Introduction: The Will to App: digitising public health

(Dis)assembling mental health through apps: The sociomaterialities of young adults’ experiences

“…Accelerated by the emergence of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, digital health encompasses personal devices including apps and wearable devices (wearables), websites and social media, government services such as My Health Record in Australia, and the collecting, processing, and sharing of large data in hospitals, research institutes, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical corporations. Critical analyses of digital health have covered many topics, for example, surveillance, privacy, and power (Lupton, 2016), pedagogical and public dimensions of online health platforms (Van Dijck and Poell, 2016), subjectivity, agency, and the digitally engaged subject (Hohmann-Marriott, 2021), empowerment (Lupton and Maslen, 2019), healthcare and digital disruption (Levina, 2017), and the digitalisation of public health (Albury et al, 2019).…”

Commodifying Diversity in the Marketing of a Digital Hearing Start-Up

“…Secondly, this article will engage with the widely articulated view in media studies that mobile apps, and particularly health and fitness apps, address their users primarily as self-managing individual citizens, taking on responsibility for themselves and their wellbeing (e.g., Levina 2017;Lupton 2014;Mulvin 2018). In the words of Albury et al (2019) "the individual's will to self-care is embedded in the design, marketing, and governance of such tools" (p. 4). So, for instance, Dylan Mulvin argues that night modes, recently built into mobile phones to tackle the problem of what is described as "poor sleep hygiene," divert attention from wider structural issues-the proliferation of precarious work, for example-that lead to difficulties getting enough sleep.…”