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Surveillant care or benevolent control? A multimodal genre and sentiment analysis of therapeutic mHealth app reviews
Abstract
The rapid expansion of mobile mental health (mHealth) apps has redefined the landscape of digital mental health interventions, offering unprecedented accessibility and scalability while embedding users within algorithmic infrastructures of care and control. This study adopts a multidisciplinary framework, integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and move analysis to interrogate the linguistic, affective, and visual strategies shaping user engagement with mHealth apps. Through an extensive analysis of 30,000 user reviews from Headspace, Calm , and BetterHelp , the paper uncovers a structured rhetorical pattern in user feedback, revealing the interplay of empowerment, algorithmic governance, and neoliberal self-optimization. Key insights include four emerging inter-related repertoires across the dataset. These findings advance the concept of therapeutic surveillance advanced by the current research endeavor, illustrating how mHealth apps function as digital shepherds – nudging users toward self-regulation while extracting behavioral and emotional data.
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Virtual Influencers (VIs) have become the most prolific research subjects in human–computer interaction and mass media and communication studies from a plethora of perspectives. Developed to integrate social traits and anthropomorphic minds in their social media posts, human-like VIs engage with followers via visually authentic personae, emotionally captivating multimodal storytelling, and semio-pragmatic labor-intensive strategies in conformity with the expectations (and pressures) of the contemporary influencer culture. Informed by Belk’s revisited model of and timely scholarly works on the extended self, we introduce a new conceptualization of the virtual self that performs identity in platformized spaces. To examine virtual personae’s identity performance, we adopt a trans-disciplinary mixed-method forensic netnographic research design, synergizing computer vision, natural language processing, and semio-pragmatic analytical tools. A convenient sample of 334 (sponsored) posts, retrieved from the official Instagram account of the quintessential virtual agent Lil Miquela, is scrutinized taking into consideration her posts’ images and accompanying captions. The paper carries out the tripartite analysis in serious attempt to unravel: (a) how humanoid her synthesized images appear to the naked eye in quest of authenticity building; (b) the techno-affects that contribute to her identity performance; and (c) the semio-pragmatic affordances appropriated and deployed in Instagrammable spaces, showcasing how the three serve the performance of her digital identity. Valuable insights reveal that her agency draws heavily on algorithmization and semiotic immateriality to produce action. The study’s findings contribute to the existing body of literature on VIs and the extended self within the context of artificial intelligence.
In the last ten years, social media site mining, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all other websites, has become a popular area of study. In the world of digital media today, people are getting more and more vocal because they love to share their opinions. User-generated material abounds on social media platforms and apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, providing wealthy content to gather sentiments. Comments are another way that the most active and social voices can make themselves heard, which in turn gives us a window into their feelings. Sentiment analysis is the task of comprehending the emotions and opinions conveyed in text and other media. It has various applications in domains along with social media such as e-commerce, health, politics, and marketing. This paper delineates the generic process of sentiment analysis and reviews the main methods, challenges, and trends in this field. The main goal of this survey paper is to survey the current state-of-the-art research works on sentiment analysis (SA) techniques and related fields and to compare the performance of different deep learning models for sentiment polarity. The paper also discusses the recent studies that have employed machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid models to address sentiment polarity problems, which is the categorization of text into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. The paper evaluates the results of different models on a series of datasets. The paper’s main contributions are the elaborate classifications of numerous recent articles and the demonstration of the recent research directions in sentiment analysis and its related fields. The paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of SA techniques with succinct details.
The automated classification of texts into predefined categories has become increasingly prominent, driven by the exponential growth of digital documents and the demand for efficient organization. This paper serves as an in-depth survey of text classification and machine learning, consolidating diverse aspects of the field into a single, comprehensive resource—a rarity in the current body of literature. Few studies have achieved such breadth, and this work aims to provide a unified perspective, offering a significant contribution to researchers and the academic community. The survey examines the evolution of machine learning in text categorization (TC), highlighting its transformative advantages over manual classification, such as enhanced accuracy, reduced labor, and adaptability across domains. It delves into various TC tasks and contrasts machine learning methodologies with knowledge engineering approaches, demonstrating the strengths and flexibility of data-driven techniques. Key applications of TC are explored, alongside an analysis of critical machine learning methods, including document representation techniques and dimensionality reduction strategies. Moreover, this study evaluates a range of text categorization models, identifies persistent challenges like class imbalance and overfitting, and investigates emerging trends shaping the future of the field. It discusses essential components such as document representation, classifier construction, and performance evaluation, offering a well-rounded understanding of the current state of TC. Importantly, this paper also provides clear research directions, emphasizing areas requiring further innovation, such as hybrid methodologies, explainable AI (XAI), and scalable approaches for low-resource languages. By bridging gaps in existing knowledge and suggesting actionable paths forward, this work positions itself as a vital resource for academics and industry practitioners, fostering deeper exploration and development in text classification.
