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Through the conceptual framework of datafication, dataism and dataveillance, this study investigates beliefs and attitudes regarding datafication and the related privacy and security concerns among individuals with Type 1 diabetes. Qualitative research was conducted through interviews among fifty-two individuals with Type 1 diabetes in Poland and Italy. The findings reveal a dynamic interplay between self-discipline and empowerment. The majority of interviewees emphasized the benefits of technologies for gaining a better understanding of their health condition and for more effective disease management. However, a minority of interviewees perceived the negative effects of datafication, including dataveillance, which leads to hyper-control of the disease, and dataism, characterized by excessive reliance on and dependency on technology. Critical beliefs about technologies fuelled rejection attitudes, leading some interviewees to suspend or abandon their use. Lastly, reflexivity on privacy and security issues appears to be low, particularly among older individuals with lower levels of education and socioeconomic status. This results in a poor understanding and underestimation of the potential risks associated with security and privacy. The findings increase the understanding of the factors that can facilitate or hinder the adoption of technology among people with diabetes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Japanese self-regulatory systems that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War to regulate the sexual content within Japanese films metamorphosed into a powerful state apparatus to create fear and uncertainty for those involved in making adult videos. We depict the history of Japan's obscenity laws, from their origin as a response to Western imperialism to the self-regulatory bodies created in the post-war period of the American Occupation to maintain the obscenity laws while conceding to American demands for freedom of creative expression. Thus, these self-regulatory bodies originated to mediate between two antithetical Western imperial requirements in a state initially wanting to modernize and then democratize. We then examine how the notorious prosecution of the Nihon Ethics of Video Association (Bideo Rinri Kyōkai aka Biderin), the self-regulatory of the adult video industry, brought to a head the contradictions inherent in the state's deployment of these bodies while revealing a more sinister dynamic of state control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that femininity is a form of control over women's identity, and that femininity is predominantly performative. This research examines the performative nature of femininity in Instagram posts, based on the idea that social media is a means through which young women negotiate and perform their feminine identity. Self-presentation theories suggest that female social media users perform aspects of self-presentation as influenced by the audience, the situation, and implicit social constructs of gender. This study used Reflexive Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with ten women Instagram users aged between 18 - 27, who post regularly to Instagram. The focus was on exploring the participant's detailed accounts of how they manage their online identity and self-presentation of femininity on Instagram. Emerging themes emphasised the performative aspects of self-presentation, such as self-surveillance and self-monitoring and impression management in relation to online social situations. Findings highlight the significant, influential aspect the audience plays in performative femininity as well as the importance of Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical theory of self-presentation and Walkerdine's (1989) concept of femininity as a performance. The study raises important questions about the presentation and performative elements of femininity on Instagram and how femininity is still a form of hegemonic control over women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution originates from Track 1, “Genetics and biomedical innovation: Between risky and promising scenarios”, held within the VIII STS Italia conference. The session was intended to promote reflection on the implications of the latest innovations in genetic research and molecular biology for the formation of new care practices, as well as new surveillance and risk management. The objective of the paper is to highlights the contradictions and ambivalence that may rise from biomedical innovation through analysing two specific cases: 1) off-label practice in the context of rare disease in oncology and 2) pre-natal screening technology and surveillance practices. In both cases, these biomedical innovations, although very promising, produced high uncertainty, and the technologies and/or processes developed to cope with the “unknown” were challenging. However, at the same time, tensions and contradictions were observed that originated unexpected practices “from below”. In particular, the following section is focused on the ambivalence that has increasingly taken root in the management of risks related to health with respect to individual contributions and to research and scientific work practices.

