Beyond Techno-Utopia: Critical Approaches to Digital Health Technologies

Abstract

The title for this special issue was devised as a direct challenge to the prevailing solutionist and instrumental approaches to the application of digital technologies to medicine and public health. In formulating the idea and title for the special issue, I wanted to inspire some provocative and challenging commentary and research on what I interpreted as a dominantly techno-utopian position on digital health. One important approach that I particularly wanted to encourage, and which I articulate in my own contribution to the special issue, is that which views digital health technologies as social, cultural and material artefacts which have political implications and embodied entanglements with humans and other nonhuman actors. - Deborah Lupton, Guest Editor