This bibliometric study examines the relationship between media manipulation and adolescent mental health, analyzing 101 articles published from 2016 to 2024. The research reveals a significant increase in attention post-2016, with the United States, Spain, Australia, and Italy leading contributions. Using PRISMA guidelines and VOSviewer for keyword co-occurrence and co-citation mapping, three main research clusters are identified: cognitive dynamics of misinformation, digital literacy, and the social implications of misinformation. The study emphasizes the need for multidisciplinary efforts to enhance digital literacy and develop informed policy interventions. Findings advocate for proactive strategies to mitigate the negative effects of digital misinformation on youth, including policy reforms for effective content moderation and greater transparency in algorithmic processes. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of context-aware AI systems and better access to mental health services to address the psychological impacts of media manipulation on adolescents. These efforts are essential for fostering a sustainable digital environment that supports the mental well-being of young people.
Background
The increasing prevalence of mental health issues among children and adolescents has prompted a growing number of researchers and practitioners to explore digital technology interventions, which offer convenience, diversity, and proven effectiveness in addressing such problems. However, the existing literature reveals a significant gap in comprehensive reviews that consolidate findings and discuss the potential of digital technologies in enhancing mental health.
Methods
To clarify the latest research progress on digital technology to promote mental health in the past decade (2013–2023), we conducted two studies: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The systematic review is based on 59 empirical studies identified from three screening phases, with basic information, types of technologies, types of mental health issues as key points of analysis for synthesis and comparison. The meta-analysis is conducted with 10 qualified experimental studies to determine the overall effect size of digital technology interventions and possible moderating factors.
Results
The results revealed that (1) there is an upward trend in relevant research, comprising mostly experimental and quasi-experimental designs; (2) the common mental health issues include depression, anxiety, bullying, lack of social emotional competence, and mental issues related to COVID-19; (3) among the various technological interventions, mobile applications (apps) have been used most frequently in the diagnosis and treatment of mental issues, followed by virtual reality, serious games, and telemedicine services; and (4) the meta-analysis results indicated that digital technology interventions have a moderate and significant effect size (g = 0.43) for promoting mental health.
Conclusion
Based on these findings, this study provides guidance for future practice and research on the promotion of adolescent mental health through digital technology.
Systematic review registration
https://inplasy.com/inplasy-2023-12-0004/, doi: 10.37766/inplasy2023.12.0004.
Background
The importance of customer reviews in determining satisfaction has significantly increased in the digital marketplace. Using sentiment analysis in customer reviews has immense potential but encounters challenges owing to domain heterogeneity. The sentiment orientation of words varies by domain; however, comprehending domain-specific sentiment reviews remains a significant constraint.
Aim
This study proposes an Improved VADER (IVADER) lexicon-based classification model to evaluate customer sentiment in multiple domains. The model involves constructing a domain-specific dictionary based on the VADER lexicon and classifying doeviews using the constructed dictionary.
Methodology
The proposed IVADER model uses data preprocessing, Vectorizer transformation, WordnetLemmatizer-based feature selection, and enhanced VADER Lexicon classifier.
Result
Compared to existing studies, the IVVADER model accomplished outcomes of accuracy of 98.64%, precision of 97%, recall of 94%, f1-measure of 92%, and less training time of 44 s for classification.
Outcome
Product designers and business organizations can benefit from the IVADER model to evaluate multi-domain customer sentiment and introduce new products in the competitive online marketplace.