Concurrent with the rise of digital health and personal health tracking technologies, a market has also emerged of products targeted specifically at women: 'femtech'. This article is motivated by the concern that insufficient regulatory attention has been devoted to this growing market, and that extant ambiguity in the regulation of femtech leaves its users at risk of relying on technologies of as-yet unproven worth. It is posited that femtech profoundly disrupts well-established regulatory mechanisms of protection in ways that mean that these silos of protection will not be adequate. This is because regulation, as it is currently constructed, is insufficiently sensitive to feminist perspectives regarding what these technologies mean for women. As a result, the regulatory sphere in which femtech operates fundamentally fails to ensure that the health and safety of femtech users are protected as this market continues to expand. To counteract this, the argument is made that an appropriate regulatory response to femtech must respond to the distinctive unmet need in the regulation of this technological realm and the acute risk that femtech poses. This must include a multidimensional whole-system approach grounded in feminist perspectives on health, fertility, and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on UK research with over 600 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT+) people, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant AH/J011894/1), which explored understandings and experiences of LGBT 'community'. I examine the ways in which intimacy is regulated and shaped by and within social interaction, which was apparent in three main ways. First, the research identified how for some people the very concept of 'LGBT community' was linked to intimacy. Second, there was strong evidence to suggest that some LGBT+ people self-regulate their practices of intimacy (such as holding hands or kissing in public) so as not to be recognised as enacting a same-gender relationship. This was understood as a form of self-protection or hate crime prevention, though degrees of habit and professed concern for other people's feelings were also contributing factors. Third, experiences of intimate relations were shaped by intersectional dynamics, particularly relating to various forms of discrimination, including ageism, biphobia, classism, (dis)ableism, racism, and transphobia from and among LGBT+ people. Whilst LGBT 'communities' were thought to enable opportunities to seek sexual and/or intimate encounters, this is not without its complexities. Although there have been improvements in relation to legislation and wider social attitudes, there is, for some, persistent apprehension and self-regulation which, whether necessary or not, are significant. LGBT+ people's experiences thus suggest that intimacy can be shaped by multiple inequalities both within and without LGBT 'communities'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores and describes how Colombian and Spanish young people present themselves on Instagram according to the social game and the symbolic capital that they infer as normative from influencers. The methodology used combines the focus group technique (seven groups) with a content analysis of the profiles of the informants (N = 651). In total, 53 first-year creative industries university students participated. The results show that the work developed by the influencers has given rise to an aspirational narrative genre that young people tend to emulate according to the Instagram habitus in order to be recognised as leading players. Their self-presentation has three main features: a) a preference for showing 'in-classifying' practices such as leisure and tastes for freedom; b) the predominance of a specific type of profile and gestures that avoids self-production markers and aspires towards a global audience; and c) the normalisation of self-promotional discourse. Most informants experience Instagram as a game in which they compete to accumulate visibility conceived as relational validation, although in the case of Colombian informants there is a more professional outlook towards the platform. Finally, for all of them, Instagram constitutes a serious game, and many of them admit to feeling too exposed. As a result, they have implemented self-surveillance practices, such as consulting with peers before posting photographs, using secondary accounts and deleting posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article relates the Foucauldian theorisation of self-surveillance to the contradictory (non)presence of racialized labouring bodies of South Asian men in rural Greece. The disciplinary mechanism of temporary labour and migration regimes, exercised through migrant illegality and threat of deportations, works efficiently to make the men conform to a certain set of societal behaviours, erase their presence from Greek public spaces, and extract productive labour efficiently from them. By drawing on interviews of undocumented Indian and Pakistani male migrants in Greece, the article shows how 'illegality' and potential deportability shapes their strategies of staying in the country. The men self-surveil and regulate their movements by 'containing' themselves in their dormitories after work. This self-imposed isolation, through spatial segregation, deflects attention away from Greece's restrictive immigration and labour regimes, based on differential exclusion based on class, skills, and professional education. It prevents local Greeks from building solidarity with them and, in doing so, avoid dismantling deep-rooted and widely prevalent discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to idealized social media imagery has been shown to be detrimental to body image among young women, and social media literacy may be protective. This mixed methods study aimed to evaluate the effects of an online video narrated by a high-profile, plus-size model on the body image and negative mood of young women and predictors of the effects. A sample of 304 young women, average age 20.95 (SD = 2.09) years, completed an online survey including pre- and post-exposure measures of state body image and negative mood, and trait measures of upward social media appearance comparison, thin-ideal internalization, and selfie-investment. A subset (n = 148) responded to open-ended questions to obtain feedback on the video coded categorically and through thematic analysis. Findings revealed immediate improvements in state body satisfaction and negative mood, with higher levels of trait appearance comparison and selfie investment associated with smaller effects of the video. Participants endorsed the video as raising awareness of unrealistic images but limited in terms of mitigating appearance comparison and selfie-investment. Furthermore, participants described that Iskra's status as a professional model also influenced their reactions. These findings highlight the importance of assessing for unintended paradoxical effects of social media literacy efforts and ensuring that such interventions are empirically based. • The effects of exposure to a social media video created by a plus size model were evaluated using mixed methods • Short term improvements in state body satisfaction and negative mood were found • Participants described the video as helpful in terms of raising awareness