eHealth platforms as user–data communication: Examining patients’ struggles with digital health data

Sundhed.dk is Denmark's national eHealth platform allowing citizens to access their personal health data. Based on 16 qualitative interviews with patients, our aim in this article is to examine how patients engage with their health data. First, we illustrate how patients struggle in different ways to make sense of numerical measurements and written notes. Second, we examine the platform as a communicative space and suggest that a new “medical-domestic” space arises in which medical data is interpreted and negotiated at home. Third, we investigate how health data affects patients’ experiences of being involved as equal partners and how access to data potentially enhances patient empowerment, but also how expectations are sometimes unfulfilled. In conclusion, we argue for a broader public dialogue in order to make sure that the data provided actually creates an optimal starting point and does not foster insecurity or self-doubt on the patient's side.

An organisational cultivation of digital resignation?: Enterprise social media, privacy, and autonomy

Enterprise social media (ESM) have largely gone ignored in discussions of the datafication practices of social media platforms. This article presents an initial step towards filling this research gap. My research question in this article regards how employees of companies using the ESM Workplace from Facebook feel that the implementation of this particular platform relates to their potential struggles for digital privacy and work–life segmentation. Methodologically, I explore this through a qualitative interview study of 21 Danish knowledge workers in different organisations using the ESM. The central analytical proposal of the article is that the interviewees express a “digital resignation” towards the implementation of the ESM. In contrast to previous discussions, this resignation cannot only be thought of as “corporately cultivated” by third parties, but must also be considered as “organisationally cultivated” by the organisations people work for. The study suggests that datafication-oriented media studies should consider organisational contexts.

Struggling with and mastering e-mail consultations: A study of access, interaction, and participation in a digital health care system

In Denmark, medical consultations and the institutional practice of going to the doctor have been expanded upon over the past decade, with e-mail consultations (e-consultations) now supplementing conventional consultations. As a form of communication with different constraints than face-to-face and telephonic communication, e-consultations are likely to both afford some benefits and present struggles. In this article, I examine the use and perception of primary care e-consultations from the perspective of the patient. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 20 patients and guided by the following research question: How do patients struggle with and master digital participation during e-consultations? The study demonstrates that e-consultations are more than a digital access point to the healthcare system: patients often struggle to maintain contact with their general practitioner, and e-consultations can help them navigate the healthcare system. Indeed, those who master this form of communication are appreciative of it and perceive it as screen care.

Hybrid presence: Integrating interprofessional interactions with digital consultations

Healthcare practitioners struggle to adapt to the changes that new digital media entail for social interactions, but what does the struggle look like, and how is it embedded in these professionals’ everyday experiences? I investigate these questions in this study of how digitalisation conditions social interactions in the context of the Danish medical setting by drawing on ethnographic work. Moreover, via a video-recorded case study, this article shows how two practitioners organise social actions by exploiting features of a digital communication system in a situation where they manage a practical problem. I propose the concept of hybrid presence related to the scientific fields of dialogism and distributed cognition as an explanation of how the participants are capable of immersing themselves with both the digital technology and the social interaction. Hybrid presence thus proves useful in the discussion of how practitioners may struggle with technology.

The ambiguities of surveillance as care and control: Struggles in the domestication of location-tracking applications by Danish parents

The implicit ambiguity of surveillance as both care and control has been a key theoretical issue in social science research on surveillance practices and technologies. This article addresses this ambiguity empirically by examining how parents using – or not using – location-tracking apps to monitor their children negotiate this tension. Drawing on 17 semistructured interviews conducted with parents in different regions of Denmark, we examine the struggles of these parents to fit this technology into their world and to reconcile their uses with ideals of trust, privacy, and good parenting. By highlighting how users and non-users perceive and negotiate the controlling affordances of tracking apps, we emphasise the potential for negotiation, contestation, and resistance raised by this technology, and the contingent nature of its appropriation and effects. Thereby, it brings nuances to techno-pessimistic accounts of child tracking and calls for further empirical studies examining how these technologies are experienced in practice.

The struggle and enrichment of play: Domestications and overflows in the everyday life of gamer parents

Gaming is a frequent source of conflict for families. Research on parents and gaming has identified a lack of gaming-related expertise, a general devaluation or fear of play, and authoritative and restrictive parenting styles as key sources of conflict. What happens when these deficits are addressed? What does mediation look like when parents are expert gamers, enjoy play, and encourage play for their children? Based on qualitative interviews with 29 parents who identify as gamers, we explore how gamer parents domesticate games. To explore the work of stabilising gaming as a wholesome and valued pastime, we combine domestication theory with overflows to address the struggles involved. The analysis investigates how gamer parents mediate play, with an emphasis on how games are interpreted, the family's player practices, and the role of gaming-related expertise in accordance with the three dimensions (symbolic, practice, cognitive) of domestication theory.

Existential vulnerability and transition: Struggling with involuntary childlessness on Instagram

In their efforts to find others who share their experiential reality and existential struggle, many involuntarily childless women turn to Instagram to engage and participate in the practice of trying-to-conceive (TTC) communication. Through the conceptual lens of digital existence, where the digital and online are regarded as constitutive of existential transition, we draw on ten interviews and an online ethnography to explore some of the struggles that involuntarily childless women experience with and through technology. We find that TTC communication can be constitutive of coming to terms with the status of involuntary childlessness. In particular, this study illustrates that TTC communication, for involuntarily childless women, is both a site of struggle and a safe space as they transition to nonmotherhood in an existential terrain where they share an intimate journey.

Going cold turkey!: An autoethnographic exploration of digital disengagement

As the dust of society-wide digitalisation settles, the search for meaningful technological encounters is becoming more urgent. While the Nordic countries embrace digitalisation, recent concerns regarding technology overuse have been gaining increased attention. This tendency is exemplified in practices of limiting digital use, called digital disengagement – an apparent paradox in Nordic societies where digital is the dominant paradigm. In this article, we explore the emergence of disconnection-centred devices called “dumbphones”, which cater to individuals wishing to escape hyperconnected lifestyles. Drawing on a new materialist perspective, we present a content analysis of dumbphones’ advertising material, followed by a collaborative autoethnographic study in which we replace our smartphones with dumbphones. We critically weigh the promises of the dumbphones against the actual experience of digital disengagement in Sweden. Our findings illustrate a struggle with digital technologies, even despite their absence, due to emerging workarounds and societal expectations of use.

The ambiguity of technology in ASMR experiences: Four types of intimacies and struggles in the user comments on YouTube

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling, static-like sensation in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. Within recent years, ASMR has mostly been associated with videos on YouTube (technologically mediated ASMR) dedicated to make the users “tingle”, relax, and feel at ease. In this article, I explore the ambiguity of technology in relation to the ASMR experience and theoretically investigate how viewer-listeners might struggle to obtain an intimate and parasocial interaction in a technologically mediated ASMR context. The article introduces four types of intimacies as well as theoretical concepts of mediated intimacy, immediacy, and parasocial interaction, and I discuss these intimacies and concepts in relation to illustrative comments by some of the pacesetting power users of ASMR.