Digital artefacts and infrastructures have been presented as ever more urgent and necessary for mental health research and practice. Telepsychiatry, mHealth, and now digital psychiatry have been promoted in this regard, among other endeavours. Smartphone apps have formed a particular focus of promissory statements regarding the improvement of epistemic and clinical work in psychiatry. This article contextualises and historicises some of these developments. In doing so, I show how purportedly novel fields have been constituted in part through practices of ‘performative nominalism’ (whereby articulations of a neologism in relation to established and recent developments participate in producing the referent of the new term). Central to this has been implicit and explicit extolment of what I term biomedical virtues in public‐facing and professionally orientated discourse. I document how emphases on various virtues have shifted with the attention of psychiatry to different digital modalities, culminating with knowledge‐production in mental health as one significant focus.
Innovations in networked digital communications technologies, including the rise of “Big Data,” ubiquitous computing, and cloud storage systems, may be giving rise to a new system of social ordering known as algorithmic regulation. Algorithmic regulation refers to decisionmaking systems that regulate a domain of activity in order to manage risk or alter behavior through continual computational generation of knowledge by systematically collecting data (in real time on a continuous basis) emitted directly from numerous dynamic components pertaining to the regulated environment in order to identify and, if necessary, automatically refine (or prompt refinement of) the system's operations to attain a pre-specified goal. This study provides a descriptive analysis of algorithmic regulation, classifying these decisionmaking systems as either reactive or pre-emptive, and offers a taxonomy that identifies eight different forms of algorithmic regulation based on their configuration at each of the three stages of the cybernetic process: notably, at the level of standard setting (adaptive vs. fixed behavioral standards), information-gathering and monitoring (historic data vs. predictions based on inferred data), and at the level of sanction and behavioral change (automatic execution vs. recommender systems). It maps the contours of several emerging debates surrounding algorithmic regulation, drawing upon insights from regulatory governance studies, legal critiques, surveillance studies, and critical data studies to highlight various concerns about the legitimacy of algorithmic regulation.
Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. To more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people and the way those decisions are being shaped, this article focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celebrity and influencer parents. The article begins by contextualizing these parental practices within the literature on surveillance, with particular attention to online surveillance and the increasing importance of affect. It then gives a brief overview of work on pregnancy mediation, monitoring on social media, and via pregnancy apps, which is the obvious precursor to examining parental sharing and monitoring practices regarding babies and infants. The examples of parental monitoring and parental mediation will then build on the idea of “intimate surveillance” which entails close and seemingly invasive monitoring by parents. Parental monitoring and mediation contribute to the normalization of intimate surveillance to the extent that surveillance is (re)situated as a necessary culture of care. The choice to not survey infants is thus positioned, worryingly, as a failure of parenting.
In this article, we provide an account of Fitbit, a wearable sensor device, using two complementary analytical approaches: auto-ethnography and media analysis. Drawing on the concept of biopedagogy, which describes the processes of learning and training bodies how to live, we focus on how users learn to self-care with wearable technologies through a series of micropractices that involve processes of mediation and the sharing of their own data via social networking. Our discussion is oriented towards four areas of analysis: data subjectivity and sociality; making meaning; time and productivity and brand identity. We articulate how these micropractices of knowing one’s body regulate the contemporary ‘fit’ and healthy subject, and mediate expertise about health, behaviour and data subjectivity.
Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and well-being in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalised the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces.
People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of an audience. This paper argues that closely examining content created by others and looking at one's own content through other people's eyes, a common part of social media use, should be framed as social surveillance. While social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its effects and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I look at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on people who engage in it. I use Foucault's concept of capillaries of power to demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than the hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance literature. Social media involves a collapse of social contexts and social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social surveillance. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. These processes are normal parts of day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through social media.
In what ways has psychology become more influential in Western society? In this book author Ole Jacob Madsen considers the notion of a ‘Therapeutic Turn’ in Western culture – the tendency for psychology to permeate ever new spheres within society.
The Therapeutic Turn evaluates the increasing prevalence of psychology in several areas of Western society: Western consumer culture, contemporary Christianity, self-help, sport and politics. Madsen proposes that there are problematic aspects to this development which are seldom recognised due to a widely held assumption that ‘the more psychology, the better for everyone’. A recurring concern with psychological solutions is that they often provide individual solutions to structural problems. As a result, psychologists may be inadvertently increasing the burden on the shoulders of the people they are meant to help and, at the same time, our capacity to understand individual suffering in the light of major historical and political changes in society is becoming increasingly clouded.