of unrealistic images • The videos was also perceived as having limited capacity to decrease comparisons [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of fertility apps and what data-sharing in this arena can mean for app users. The paper offers a brief background of some available fertility apps, how they work and where they are situated in the sphere of health-tracking apps. Exploring how exactly these apps market themselves in terms of feminist-empowerment discourses, the author examines how these claims fit within broader critical discussions around fertility data, data sharing and the ways that applications and algorithms are designed to configure particular versions of reproductive femininity. The author shows the way that intimate data takes on a new life as it is sold on in order to identify women as potential targets for purposes of commercial marketing, as well as the more subtle ways this works to remind female users of reproductive expectations within societies. The paper illustrates the way that fertility apps can play a role in the further medicalization and regulation of the female body as a newly-digitalized reproductive machine, as these apps become a new mode of inducing conception under a veiled guise of appearing to be a harmless and empowering way for women to re-learn and re-claim their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how food-related practices are discursively constructed in an employee wellness program (EWP). Drawing on qualitative grounded theory analyses of internal-and external-facing EWP materials, the author theorizes how food-related practices, technology, institutional power, and wellness intersect. By entwining health, medicine, and food under the umbrella of wellness, the EWP promotes food-as-wellness (eating the right foods will lead to individual holistic well-being by improving the already-healthy person) while incenting and effectuating food-as-medicine (eating the right foods can help cure individual illness/disease or intervene as a treatment for a disease risk factor such as overweight or obesity) because of food-as-economics (collectively eating the right foods can help solve rising health insurance costs). The theory advanced in this article expands our understanding of wellness discourses and points to the need for research examining how such discourse impacts lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By discursively analyzing blogs and popular press articles written by people who discontinued using Fitbit, this article reveals the incongruities between the tracking of our bodily information, the communication of that bodily information via wearables, and the promises of changing of users' attitudes and behaviors with how wearables are actually used in practice. The discourses of discontinuance in this analysis also reveal how former Fitbit engenders feelings of disconnection and may affect users in detrimental ways. As a result, and despite the predominant framing and conceptualization of wearables as "motivating," "empowering," and "useful" (self)surveillance tools, I argue that Fitbit is an example of a failure both of self-surveillance and of wearable communication for helping users achieve their health and fitness goals. Finally, I argue that we need to start thinking about wearable communication like other forms of communication that are inherently inconsistent and contradictory, and that can be accepted, negotiated, or rejected by users. Instead of focusing on the disciplinary or controlling potentials of wearables as a form of self-surveillance, this paper considers the resistance and negotiations inherent in the (dis)use of wearables, and demonstrates the necessity of exploring both wearables and surveillance itself in relation to fundamental understandings of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selfies are self-surveillance images or videos captured by individuals using digital cameras that, in the attempt to obtain content, may lead to selfie-related injuries or deaths. Criminal selfies refer to offenders who take selfies with their victim(s) during crimes. Globally, both phenomena are underestimated due to deficient official data and the social nature of these incidents. This pioneering media-based retrospective study on selfie-related trauma aims to offset the literature deficit on this topic in Egypt, as an Arabic-speaking country, and extend the global understanding beyond the Western context. We utilised the Egyptian newspaper articles published between January 2014 and May 2023. We identified 25 reports of selfie-related accidents that resulted in 29 casualties with an 82.8% fatality rate. Male victims outnumbered female victims and the mean age was 21.8 years, with most victims aged in their twenties. Regarding the causes of selfie-related deaths, drowning in the Nile ranked first (43.4%) followed by falling from a height (26%). Unless suicide was suspected (n = 1), the remaining cases were considered accidental. We also found four reported criminal selfies that were associated with intimate partner violence. Three of these offenders were male, of which two had a history of drug addiction. In contrast to selfie cases, only one offender belonged to the second decade age group. Overall, selfie-related deaths were infrequent, with an average of three incidents per year. In conclusion, audio-visual communication has altered the modus operandi of crimes, so the digital media analysis should supplement the criminological and medicolegal processes., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

It has become cliché to observe that new information technologies endanger privacy. Typically, the threat is viewed as coming from Big Brother (the government) or Company Man (the firm). But for a nascent data practice we call “self-surveillance,” the threat may actually come from ourselves. Using various existing and emerging technologies, such as GPS-enabled smartphones, we are beginning to measure ourselves in granular detail – how long we sleep, where we drive, what we breathe, what we eat, how we spend our time. And we are storing these data casually, perhaps promiscuously, somewhere in the “cloud,” and giving third-parties broad access. This data practice of self-surveillance will decrease information privacy in troubling ways. To counter this trend, we recommend the creation of the Privacy Data Guardian, a new profession that manages Privacy Data Vaults, which are repositories for self-surveillance data. In addition to providing technical specifications of this approach, we outline the specific legal relations, which include a fiduciary relationship, between client and Guardian. In addition, we recommend the creation of an evidentiary privilege, similar to a trade secret privilege, that protects self-surveillance data held by a licensed Guardian. We also answers objections that our solution is implausible or useless. We conclude by pointing out that various legal, technological, and self-regulatory attempts at safeguarding privacy from new digital, interconnected technologies have not been particularly successful. Before self-surveillance becomes a widespread practice, some new innovation is needed. In our view, that innovation is a new “species,” the Personal Data Guardian, created through a fusion of law and technology and released into the current information ecosystem.

