer employers discounted wearable devices for their employees so that corporate ‘wellness’ programs can be put in place in which fitness data sharing and competition are encouraged among employees. Dating apps like Tinder encourage users to think of the search for partners as a game and the attractive presentation of the self as a key element in ‘winning’ the interest of many potential dates. The #fitspo and #fitspiration hashtags used in Instagram and other social media platforms draw attention to female and male bodies that are slim, physically fit and well-groomed, performing dominant notions of sexual attractiveness. Pregnancy has become ludified with a range of digital technologies. Using their smartphones and dedicated apps, pregnant women can take ‘belfies’, or belly selfies, and generate time-lapse videos for their own and others’ entertainment (including uploading the videos on social media sites). 3D-printing companies offer parents the opportunity to generate replicas of their foetuses from 3D ultrasounds, for use as display objects on mantelpieces or work desks. Little girls are offered apps which encourage then to perform makeovers on pregnant women or help them deliver their babies via caesarean section. In the education sector, digitised gamification blurs leisure, learning and physical fitness. Schools are beginning to distribute heart rate monitors, coaching apps and other self-tracking devices to children during sporting activities and physical education classes, promoting a culture of self-surveillance via digital data at the same time as teachers’ monitoring of their students’ bodies is intensified. Online education platforms for children like Mathletics encourage users to complete tasks to win medals and work their way up the leaderboard, competing against other users around the world.

In these domains and many others, the intersections of work, play, health, fitness, education, parenthood, intimacy, productivity, achievement and concepts of embodiment, selfhood and social relations are blurred, complicated and far-reaching. These practices raise many questions for researchers interested in digitised leisure cultures across the age span. What are the affordances of the devices, software and platforms that people use for leisure? How do these technologies promote and limit leisure activities? How are people’s data used by other actors and agencies and in what ways do these third parties profit from them? What do people know about how their personal details are generated, stored and used by other actors and agencies? How do they engage with their own data or those about others in their lives? What benefits, pleasures and opportunities do such activities offer, and what are their drawbacks, risks and harms? How are the carers and teachers of children and young people encouraging or enjoining them to use these technologies and to what extent are they are aware of the possible harms as well as benefits? How are data privacy and security issues recognised and managed, on the part both of those who take up these pursuits voluntarily and those who encourage or impose them on others? When does digitised leisure begin to feel more like work and vice versa: and what are the implications of this?

These questions return to the issue of lively data, and how these data are generated and managed, the impact they have on people’s lives and concepts of selfhood and embodiment. As I noted earlier, digital technologies contribute to new ways of reconceptualising areas of life as games or as leisure pursuits that previously were not thought of or treated in those terms. In the context of this move towards rendering practices and phenomena as recreational and the rapidly-changing sociomaterial environment, all social researchers interested in digital society need to be lively in response to lively devices and lively data. As the editors of this special issue contend, researching digital leisure cultures demands a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective. Several exciting new interdisciplinary areas have emerged in response to the increasingly digitised world: among them internet studies, platform studies, software studies, critical algorithm studies and critical data studies. The ways in which leisure studies can engage with these, as well the work carried out in sub-disciplines such as digital sociology, digital humanities and digital anthropology, have yet to be fully realised. In return, the key focus areas of leisure studies, both conceptually and empirically – aspects of pleasure, performance, politics and power relations, embodiment, selfhood, social relations and the intersections between leisure and work – offer much to these other areas of enquiry.

The articles published in this special issue go some way to addressing these issues, particularly in relation to young people. The contributors demonstrate how people may accept and take up the dominant assumptions and concepts about idealised selves and bodies expressed in digital technologies but also how users may resist these assumptions or seek to re-invent them. As such, this special issue represents a major step forward in promoting a focus on the digital in leisure studies, working towards generating a lively leisure studies that can make sense of the constantly changing worlds of lively devices and lively data.

Review of Social Media for Academics

I have written many times on this blog about my own experiences of using social media and other digital tools for academic work and my research focusing on how other academics are doing this.

One of the people I have encountered along the way is Mark Carrigan, an early career British sociologist. Appropriately enough, we first met on Twitter a few years ago, around the time I began experimenting with various digital tools for professional purposes. Since then, we have had many discussions there and on other online forums, as well as by email, about using social media in universities (and a couple of in-person meetings as well). Mark has now written a book on Social Media for Academics. It is the first book I know of to present a ‘how-to’ manual combined with reflections on the wider implications of  academic social media engagement.

Mark is a great example of someone who has strategically used social media while still in the very early stages of his career (completing his doctorate) to create a high profile for his work. He has now built on this experience not only to work in various positions involving promoting academic journals, departments and organisations, but to produce this book. In its chapters, Mark employs a casual, chatty style to painlessly introduce readers to the art of academic social media.

The book is distinctive because Mark’s sociological training allows him to contextualise the social, cultural and political implications of academic social media use. Yes, he offers  a multitude of helpful tips and advice about how best to communicate online, what platforms and tools are the most effective, how to develop your own voice, how online engagement helps in promoting one’s research and reaching wider audiences outside academia, building networks, curating interesting material you have found on the internet, finding time to use social media and so on. But there are also reflections offered on what academic social media means for professional identities and for academic work in general. In addition there are many pithy remarks drawing on Mark’s observations, for example, of the awkwardness that sometimes accompanies the experience of colleagues meeting in the flesh after having developed a hitherto purely online relationship, or the potential pitfalls of live-tweeting conferences or writing a tweet or blog post in haste and anger that then becomes widely circulated well after the initial irritation has subsided.