The Therapeutic Turn presents an accessible and engaging critique of the influence of psychology within Western society. It will appeal to a broad audience of students, academics and lay readers interested in this aspect of modernity and contemporary society, and it will also be of great interest to practitioners and therapists.
Although over 100,000 health and medical mobile apps have been placed on the market, few critical social analyses have been yet undertaken of the role of these apps in healthcare, preventive health and health promotion. In this article I present an argument for approaching the study of mobile apps as sociocultural artefacts, focusing specifically on those that have been developed on health and medical topics. This perspective acknowledges that apps are digital objects that are the products of human decision-making, underpinned by tacit assumptions, norms and discourses already circulating in the social and cultural contexts in which they are generated, marketed and used. First, I provide the context, by discussing the gradual digitisation of health and medical information since the advent of the Internet and the emergence of health and medical apps as one of the latest developments. Second, I discuss how a critical perspective may be employed to analyse the social, cultural and political dimensions of health and medical apps. Finally I illustrate how such an approach may be applied by giving a case study of an analysis of the top 10 ranked health and medical apps on the Apple App Store on one day, outlining some major themes and discourses that emerge.
We argue that the processes underlying institutionalization have not been investigated
adequately and that discourse analysis provides a coherent framework for such
investigation. Accordingly, we develop a discursive model of institutionalization that
highlights the relationships among texts, discourse, institutions, and action. Based on
this discursive model, we propose a set of conditions under which institutionalization
processes are most likely to occur, and we conclude the article with an exploration of
the model’s implications for other areas of research.
This book provides a rich and accessible account of genre studies by a world-renowned applied linguist. The hardback edition discusses today's research world, its various configurations of genres, and the role of English within the genres. Theoretical and methodological issues are explored, with a special emphasis on various metaphors of genre. The book is full of carefully worded detail and each chapter ends with suggestions for pedagogical practice. The volume closes with evaluations of contrastive rhetoric, applied corpus linguistics, and critical approaches to EAP. Research Genres provides a rich and scholarly account of this key area.
Background
Text-based digital media platforms have revolutionized communication and information sharing, providing valuable access to knowledge and understanding in the fields of mental health and suicide prevention.
Objective
This systematic review aimed to determine how machine learning and data analysis can be applied to text-based digital media data to understand mental health and aid suicide prevention.
Methods
A systematic review of research papers from the following major electronic databases was conducted: Web of Science, MEDLINE, Embase (via MEDLINE), and PsycINFO (via MEDLINE). The database search was supplemented by a hand search using Google Scholar.
Results
Overall, 19 studies were included, with five major themes as to how data analysis and machine learning techniques could be applied: (1) as predictors of personal mental health, (2) to understand how personal mental health and suicidal behavior are communicated, (3) to detect mental disorders and suicidal risk, (4) to identify help seeking for mental health difficulties, and (5) to determine the efficacy of interventions to support mental well-being.
Conclusions
Our findings show that data analysis and machine learning can be used to gain valuable insights, such as the following: web-based conversations relating to depression vary among different ethnic groups, teenagers engage in a web-based conversation about suicide more often than adults, and people seeking support in web-based mental health communities feel better after receiving online support. Digital tools and mental health apps are being used successfully to manage mental health, particularly through the COVID-19 epidemic, during which analysis has revealed that there was increased anxiety and depression, and web-based communities played a part in reducing isolation during the pandemic. Predictive analytics were also shown to have potential, and virtual reality shows promising results in the delivery of preventive or curative care. Future research efforts could center on optimizing algorithms to enhance the potential of text-based digital media analysis in mental health and suicide prevention. In addressing depression, a crucial step involves identifying the factors that contribute to happiness and using machine learning to forecast these sources of happiness. This could extend to understanding how various activities result in improved happiness across different socioeconomic groups. Using insights gathered from such data analysis and machine learning, there is an opportunity to craft digital interventions, such as chatbots, designed to provide support and address mental health challenges and suicide prevention.
Social Media and Mental Health Special Issue Editorial.