This article analyzes my personal experience of having a maternal body through autoethnographic means. Being pregnant is a time of celebration, but moms experience private and public changes in their bodies. These public changes continue during the postpartum period. Ground in Foucault's panopticon, this paper explores how the maternal body undergoes self-surveillance as well as surveillance by the proverbial others. I provide vignettes and personal experiences to highlight the panopticon: moms self-surveil but moms are also being surveilled when in the public eye. I make the argument of how the maternal body is a site of surveillance often used to judge the goodness of the mother or the usefulness of the maternal body. I conclude with a suggestion of how the panopticon can be used to examine parenting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 30 years have passed since the first HIV-specific criminal laws were enacted, generally making it a crime for people living with HIV to have sex with another person without disclosing their HIV-status. This study examines the tensions between medicine and criminal justice discourses in the application of laws governing a once terminal disease that medicine has transformed, over the past three decades, into a manageable condition. Has medical progress affected courtroom discussion? To answer this question, the authors analyze court transcripts from nine criminal HIV nondisclosure jury trials between 1994 and 2015 in Michigan, Tennessee, and Missouri. The analysis focuses on how shifting medical discourses of risk influence the way prosecutors and counsels construct notions of individual responsibility and, thus, culpability for HIV exposure. The authors argue that antiretroviral therapy and sophisticated clinical testing technologies have led to increasingly medicalized notions of criminal responsibility that they term 'molecular responsibility.' Over time, arguments over the defendant's responsibility shift from the realm of morality to incorporate the defendant's capacity and willingness to medically control the microbiological dimension of their condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine the discursive practices surrounding athletes' bodies with a particular focus on a) how food, the body and agency around eating and exercising practices are constructed, as well as b) how dominant discourses and narratives are deployed. A case study design was used, examining interactions from three female athletes with a sport psychologist regarding their body composition. The psychology sessions took place within an elite sport setting. Recordings from three initial psychology sessions were recorded. Analysis drew on a synthesis of discursive psychology and conversation analysis. Competing depictions of food and the body were drawn on by the athletes and the psychologist in order to either reproduce or resist taken for granted notions about a need to reduce body composition to improve performance. Discursive tensions were evident in talk around female athletes' bodies, with a performance narrative functioning to regulate athletes' bodies, at the same time that athletes oriented to a dominant notion of the thin female body. Food was also variously constructed in moral terms and as a neutral energy source. Throughout the sessions, individual agency for the body and for resolving the 'problem' of body composition was reproduced, with broader discursive and institutional practices overlooked. This study provides an in insight into how talk around the body and eating practices takes place within one institutional context occurring within an elite sport setting. In particular, this study highlights how potentially problematic discourses and practices are privileged and reproduced or resisted. Shifting the focus to technique rather than body modification and nutrition may be beneficial for athletes' wellbeing. Further implications for practice are discussed. • Within an elite sport setting, a need to change skinfolds was subtly reinforced. • The tension between feminine vs performative bodies was evident. • Biomedical discourses around food reinforced individual responsibility for eating/body shape. • A performance narrative functioned to reinforce body regulation, but was resisted. • A focus on technique rather than the body for enhancing performance might benefit athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the spread of digital media, the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies has gained prominence, engaging scholars from the humanities and the social sciences alike. This introductory article aims to map out the main terrain of surveillance through, by and in the media. First, we discuss the phenomenon of, and the scholarly work on, surveillance through and by media, taking into consideration both state and corporate surveillance and how these activities have grown with the new digital and personal media of today. We then discuss surveillance as the phenomenon is represented in the media and how representations relate to surveillance practices. We conclude by presenting the articles of this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends Keränen's (2010) application of the concept of autopoiesis, or self-generation, to rhetoric by examining how arguments about wellness and natural health self-generate in public discourse. The article analyzes 20 qualitative interviews on what it means in contemporary culture to be "well"-how wellness differs from illness, how it is distinct from health, and how it can be maintained and enhanced. The analysis shows that wellness discourse is predicated on the entanglement of seemingly opposed logics of restoration and enhancement: those who seek wellness through dietary supplements and natural health products seek simultaneously to restore their bodies, perceived as malfunctioning, to prior states of ideal health and well-being, and to enhance their bodies by optimizing bodily processes to be "better than well" (Elliott, 2003). The fusing of these two logics creates an essentially