Personal Health Data, Surveillance, & Biopolitics: Toward a Personal Health Data Information Literacy
Published in Progressive Librarian, 2018
As consumer wearable health and mobile health technologies become embedded in everyday life, coalescing with the integration and use of personal health data and the personal health record in the sprawling domains of the medical-industrial complex (MIC), health/information literacy (H/IL) and data information literacy (DIL), become more important, both for users of these wearable devices and for undergraduate students who might be folded into the research process as participants or researchers.
The present paper argues for the integration of information literacy skills and instruction with a critical understanding of personal health data to provide useful skills for managing the massive amounts of personal health data that users are generating. My goal is to argue for an expansion of data information literacy to provide the necessary skills for users and researchers to critically assess their relationship to personal health data, understanding the concurrent modes of doing and undergoing surveillance.
Recommended citation: Johnson, M. W. (2018). Personal Health Data, Surveillance, & Biopolitics: Toward a Personal Health Data Information Literacy.” Progressive Librarian, 46 (Winter 2017/2018), 150-158.”