The “Treat Us Right!”: Digital Publics, Emerging Biosocialities and the Female Complaint” piece by Banner discussed the drive to patient-focused medicine, whereby individuals are subjected to neoliberal biomedical realities. This specific piece focused on a networking site where women discussed their minute-to-minute health data fluctuations, and how they saw themselves as subjects in different arenas.
This made me think a little bit about WebMD and the kind of diagnostic realities/fantasies that are brought upon by such a specific way of framing diagnostic tools. What kind of a subjectivity arises out of the specific ways in which webMD constructs illness as a set of discrete symptoms, what does it mean for things to be %-based matches with symptoms? What does it mean for someone to be able to “share” their results to social media, muddying the sociality of diagnosis.
Tying this into the piece about “online and offline” relationships, I’ve seen folks kind of invalidate the experiences that have been informed by the “online” diagnosis, which is in one way sort of valid because of the ways in which diagnosis is structured, but also it can kind of still carry a ton of truth within itself. There’s a way in which the virtual mediation by technology of diagnosis forms the “inauthentic experience”, which might not be seen in regards to self-diagnosis technology bought at pharmacies that are physical, yet also not mediated by a physical doctor. I think that might have been an analytical leap, but I can see and have seen something like that occurring.
No comments:
Post a Comment