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Published 4 February 2009
Event 5 March 2009

Can the internet make us healthy? Can information substitute for care? Are traditional forms of knowledge and power being challenged by the emergence of informed patients and citizens? Are digital divides contributing to health divides? Is smart home care the answer to independent living for the elderly?

These questions are explored through the lens of social informatics, on a journey that starts with a concern for Rosie the Riveter and arrives at a place where robots are the new health trainers. Along the way, we explore the troubles that arise when travelling through places where technologies are both the object of study and, really, not the point at all. We ask:

• how can we remain attentive to the ways in which technologies appear to determine more and more areas of our lives and yet remain critical of deterministic understandings of these very same technologies?
• how can we keep technologies at the forefront of our enquiries whilst, at the same time, refusing to reify them?
• how might we understand resistance to new technologies without resorting to accusations of Luddism?
• how might we engage citizens in exploring new technologies without appearing to promote notions of technology as progress and access as empowerment?
  

Drawing on a range of empirical studies undertaken over more than 20 years, the lecture explores how a social informatics approach can work creatively with these tensions not only to produce improved understandings of technologies and their relationships to the social worlds they inhabit, but also to connect with policy and practice-based communities to encourage a more critical engagement with discourses of the 'e' society.

Health-e Concerns? Questions for social informatics
Thursday 5 March 2009 at 6.30pm
Sallis Benney Theatre,
University of Brighton
Grand Parade
Brighton BN2 0JY

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

All welcome - if you would like to attend please email events@brighton.ac.uk.