Week 14: Health, Care, and Wellbeing

Mandatory Reading

• Leaver, T. (2017). Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online. Social Media + Society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192
• Guttman, N., Lev, E., Segev, E., Ayecheh, S., Ziv, L., Gadamo, F., Dayan, N., & Yavetz, G. (2018). “I never thought I could get health information from the Internet!”: Unexpected uses of an Internet website designed to enable Ethiopian immigrants with low/no literacy skills to browse health information. New Media & Society, 20(7), 2272-2295. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817712937
• McCosker, A., & Gerrard, Y. (2021). Hashtagging depression on Instagram: Towards a more inclusive mental health research methodology. New Media & Society, 23(7), 1899–1919. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820921349 TikTok_Syllabus
• Vanden Abeele, M. M. P., & Nguyen, M. H. (2022). Digital well-being in an age of mobile connectivity: An introduction to the Special Issue. Mobile Media & Communication, 10(2), 174-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579221080899

Further Reading

• Beattie, A., & Daubs, M. S. (2020). Framing “digital well-being” as a social good. First Monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10430
• Bol, N., Helberger, N., & Weert, J. C. M. (2018). Differences in mobile health app use: A source of new digital inequalities? The Information Society, 34(3), 183–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2018.1438550

Advanced UG Version

• Ruckenstein, M., & Schüll, N. D. (2017). The datafication of health. Annual review of anthropology, 46(1), 261-278.
• Leaver, T. (2017). Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online. Social Media + Society, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117707192

Rationale

The chosen works center on discussions of important ideas in health, care, and welfare within the digital sphere. Many publications from journals in psychology, medicine, and sociology were under consideration, but finally none were chosen. This choice was taken to guarantee that students participate more actively in the critical debates and theoretical models supporting digital intimacies in health and welfare instead of concentrating on empirical results from these domains. The selected readings address subjects including privacy, care, access, networks of support, and maintenance and measurement of health. In the future, this module may include more findings on what it means to bring AI into health care.