Advancing digital disconnection research: Introduction to the special issue

Over the past decade, scholarly interest in “digital disconnection” and related concepts has grown in media and communication studies, and in related disciplines. The idea of digital disconnection explicitly references digitalization as a key societal development, creating conditions of intensified and embedded media involvement across social life. The notion of digital disconnection thereby represents a critical response to mediated conditions that characterize our societies and permeate our everyday lives. In this special issue, we take stock of the contributions, challenges, and promises of digital disconnection research. We showcase how digital disconnection scholarship intersects with other developments in media and communication research, and is part of debates and empirical analysis in related disciplines from tourism studies to psychology. We argue that one of the key strengths of the emergent work is the variety of social domains and conceptual debates that are included and explored in digital disconnection research. On the other hand, we also point to the need for further methodological development, conceptual consolidation, and empirical diversity, particularly in the face of global inequalities and ongoing crises.publishedVersio

Communication as Ongoing Care: Patients as Active Partners in Care Work with MyChart

This article investigates how the patient portal MyChart is currently embedded in the infrastructure for the collaborative care for people in rehabilitation or living with chronic disease. We aim to sensitize discussions about logics of care (Mol, 2008), care infrastructures (Danholt & Langstrup, 2012) and the push for self-care to the role of information, mediated communication and participation in achieving good care. We base our argument on findings from fieldwork among patients and clinicians at two hospital units for Gastroenterology and Cardiovascular diseases in Copenhagen around the implementation and use of MyChart for information, communication and participation in self-care. Our fieldwork indicates that patients have clear – but very different – preferences for accessing and engaging with information and communication through MyChart. We link these modes to experiences of authority, role-expectations and the prospect for joint decision-making in healthcare. We suggest that the introduction of more communicative flexibility for some patients speaks to an important element in contemporary care infrastructures, regarding media choice. This choice, while seemingly trivial, grants the patient communication agency at a point where the patient can actually master the role of active partner in care. We further suggest that attending to often overlooked ritual aspects of communication may help qualify analyses of care in pursuit of a good life

Methods for datafication, datafication of methods: introduction to the special issue

Digital media enable processes of datafication: users' online activities leave digital traces that are transformed into data points in databases, kept by service providers and other private and public organisations, and repurposed for commercial exploitation, business innovation, surveillance — and research. Increasingly, this also extends to sensors and recognition technologies that turn homes and cities, as well as our own bodies, into data points to be collected and analysed So-called 'traditional' media industries, too, including public service broadcasting, have been datafied, tracking and profiling audiences, algorithmically processing data for greater personalisation as a way to compete with new players and streaming services. Datafication both raises new research questions and brings about new avenues, and an array of tools, for empirical research. This special issue is dedicated to exploring these, linking them to broader historical trajectories of social science methodologies as well as to central concerns and perspectives in media and communication research. As such, this special issue grapples with approaches to empirical research that interlink questions of methods and tools with epistemology and practice. It discusses the datafication of methods, as well as methods for studying datafication. With this we hope to enable reflection of what research questions media and communication scholars should ask of datafication, and how new and existing methods enable us to answer them

Methods for datafication, datafication of methods: introduction to the special issue

Digital media enable processes of datafication: users' online activities leave digital traces that are transformed into data points in databases, kept by service providers and other private and public organisations, and repurposed for commercial exploitation, business innovation, surveillance -- and research. Increasingly, this also extends to sensors and recognition technologies that turn homes and cities, as well as our own bodies, into data points to be collected and analysed So-called ‘traditional’ media industries, too, including public service broadcasting, have been datafied, tracking and profiling audiences, algorithmically processing data for greater personalisation as a way to compete with new players and streaming services. Datafication both raises new research questions and brings about new avenues, and an array of tools, for empirical research. This special issue is dedicated to exploring these, linking them to broader historical trajectories of social science methodologies as well as to central concerns and perspectives in media and communication research. As such, this special issue grapples with approaches to empirical research that interlink questions of methods and tools with epistemology and practice. It discusses the datafication of methods, as well as methods for studying datafication. With this we hope to enable reflection of what research questions media and communication scholars should ask of datafication, and how new and existing methods enable us to answer them