Share the story of what Open Access means to you
University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities
Olivia Banner
You don't have access to this book. Please try to log in with your institution.
Log in
The Precision Medicine Initiative, Apple's HealthKit, the FitBit—the booming digital health industry asserts that digital networks, tools, and the scientific endeavors they support will usher in a new era of medicine centered around "the voice of the patient." But whose "voices" do such tools actually solicit? And through what perspective will those voices be heard? Digital health tools are marketed as neutral devices made to help users take responsibility for their health. Yet digital technologies are not neutral; they are developed from an existing set of assumptions about their potential users and contexts for use, and they reflect dominant ideologies of health, dis/ability, gender, and race. Using patient-networking websites, the Quantified Self, and online breast cancer narratives, Communicative Biocapitalism examines the cultural, technological, economic, and rhetorical logics that shape the "voice of the patient" in digital health to identify how cultural understandings and social locations of race, gender, and disability shape whose voices are elicited and how they are interpreted.
-
Cover
-
Title Page
-
Copyright Page
-
Contents
-
Acknowledgments
-
Introduction: Theorizing Communicative Biocapitalism
-
1. Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in the Medical Humanities
-
2. The Voice of the Patient in Communicative Biocapitalism
-
3. Capacity and the Productive Subject of Digital Health
-
4. Algorithms, the Attention Economy, and the Breast Cancer Narrative
-
5. Against the Empathy Hypothesis
-
Conclusion
-
Footnotes
-
Notes
-
Works Cited
-
Index
Citable Link
Published: 2017
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-05369-8 (paper)
- 978-0-472-12338-4 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-07369-6 (hardcover)