In Sickness and In Health.

In our age of complete digitalization, its hard to think of anything that we can not do online. Conventionally, our personal health and well-being was reserved for the knowledge and prestige of the family physician. This trust, along with most of our actions, has shifted from the physical world to the digital as we type our ails and worries into a search engines to see what we may suffering from. This role of mediation (a key point raised by Latour in Wyatt et al.) is nothing new, it is what GP’s and nurses have been doing for centuries. But by introducing the internet as a trusted mediator, a rivalry between reverent and legitimate power has ignited.

Through the internet, we witness the rise of the medicine 2.0 and individualism through new source of both information & misinformation and spaces of research as detailed by Leong. The control of power has shifted; responsibility has stayed with the individual however the concern is now communal. The drastic changes in legislation and public opinion on smoking in Australia exemplifies this. In an attempt to regain the loose reins, you find new systems of management and administration in the from of websites and forums which aid the shift of power from public to private. In particular, government administrated websites that provide information on a range of health issues, including illicit drugs, in a responsible and proactive manner. By presenting facts in public forum, the internet aids in dispelling myths while assisting users to make informed decisions.

However, there remains the darker side to this 24/7 digital pharmacy as Neilson and Barratt discuss. The internet instantly oversteps the professional administration of products and treatments, delivering them directly to the hands of mere cyberchondriacs, to borrow Lewis’ terminology, full blown addicts or the curious consumer. They go on to raise the question of online monitoring, alluding that technology helps slay the monster it created.

When using the popular WebMD Symptom Checker, if the common symptoms of stress, headache and restless sleep are submitted, you are reassuringly diagnosed with either sunburn, dementia, porphyria or lymes disease. The only illness it fails classify is our obsessive attraction towards a complete and all consuming digital life.

Reshaping a culture around the digital revolution, countries now have to support their citizens who are affected by the new vices the internet provides. In Korea, a highly digitalized country, internet addiction is treated as a mental addiction. The video, Internet Addiction in China documents the move of communal interaction to individual digital obsession and the drastic treatment which is prescribed to rectify it.

References

Lewis, T. (2006). Seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondria? Media, Culture & Society, volume 28, issue 4: 521-539.

Nielsen, S. and Barratt, M. J. (2009). Prescription Drug Misuse: Is Technology Friend or Foe? In Drug and Alcohol Review, volume 28: 81-86.

Wyatt, S., Harris, R. and Wathen, N. (2008). The Go-Betweens: Health, Technology and Info(r)mediation. In Mediating Health Information: The Go-Betweens in a Changing Socio-Technical Landscape. Sally Wyatt, Nadine Wathen and Roma Harris (eds), pp. 1-12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.