This book is highly recommended for higher degree students and faculty staff members who are interested in the possibilities of academic social media for both research and teaching, as well as researchers interested in future directions for the university workplace and academic identities.

 

Digitised dissection: medical procedures on the internet

 

This is an excerpt from my book in progress, Digital Health: Critical Perspectives, to be published by Routledge in 2017.

With the advent of websites, social media platforms and apps, the internal organs and workings of the body have moved from being exclusively the preserve of medical students and surgeons. Digital medical devices have entered into the public arena of the internet, offering new possibilities for lay people to gaze inside the spectacle of the human body. A vast volume of computerised medical images of human life from conception to death are now readily available online. Tapping in such keywords as ‘human anatomy’ will call up many apps on the Apple App Store or Google Play which provide such details. While these apps have been explicitly designed for the use of medical and other healthcare students and trainees, they are readily available to any person who may wish to download them. The Visible Human Project developed by the US National Library of Medicine is an earlier example of how human flesh can be rendered into a digital format and placed on the internet for all to view. The developers of The Visible Human Project used digital technologies to represent in fine detail the anatomical structure of two cadavers (one male and one female). Each body was cross-sectioned transversely from head to toe. Images of the sections of the bodies using MRI and CT scans and anatomical images were uploaded to the Project website. They can also be viewed at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC. A similar website, The Visible Embryo, displays images of embryos and foetuses from fertilisation to birth, with a week-by-week display showing the stages of foetal development. The data used for this website were drawn from digitising microscopic cross-sections of human embryo specimens held on slides in The National Institutes of Health’s Carnegie Collection of Embryos as well as from 3D and 4D digital foetal ultrasound images.

Many opportunities are provided on the internet for people who want to view detailed images of surgical and other medical procedures in their full gory detail. YouTube has become a major provider of anatomical and surgical technique videos for medical training. Some medical specialists and surgeons upload images and videos of their work to Snapchat and Instagram, mostly in the effort to promote their services (cosmetic surgeons are in the forefront in this practice). Instagram does not allow users to upload images that are considered too explicit (such as those portraying surgery on breasts or genitals), so some doctors have turned to Snapchat as an alternative forum. One infamous such specialist is Sandra Lee, a dermatologist known as ‘Dr Pimple Popper’. Her Instagram photos and YouTube videos showing her at work have received many millions of views. Perhaps the best-known Snapchatting medical specialist is the cosmetic surgeon ‘Dr Miami’ (Michael Salzhauer), who uploads detailed photos and videos of his surgical procedures (including controversial procedures like labiaplasties, or surgery designed to reshape women’s external genitals). ‘Dr Miami’ is unafraid to Snapchat images of himself brandishing a wad of body fat he has just excised in a tummy tuck. He employs two full-time staff members to manage his social media accounts.

The use of web-streaming services is employed by a number of hospitals to host webcasts of surgical procedures for any interested person to view. The US National Library of Medicine provides a list on its website of several such webcasts with hyperlinks, from numerous different American hospitals. Lay people may now even view live-streamed surgical procedures using a smartphone app and wearing a virtual reality headset to provide a 3D immersive effect, as offered by the Medical Realities company in April 2016. This technology is designed principally for training medical students, but also allows lay people who participate to feel as if they are present in the operating theatre.

Pinterest, an image-curating and sharing platform, features many collections of images related to medical matters. Several of these relate to patient experiences of health, but others are curated by medical and nursing students and practising healthcare providers. Some are humorous, featuring memes, cartoons or other images designed to appeal to medical and nursing students and other trainees in the health professions. Other Pinterest photographs feature novelty commodities, again clearly directed to the same audience (for example, anatomical heart or ECG heart beat cookie cutters, human-organ and stethoscope-shaped jewellery, coffee mugs in the shape of spinal vertebrae). While these images are vastly outnumbered by the serious photographs in Pinterest collections that show anatomical images and other medical information (some of which are explicit photographic images that detail flesh, bone and blood), they offer alternative representations of the ways in which human bodies and the practice of healthcare are represented online.

The major differences offered by the latest digital technologies that document and monitor the human body are the continual nature of the surveillance opportunities they present, their expansion from the clinic into domestic and intimate spaces and relationships and their feedback mechanisms, which allow their subjects to ‘read’ and interpret their own bodies via biometric measurements. Medical practices that were once embodied in the flesh, including the development of doctors’ expertise in touching the patient’s body and determining what is wrong, have increasingly become rendered into software such as the video conferencing services offered in remote telemedicine technologies. Virtual bodies have been developed for medical training purposes, allowing students to conduct virtual surgery. To achieve this virtuality, the processes by which doctors practice – their customs, habits and ways of thinking – are themselves digitised. Both doctors and patients are rendered into ‘informatic “body objects”, digital and mathematical constructs that can be redistributed, technologized, and capitalized’ (Prentice, 2013: 20).

Many digital health technologies are directed at illuminating the exterior or interior of the human body with the use of metrics that may represent features of the body as numbers or graphs. The use of apps to collect information about body functions and movements, for example, generates a continuing set of images that represent the body. Biometric data serves first to fragment the body into digitised pieces of information and then to combine these pieces into a recombinant whole that is usually presented in some kind of visual form. Amoore and Hall (2009: 48) use the term ‘digitised dissection’ to refer to the ways in which biometric whole body scanners at airports operate. This term is even more apposite when adopted to discuss the fragmentation of bodies in the context of digital health. Digital technologies are able to peer into the recesses of the body in ever-finer detail, creating new anatomical atlases.

References

Amoore, L. & Hall, A. (2009) Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 444-64.

Prentice, R. (2013) Bodies in Formation: an Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery EducationDurham, NC: Duke University Press.