Engendering assemblages: the constitution of digital health data as an epistemic consumption object

ABSTRACT

This article uncovers the ideational work implied in the formation of a new assemblage dedicated to the constitution of ‘digital health’ as a productive field of social action. We analyze the Israeli National Plan for Digital Health as a Growth Engine, examining how it formulates and communicates imaginaries of digital health and of health data. The analysis illuminates how digital health data is constructed as an epistemic consumption object with economic and social value, and how the assemblage necessary for realizing these values is imagined. The research reveals the predominant position of one actant – health data – in the formation of the assemblage. The notion of digital health data and the ways in which it is imagined as a multivocal and open-ended object function as a pivotal focus of the assemblage, giving it its characters, outlining its goals and the benefits that might emerge from its operation, defining the human and non-human actants that constitute it, and formulating the conditions for its productive operation. At a more general level, the study contributes to the study of the formation of socio-technical assemblages that are constituted around data as their pivotal focus, elucidating the specific imaginaries involved in these processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital health
• big data
• assemblage
• epistemic consumption object
• imaginary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the sake of comparison, and to account for the biases of the search engine: a query for the term ‘health’ in Goggle Scholar yields 473k, 385k, 557k, and 748k publications for these respective decades.

2 One must note that there are many more actants at play here which we plaster over for the sake of simplicity and which become important when one looks into a specific project in more detail. For example, laws and judicial knowledge concerning intellectual property or privacy, or financial institutions and investment technologies and products.

3 All quotations from the government’s resolution and plan are our own translation from the Hebrew.

4 International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification. Its use in the US was discontinued in 1999.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eran Fisher

Eran Fisher is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. He studies the link between digital media technology and society. His work has been published in the European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Labour and Society, Media, Culture, and Society, Information, Communication, and Society, and The Information Society. His books include Algorithms and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2022), Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Internet and Emotions (co-edited with Tova Benski, 2014), and Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (co-edited with Christian Fuchs, 2015).

Zeev Rosenhek

Zeev Rosenhek is Professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. His main research interests lie in the fields of political and economic sociology, with a particular focus on processes of institutional change and continuity in state-economy relations. He is the co-author of The Israeli Central Bank: Political Economy, Global Logics and Local Actors (Routledge, 2011) with Daniel Maman, and has published articles in journals such as Archives Europeennes de Sociologie, British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of Social Policy, Review of International Political Economy, Social Problems, and Socio-Economic Review.