closed rhetorical system in which wellness is always a moving target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a textual examination and reception analysis of a HIV/AIDS poster used by the University of KwaZulu-Natal students during 2006-09. It examines how discourses construct self-responsibility for sexual health among female students. Discourse analysis, language and visual strategies are applied to reveal gender stereotypes. The article argues that an alternative discourse of femininity is used centring on female power bordering on active participation through the use of the discursive self 'I' in order to promote self-surveillance and individual agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medicine emphasise the rise of professional and scientific authority, and suggest a decline in domestic health initiatives. Exploring the example of weight management in Britain, we argue that domestic agency persisted and that new regimes of measurement and weighing were adapted to personal and familial preferences as they entered the household. Drawing on print sources and objects ranging from prescriptive literature to postcards and 'personal weighing machines', the article examines changing practices of self-management as cultural norms initially dictated by ideals of body shape and function gradually incorporated quantified targets. In the twentieth century, the domestic management of health-- like the medical management of illness--was increasingly technologised and re-focused on quantitative indicators of 'normal' or 'pathological' embodiment. We ask: in relation to weight, how did quantification permeate the household, and what did this domestication of bodily surveillance mean to lay users?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing the essays in this special issue on medicine in the household, Bivins, Marland and Tomes briefly sketch the existing historiography and argue for the enduring importance of the household as a site of medical decision making and practice. The household as explored by this collection also offers a valuable space within which to test new methodologies addressing the challenges that face historians and other scholars seeking to trace the reception, adoption and adaptation of new knowledge, practices and products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Sharing’ as it relates to the online environment is underconceptualized, and yet has been proposed as a means for understanding how individuals negotiate everyday privacy. To explore this possibility, we gather reader comments to online news accounts, as these offer an opportunity for observing everyday discourse. Using semantic network analysis, we map related concepts, and use these as a basis for revisiting the concept of ‘sharing' as it pertains to the digital sphere. We argue that while ‘sharing' continues to encompass traditional notions of communality and distribution, as practiced in digital spaces, it also takes on an added dimension of subjectivity. Consonant with Foucault's (1988) ‘technologies of the self’, sharing online becomes a reflexive mechanism to know and care for oneself. By considering ‘sharing' in this light, we aim to further the conversation of counter-posing sharing to privacy, especially when envisioned as a boundary management process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article moves beyond a history of domestic home video fitness programs to explore digital fitness with specific attention to the self-monitored fitness 'movement' and the hardware and software that facilitate its proliferation. The research in this area is currently conducted through preliminary small scale studies, alongside some flawed but still (inadvertently) useful undergraduate and graduate projects. Popular cultural interest is burgeoning, with the popularity of the Fitbit suite and the iWatch surging through an array of commentaries on blogs, YouTube videos, tweets and Facebook posts. This theoretical paper links digitisation with fitness to explore the balance between self-monitoring and surveillance, motivation and shaming. The Fitbit is an example of this self-monitored fitness 'movement' that reveals the ambivalence of quantifying steps and stairs while managing a volatile neoliberal working environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital health technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, health education and voluntary self-surveillance, self-quantification and self-care practices. This paper presents a critical analysis of one digital health device: computer apps used to self-track features of users' sexual and reproductive activities and functions. After a review of the content of such apps available in the Apple App Store and Google play™ store, some of their sociocultural, ethical and political implications are discussed. These include the role played by these apps in participatory surveillance, their configuration of sexuality and reproduction, the valorising of the quantification of the body in the context of neoliberalism and self-responsibility, and issues concerning privacy, data security and the use of the data collected by these apps. It is suggested that such apps represent sexuality and reproduction in certain defined and limited ways that work to perpetuate normative stereotypes and assumptions about women and men as sexual and reproductive subjects. Furthermore there are significant ethical and privacy implications emerging from the use of these apps and the data they produce. The paper ends with suggestions concerning the ‘queering’ of such technologies in response to these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article is about Bangladeshi American multimedia artist Hasan Elahi, who was detained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit. It mentions how Elahi was requested to regularly update the FBI of his whereabouts and in order to do this he complied an online archive of images and information designed to assist the FBI in keeping track of his activity through self-surveillance.