Can Digital Health Save Democracy? Meeting the Cosmopolitical Challenge of Digital Worlds

Abstract

This article explores the challenges and opportunities of social media health activisms to shape public participation in the digital future of healthcare. As health becomes ever more entangled with digital technologies, a growing ecology of digital health services promise greater individual autonomy to learn about and managing medical conditions, as well as accessing health services and engaging in forms of self-care. Cautioning against optimist visions of digital health and their promise of empowerment and autonomy, the article explores how health activisms on social media are reclaiming visions of healthcare that move beyond individual and depoliticised models of health technologies. The notion of cosmopolitics is employed to conceptualise relations between technology and health that implicate human and non-human interests in entanglements between health, morality and technology.

Keywords

• health
• digital health
• surveillance
• politics
• social media
• healthcare futures