Author: Pauline Garvey

Breast Cancer Survivor App developed by Professor M. Kell, Mater Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.

I recently came across an app for survivors of breast cancer. It allows its users to calculate their body-mass index, access nutritional advice, read recipes, set exercise goals and make donations towards cancer research. The app provides a fairly comprehensive guide to health management, but I wonder if it could offer more. Increasingly, the promise of health comes in a surprising variety of packages, and these often exceed a solitary pursuit of nutrition and exercise advice.

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) led by Trinity College Dublin examines the social, economic, and health circumstances of over 8,000 people aged 50 years and older, resident in Ireland. Researchers have found that instead of later years being a time of decline and dependency, older adults make a valuable contribution to society, with many active in the lives of their families and in their communities. The TILDA report suggests, for example, that volunteering is life enhancing as is regular social participation in sports and social clubs. Overall, it finds 60% of adults aged 54 years and over take part in active and social leisure activities at least once per week while 47% participated in at least one of these organised groups at least once per week.

In my fieldwork site, there are groups that meet weekly to knit and chat while sharing coffee and cake. Other groups swim in the sea, go to church, go for bracing walks or gather to engage in litter picks. Many research participants talk of these activities as both building community and enhancing health, activities that are usually moderated through smartphone apps. Some activities that do not seem, on first glance, to be related to health come to be framed as such. For example, one participant in a craft group shared a post called ‘The Health Benefits of Knitting’ (Brody 2016) which argued that the repetitive work of knitting reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Are people joining these groups for purposes of health or fun or ‘community-building’ or for other reasons altogether? Are these distinctions blurred or even relevant for participants? Similarly, WhatsApp is integral to the moderation of these groups, not only in how groups are made but in the types of sociality that they engender, such as in the frequency of online interactions. Continuous online conversations that research participants have on WhatsApp can be experienced as a delight or disappointment, but either way have been described to me as new. These are some of the issues that I’m pursuing in my on-going research.

Breast Cancer Survivor App developed by Professor M. Kell, Mater Hospital, Dublin, Ireland, see https://www.materfoundation.ie/news/improving-care-breast-cancer-patients-mater/

Brody, J. E 25/01/2016 ‘The Health Benefits of Knitting’, The New York Times, available online at https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/the-health-benefits-of-knitting/

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), 11/10/2017 Trinity College Dublin, available online https://tilda.tcd.ie/news-events/2017/1702-w3-key-findings/

Recently, the smartphone app Kuaishou emerged from China’s cutthroat online entertainment market with more than 400 million registered users and an estimated worth of some two billion USD. It is now the fourth largest social media platform in the country, after WeChat (an instant messaging, and e-commerce and payment app), QQ (instant messaging), and the Sina Weibo micro-blogging site. The majority of the content on Kuaishou is made up of self-harm videos with “comic” twists, rather like the American TV show “Jackass.” Viewers can watch daredevils do everything from swallowing lightbulbs to lighting firecrackers under their own backsides. Those taking part are almost all from smaller, third-tier cities or rural-urban fringe zones. They seek internet stardom by harming their bodies in unconventional ways.

Middle-aged woman eating lightbulbs and worms

In China’s cosmopolitan cities, Internet celebrities are able to rake in tens of thousands of yuan every month by live-streaming themselves eating or shopping. Kuaishou users emulate their urban counterparts, hoping to making a fortune by becoming famous. However, for these people, without wider networks or resources, the results are generally disappointing, and mostly they remain mired in poverty.

For rural China, kuaishou culture expresses, in a particularly eye-catching manner, both this population’s desire for achieving a better life, and more importantly, the cultural difficulties of being poor in contemporary China. Through these practices of bodily harm and self-insults, these people reveal, among other issues, just how unacceptable they find the condition of poverty.

– Xu Zhiwei