Citizens’ use of digital media to connect with health care: Socio-ethical and regulatory implications

Digital technologies promise to transform practices of health, medicine and health care and ‘power’ economies. In expectation of their presumed future benefits, governments in recent years have invested heavily in new technology initiatives and have sought to engender ‘digital literacy’ among citizens. This article introduces papers and expands on themes arising from a special issue that explores the socio-ethical and regulatory implications of citizens’ use of digital media to connect with health care. We set the scene by examining the promissory discourse that attaches to digital technologies as applied to health care, and its role in shaping actions, and then consider the longer term prospects and implications of digitalisation for conceptions of citizenship and established categories and distinctions. As we argue, given the history of new technologies, the longer term implications of digitalisation are likely to differ significantly from those envisaged. Digital technologies promise radical positive d...