Fibreculture Journal (Jul 2012)
FCJ-144 Healthymagination: Anticipating Health of our Future Selves.
Abstract
In 2010 General Electric launched an initiative called Healthymagination. Healthymagination is an apt signifier of the emerging Health 2.0 movement - a growing effort to marry Web 2.0 technology, participatory discourse, and network subjectivity to health care and management. Through tracking, reporting and sharing of our health data we are transformed into a utopian world where we obtain a mastery of one’s future self. The investment in the health of our future selves creates actionable conditions for the present selves – a participation in the moral economy of the network, where subjects are bound by a morality that necessitates sharing of one’s data with others. The vision of a future healthy self therefore is bound with the health of the network. Through the regime of anticipation networked utopias of Health 2.0 produce risk subjectivities, which then are engaged within an affective investment in the neoliberal market economy.
