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Sally Wyatt

'Digital technologies and the provision of health information'

Digital technologies provide people with many ways of finding, sharing and creating information about their own health, diagnoses, care and treatments. These developments are often presented as enhancing patient empowerment, and radically democratising relationships between health care professionals and patients.

In this presentation, I will critically examine these claims, drawing on early work I did (with Flis Henwood at Brighton University) about how middle-aged and older women and men used the Internet to inform themselves about chronic, non-acute conditions, namely menopause and erectile dysfunction.

I will also present more recent work (with Anna Harris, Maastricht and Susan Kelly, Exeter) about the emerging practice of selling genetic tests online, in which people start out as simple consumers of a service but in the process can become transformed into research participants, in the proclaimed vanguard of new ways of doing medical research. If there is time, and if the audience is interested, I will also reflect on how digital technologies challenge traditional sociological methods.  

About the speaker

Sally Wyatt originally studied economics in Canada and the UK, but later did a PhD in science and technology studies in Maastricht. Her current research interests include the role of digital media in the production of knowledge, and the ways in which people incorporate the internet into their practices for finding health information. On the latter, her book (together with Anna Harris and Susan Kelly) called 'CyberGenetics. Health Genetics and New Media' was published in 2016 by Routledge, and awarded the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize in 2017.