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The Quantified Pandemic: Digitised Surveillance, Containment and Care in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis
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Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly defined as a way of knowing about the virus. It takes a critical look at two domains of human activity that play a central role in the fight against the virus outbreak, namely medical sciences and technological innovation. It analyzes their efforts to craft solutions for their user base and explores the unwanted social costs of these operations. The essay argues that the over-reliance of biomedical research on “whiteness” for lab testing and the techno-solutionism of the consumer infrastructure devised to curb the social costs of the pandemic are rooted in a distorted idea of a “standard human” based on a partial and exclusive vision of society and its components, which tends to overlook alterity and inequality. It contends that to design our way out of the pandemic, we ought to make space for distinct ways of being and knowing, acknowledging plurality and thinking in terms of social relations, alterity, and interdependence.
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds on critical data studies to warn against the universalization of problems, narratives, and responses to the virus. To this end, it explores two types of data gaps and the corresponding “data poor.” The first gap concerns the data poverty perduring in low-income countries and jeopardizing their ability to adequately respond to the pandemic. The second affects vulnerable populations within a variety of geopolitical and socio-political contexts, whereby data poverty constitutes a dangerous form of invisibility which perpetuates various forms of inequality. But, even during the pandemic, the disempowered manage to create innovative forms of solidarity from below that partially mitigate the negative effects of their invisibility.
New feminist materialism theories potentially offer a foundation for innovative ways to research health-related experiences from a more-than-human perspective. Thus far, however, few researchers have taken up this more-than-human and post-qualitative approach to investigate health topics. In this article, I outline some approaches I have developed. I begin with a brief overview of the central tenets of new feminist materialism scholarship and a discussion of some empirical studies where these perspectives have been employed to address health topics. I then list some key propositions, research questions, and things to think with from the feminist materialism literature that I have put to work as a basis for conducting empirical research and analyzing data. Then follows four examples drawn from my research on digital health, providing instances of how qualitative researchers can take up this approach and what insights can be generated from entering into this kind of “research assemblage.”
This editorial presents an overview of digital health technologies, discusses previous research and introduces the contributions to the special issue “Beyond Techno-Utopia: Critical Approaches to Digital Health Technologies”. It is argued that thus far, few critical analyses of digital health technologies have been published in the social science literature, particularly in relation to the newest technologies. While the articles collected here in this special issue have gone some way in offering a critical response to digital health technologies, they represent only a beginning. Many more compelling topics remain to be investigated. The editorial ends with outlining directions for future research in this area.
Despite the obvious triumph of a medical theory and practice grounded in the hospital, a new medicine based on the surveillance of normal populations can be identified as emerging in the twentieth century. This new Surveillance Medicine involves a fundamental remapping of the spaces of illness. This includes the problematisation of normality, the redrawing of the relationship between symptom, sign and illness, and the localisation of illness outside the corporal space of the body. It is argued that this new medicine has important implications for the constitution of identity in the late twentieth century.
This essay explores how public reception of, and individual resistance to, public health mandates have reinforced agentic notions of bodily management in the COVID-19 era. Our collective approach to the pandemic continues to secure prevalent understandings of human agency over disease and illness by reifying the concept of personal choice. Notions of risk and shame shape these performances but do little to dislodge cultural frames that reify notions of individualism and the entrepreneurial subject. The wide circulation of viral videos highlighting the defiance of mask mandates is one site where choice and personal autonomy animate these debates. These confrontational acts are not easily segmented from the other cultural apparatuses where the privatization of risk is marshalled for political ends.
A feminist media history of quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.
Anglo-American culture has used media to measure and quantify lives for centuries. Historical journal entries map the details of everyday life, while death registers put numbers to life's endings. Today we count our daily steps with fitness trackers and quantify births and deaths with digitized data. How are these present-day methods for measuring ourselves similar to those used in the past? In this book, Jacqueline Wernimont presents a new media history of western quantification, uncovering the stories behind the tools and technologies we use to count, measure, and weigh our lives and realities.
Numbered Lives is the first book of its kind, a feminist media history that maps connections not only between past and present-day “quantum media” but between media tracking and long-standing systemic inequalities. Wernimont explores the history of the pedometer, mortality statistics, and the census in England and the United States to illuminate the entanglement of Anglo-American quantification with religious, imperial, and patriarchal paradigms. In Anglo-American culture, Wernimont argues, counting life and counting death are sides of the same coin—one that has always been used to render statistics of life and death more valuable to corporate and state organizations. Numbered Lives enumerates our shared media history, helping us understand our digital culture and inheritance.
Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security--a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people-- naively or unwittingly--trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people's faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.
What is good care? In this innovative and compelling book, Annemarie Mol argues that good care has little to do with 'patient choice' and, therefore, creating more opportunities for patient choice will not improve health care. Although it is possible to treat people who seek professional help as customers or citizens, Mol argues that this undermines ways of thinking and acting crucial to health care. Illustrating the discussion with examples from diabetes clinics and diabetes self care, the book presents the 'logic of care' in a step by step contrast with the 'logic of choice'. She concludes that good care is not a matter of making well argued individual choices but is something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to attune knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives. Mol does not criticise the practices she encountered in her field work as messy or ad hoc, but makes explicit what it is that motivates them: an intriguing combination of adaptability and perseverance. The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice is crucial reading for all those interested in the theory and practice of care, including sociologists, anthropologists and health care professionals. It will also speak to policymakers and become a valuable source of inspiration for patient activists.
The idea of risk has recently risen to prominence in political debate and in matters of public policy. Cognitive psychology treats decision-making as a private personal act but in real life, dangers are presented in standardized forms which pre-code the individual's choices. This collection follows on from the programme for studying risk and blame that was implied in the book "Purity and Danger". The first six essays in this book argue that any analysis of risk perception that ignores cultural and political bias is worthless. For the sake of a mistaken idea of objectivity, research on risk perception tries to avoid politics, the idea of nature is inherently politicized. The next five essays range over questions in cultural theory. A culture is viewed as a way of life which standardizes concepts and values. It is held steady by the institutions in which it is articulated. Questions of autonomy, credibility and gullibility, the social origins of wants, and the recognition of distinctive thought styles are at present only beginning to be treated systematically in a framework. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of social anthropology, philosophy, political and cultural theory.
This is a PDF of an article (published under the Open Access model) accepted for publication in Medical Law Review following peer review. [Martin, R. (2006) 'The exercise of public health powers in cases of infectious disease: human rights inplications. Commentary'. Medical Law Review 14 pp.132-143] is available online at: http://medlaw.oxfordjournals.org/archive/index.dtl .--Copyright Oxford University Press DOI : 10.1093/medlaw/fwi038
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