Authors:Anette Grønning, Helena Sandberg Pages: 1 - 9 Abstract: Just as the title above suggests, it is difficult to address health issues without considering the role of the media and everyday life; the time and space when health is produced and cared for or put at risk and exposed. In the introduction to this special issue, ‘Media and health in everyday life’, we will discuss the three components of the theme. We will offer some definitions, but also problematise the conceptual underpinnings and highlight the intertwinement of the three. We set off by reflecting on health. Then we will engage with ideas around the notion of everyday life. In the final section, we add the component of the media before we present and summarise the nine contributions to the special issue and clarify to what extent they add to our understanding of the theme. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.136096 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Martina Skrubbeltrang Mahnke, Matilde Lykkebo Petersen, Mikka Nielsen Pages: 10 - 28 Abstract: This paper examines personal experiences of digital health data on the Danish eHealth platform sundhed.dk. Taking a patient’s view, the paper understands data sense-making as an embodied communicative practice. The empirical analysis, consisting of 24 purposefully sampled interviews, is brought together with the conceptual framework describing and unpacking the ambivalences to be found in digital health data experiences into themes of data ambivalence, emotional ambivalence, communicative ambivalence and identity ambivalence. This in-depth empirical description of patients’ ambivalent experiences contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the profound changes digital health data is having on a patients’ everyday lives. In particular, it emphasizes the communicative challenges arising from the constant availability of digital health data anytime, anywhere, and calls for further research into the new and unfamiliar communicative situations in which patients are placed and forced to navigate in. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.132370 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Martin Bavngaard Pages: 29 - 49 Abstract: This article explores the incorporation of mobile applications in older people’s physical health management through the lens of Foucault’s concepts on self-governance. Based on ten interviews with older Danes, the article posits that physical health management practices constitute practices of self-governance, involving participants’ attunement to both physical activity and bodily phenomena, which are both facilitated and optimized through app-based self-tracking. The findings align the rationales driving participants’ efforts with the trajectory of the governmental concept of active ageing. Using apps thus becomes intertwined with participants’ efforts towards ageing successfully, consequently taking on a dual function: Apps strengthen the adherence to norms of conduct for achieving an optimal ageing process by allowing for ubiquitous self-monitoring and self-assessment. Simultaneously, I argue that apps may also act as a gatekeeper, as lacking the technical competencies to efficiently use apps hinders effective health management and thus clashes with efforts conforming to active ageing. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.132346 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Maria Schreiber Pages: 50 - 72 Abstract: This study investigates practices of sharing the experience of stroke on Instagram through use of the hashtag #strokesurvivor. The hashtag brings together people from different cultural backgrounds and professions and those who experience different kinds of healthcare and varying degrees of physical or cognitive impairment. Through a digital ethnography of #strokesurvivor, the conjunctive experiences and communicative practices of the community are reconstructed. Instagram enables specific forms of sociality and sharing, like long-term visual storytelling and influencer dynamics. Adapting to a transformed body and identity is perceived and practiced as a conjunctive experience and a struggle. A strong orientation towards a “normal life” is a recurring theme. Mourning and perseverance are put forward as two modes of coping with and adapting to a transforming body and self. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.132468 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Mie Birk Jensen, Karen Hvidtfeldt Pages: 73 - 104 Abstract: In this paper, we explore how men’s experiences of living with illness are mediatized on Instagram, thus understanding social media platforms as “sociotechnical affordances” that support and modulate how everyday lives are lived (Paasonen, 2018). The article zooms in on four Danish Instagram profiles (with approximately 2,000 followers each) that centre on experiences of living with different diagnoses, including morbus chrohn, hip dysplasia, chronic pain, and mental illness. By applying the concepts “biological entrepreneurship” (Stage, 2017), “bodywork”, and “spornosexuality” (Hakim, 2019), we examine how masculinity becomes reconfigured as a resource, rather than an opposition to health. The content on Instagram emerges as entrepreneurial by extending the body: Situated within the larger framework of the profiles’ content and their place in the platform economy of attention, illness is transformed into a narrative and an affective source, whether on the politics of gender, visibility of illness, monetary gain, or self-help. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.133885 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Sara Dahlman, Sine N. Just, Linea Munk Petersen, Prins Marcus Valiant Lantz, Nanna Würtz Kristiansen Pages: 105 - 126 Abstract: The digitalization of health promises individual empowerment while raising the threat of collective surveillance. Conceptualizing these threats and promises as sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how issues of datafied female health are articulated in Danish public discourse. Empirically, we work with a large data set of Danish news media coverage of algorithmic technologies in the past 10 years (2011–2021). We locate coverage of female-oriented health technologies (or femtech) by using the data sprint methodology to track the emergence of such technologies as a topic of public concern. Across the data, we identify two broad sociotechnical imaginaries: one zooming in on individual uses of femtech, the other focusing on the collective benefits of public health initiatives. We conclude that sociotechnical imaginaries of femtech are increasingly entangled in everyday life, making female bodies knowable through algorithms and data. As such, female health becomes subject to instrumental rationality, not lived reality. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.133900 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen, Carsten Stage Pages: 127 - 145 Abstract: Through the development of a “health hauntological” approach, this article investigates how pre-patient illness narratives are mediated and negotiated in and around the DR documentary series Gentesten ændrede mit liv (2020) [The gene test changed my life]. We argue that this documentary format attests to how the expansion of genetic testing technologies alters experiences, genres, and narratives of illness that increasingly move to a pre-diagnostic and pre-symptomatic domain. The analysis shows how the use of genetic testing technologies creates hauntological situations in which pre-patients – through the mapping of family pathologies of the past and possible future diagnoses – encounter the complex temporalities and entanglements inherent to genetic bonds. Furthermore, we claim that these haunting encounters with mortality, vulnerability, and potential loss can be acted on – or listened to – in various responsive ways. Mediating pre-patient illness narratives thus entails an ethical balancing between care for participants and the desire for tellable, transformational narratives. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.133908 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Sergio Villanueva Baselga Pages: 146 - 163 Abstract: In 1981, the first case of AIDS was diagnosed in the US. Almost forty years later, the biomedical situation of people living with HIV (PLWH) in Western countries has significantly improved, and today, PLWH have a normal lifespan with few physical comorbidities. Nevertheless, current media representations of HIV do not seem to have moved past the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. The film Philadelphia, directed by Jonathan Deeme in 1993, has had a huge cultural impact in how society perceives HIV, and many contemporary films and fiction series portraying HIV still represent the condition in the same narrative terms. This analysis sets out to define what could be referred to as the Philadelphia Syndrome, a concept intended to describe the outdated, nostalgic representations of HIV in mainstream cultural productions in the last decade, a period marked in biomedical terms by the success of antiretroviral drugs, chronification, the importance of undetectability, and the increasingly widespread use of the prophylaxis pre-exposition (PrEP). By analyzing ten mainstream blockbuster films and fiction series produced from 2013 to 2022, this study examines the main characteristics of the Philadelphia Syndrome: nostalgia and melodramatic use of the 1980s and 1990s, high stigmatization of gay sexualities, and a neglect of women with HIV. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.132466 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
Authors:Martin Engebretsen Pages: 164 - 184 Abstract: Social media represent new arenas for health communication. Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok provide unique opportunities for health workers to build understanding, engagement, and trust among a broad and young audience. At the same time, such platforms demand of health workers a careful balance between social closeness and professional distance. The article is based on a case study in which the award-winning Norwegian psychologist Maria Abrahamsen’s practice of health communication on Instagram is studied through the lens of multimodal discourse analysis. Following a bottom-up method, the study starts with a close reading of a single Instagram post, where video and written verbal text interact closely. The entire account is then studied as a complex case of mediated health communication. Conclusively, after a discussion of genre implications, the article suggests possible solutions to key challenges concerning the followers’ engagement and trust. PubDate: 2023-05-24 DOI: 10.7146/mk.v39i74.134085 Issue No:Vol. 39, No. 74 (2023)
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