In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures like the introduction of physical and social distancing, compulsory mask wearing, and contact tracing. In the rescripting of public space, different notions of formal and informal surveillance, along with different textures of mediated and social care, appeared. In this article, we explore perceptions around divergent forms of surveillance across social, technological, governmental modes, and the relationship of surveillance to care in our media and cultural practices. What does it mean to care for self and others during a pandemic? How does care get enacted in, and through, media interfaces and public interaction?
In recent years, efforts in Global Mental Health (GMH) have evolved alongside critical engagement with the field's claims and interventions. GMH has shifted its agenda and epistemological underpinnings, increased its evidence base, and joined other global policy platforms such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This editorial introduction to a thematic issue traces the recent shifts in the GMH agenda and discusses the changing construct of ''mental health'' as GMH moves away from a categorical biomedical model toward dimensional and transdiagnostic approaches and embraces digital technologies. We highlight persistent and emerging lines of inquiry and advocate for meaningful interdisciplinary engagement. Taken together, the articles in this special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry provide a snapshot of current interdisciplinary work in GMH that considers the socio-cultural and historical dimensions of mental health important and proposes reflexive development of interventions and implementation strategies.
This study presents a qualitative analysis of mobile phone applications (apps) marketed to women for health management. Although previous research has focused on the efficacy of apps, researchers recently have begun questioning the behaviors and knowledges prioritized through technology design. In this study, feminist perspectives are used to decode how women’s health apps conceptualize a healthy female subject. Results show that the healthy female subject promoted by these apps embodies three types of subject positions: (1) Barbie; (2) Earth goddess, and (3) entrepreneur. These themes fix White, middle-class, skinny, young, and fertile female bodies as the standards for health. Women are encouraged to achieve these bodies through practices of self-surveillance, disclosure, and self-advocacy, which are encouraged and normalized through routine use of apps. Thus, apps allow women to actively participate in choosing traditional subject positions, revealing the postfeminist sensibilities of this form of technology-based embodiment.
The book discusses not only how surveillance is done to people - the 'operator' perspective - but how in everyday life people encounter, engage and even initiate surveillance. In the latter, ordinary people do their own surveillance especially but not only on social media. The culture of surveillance, discussed in relation to a range of research, is thought of as a combination of surveillant 'imaginaries' and 'practices'. These are not innocent, however, but are imbricated with surveillance capitalism. Novels such as Dave Eggers' The Circle illustrate the culture of surveillance.
Surveillance grows constantly, especially in the countries of the global north. Although as a set of practices it is as old as history itself, systematic surveil-lance became a routine and inescapable part of everyday life in modern times and is now, more often than not, dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs). Indeed, it now makes some sense to talk of “surveillance societies,” so pervasive is organizational monitoring of many kinds. Fast developing technologies combined with new governmental and commercial strategies have led to the proliferation of new modes of surveillance, making surveillance expansion hard to follow, let alone analyze or regulate. In the past three decades traffic in personal data has expanded explosively, touching numerous points of everyday life and leading some to proclaim the “end of privacy.” But although questions of privacy are interesting and important, others that relate to the ways in which data are used for “social sorting,” discriminating between groups that are classified differently, also need urgently to be examined. Who has the power to make such discriminatory judgments, and how this becomes embedded in automated systems, is a matter of public interest. Such questions are likely to be with us for some time, because of what might be called the “rise of the safety state,” which requires more and more surveillance, and also because the politics of personal information is becoming increasingly prominent.
It has recently become fashionable within the surveillance studies community to subject the concept and regime of “privacy protection” to some very rigorous criticism. “Privacy” and all that it entails is argued to be too narrow, too based on liberal assumptions of subjectivity, too implicated in rights-based theory and discourse, insufficiently sensitive to the social sorting and discriminatory aspects of surveillance, and overly embroiled in spatial metaphors about “invasion” and “intrusion.” As a concept, and as a way to frame the various social and political challenges encountered within “surveillance societies,” it is inadequate. These critiques are important, and to some extent, have set scholarly inquiry on a new, exciting and broader, trajectory than that offered by privacy scholars. On closer examination, however, these critiques are often based on some faulty assumptions about the contemporary framing of the privacy issue, and about the governance of the issue. Privacy, as a concept, regime, a set of policy instruments, and as a way to frame civil society activism, shows an extraordinary resilience. Surveillance scholars must learn to live with it.
Decision-making theories have argued that many daily decisions are the result of heuristic rather than systematic processes. Given the ubiquity of smartphones as mobile communication and computing devices along with the vast smartphone app market, our exploratory study aimed to understand how heuristics guide smartphone app selection. Observing 49 smartphone users from the US and Germany viewing 189 total apps from three predetermined categories, the current study identified five decision-making heuristics used to download a variety of smartphone apps. Of these, four were variants of a “Take the First” (TtF) heuristic that allowed smartphone users to quickly navigate the app market, by passing a good deal of other informational cues in order to download apps that were simply highly rated or ranked. Reliance on heuristic processing is useful in helping navigate the app market, but it also results in smartphone users overlooking potentially important app information.
This paper explores the embodied dimensions of computer and internet use in later life, and examines how technology use relates to constructions and experiences of the ageing body. It is argued that previous research on technology use and embodiment has neglected older bodies, in contrast to research on gender and disability. Furthermore, while earlier theorisations presented internet use as disembodied, it is argued that the experience of using such technologies is grounded in our embodiment. In the light of these limitations and arguments for more complete theories of the body, this paper explores how technology use relates to various aspects of embodiment. These issues are examined in the light of data from qualitative interviews and time-use diaries completed by retirees in 17 households in the United Kingdom. By examining the ‘technobiographies’ of these older computer users, it is shown that changes in body techniques are prompted and in some cases required by broader cultural and technological change. The findings evince the process of acquiring computing skills as an embodied competency, and as a form of ‘practical knowledge’ that can only be ‘learned by doing’. These experiences of technology use were embedded within constructions and experiences of ageing bodies. Although the participants drew on discourses of ageing in complex ways, their coding of computer technologies in terms of the competences of youth often reproduced hierarchies between young and old bodies.
George Orwell's ‘Big Brother’ and Michel Foucault's ‘panopticon’ have dominated discussion of contemporary developments in surveillance. While such metaphors draw our attention to important attributes of surveillance, they also miss some recent dynamics in its operation. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is used to analyse the convergence of once discrete surveillance systems. The resultant ‘surveillant assemblage’ operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings, and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled in different locations as discrete and virtual ‘data doubles’. The surveillant assemblage transforms the purposes of surveillance and the hierarchies of surveillance, as well as the institution of privacy.
In the recently published lectures from the College de France series, The Birth of Bio-Politics, Foucault (2009) offers his most explicit analysis of neo-liberal governmentality and its impact upon states and societies in the late twentieth century. Framed in terms of the bio-political as a mode of governance of populations and its relationship to neo-liberalism, these lectures offer a rich seam of theoretical resources with which to interrogate contemporary forms of governmentality. This paper seeks to apply these and some recent critical analysis by Foucauldian scholars, to the study of health governance, with particular reference to the use of social marketing as a strategy to improve the health of populations 'at a distance'. Reflecting a broader decollectivisation of welfare, such strategies are identified as exemplars of neo-liberal methods of governance through inculcating self management and individualisation of responsibility for health and wellbeing. Drawing on original empirical data collected with a sample of fifty long term unemployed men in 2009, this paper critically examines social marketing as a newer feature of health governance and reflects upon participants' responses to it as a strategy in the context of their wider understandings of health, choice and responsibility.
This article explores a range of technologies for ‘lateral surveillance ’ or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds with an ideology of ‘responsibilization ’ associated with the risk society: that consumers need training in the consumption of services and the development of expertise to monitor one another. Rather than displacing ‘top-down ’ forms of monitoring, such practices emulate and amplify them, fostering the internalization of government strategies and their deployment in the private sphere. In an age in which everyone is to be considered potentially suspect, all are simultaneously urged to become spies.
Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View
- V K Bhatia
- Bhatia VK
Discourse and Social Change
- N Fairclough
- Fairclough N
Being at home with privacy: Privacy and mundane intimacy through same-sex locative media practices
- L Hjorth
- S Pink
- H Horst
- Hjorth L
Addressing the escalating psychiatrist shortage
- S Weiner
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
- S Zuboff
- Zuboff S
Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation
- Z Bauman
- D Lyon
- Bauman Z