Technology and Health: How the Media Romanticizes Illness

Eve Shapiro is a sociologist and social critic, her book Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age is a critical analysis that tries to answer why technology has affected our perception of reality and has redefined our bodies and identity. Although her argument is up for debate, I find her persuasion very compelling. I also find it impossible to not see the tech dependency we have developed, if we think about our daily lives, we can conclude that outside of sleep, we are constantly engaged with technology, particularly computers and cell phones. Through this technology we further engage with one of our favorite pleasures -- mass media.

In chapter one, Shapiro theorizes on medical technology in a section she calls,“ Biomedical Technology as Mediator between Physical and Mental Health” (p 30) Shapiro reports that we depend on medical technology to legitimize the status of our illness; she views this relationship as unfavorable. We may be inclined to dismiss her claim quickly. As products of a very flawed modernity, our connection to medical science has made us “better” people. I would have to argue that medical science has encouraged us to give up much of our agency when it comes to personal health. That is not say that we have not all benefited from medical science, but for our purposes in this blog, I want us to focus on the fundamental relationship between self and technology in the medical world, and I also wish to add the subject of mass media to Shapiro’s argument.

I am in agreement with Shapiro when she asks, do we acknowledge that we’re sick “.....because we feel sick or because technology tells us?”( p 31)

We have grown attached and dependent to medical verification, we have also institutionalized their validity, Shapiro discusses this when she explains that bureaucratic entities such as schools and employers demand doctor’s notes instead of trusting our own reporting of our illness, of-course this is putting a lot of faith in people, and we all know how irresponsible that can sometimes be. That being said, someone having to write a note to assure us of our illness is the easiest way to loose agency of our body and rely on outside sources to verify our internal conditions.

Now that we have identified the fundamental disconnection between bodily agency, mental perception and medical science, let’s add capitalism and mass media.

After people are properly detached from their agency, we can now rely on pharmaceutical corporations, medical lobbyists, and mass media campaigns to supply us with the solutions to our many illnesses. Capitalism begins to formulate a medical myth that is as American as the house on the hill: everyone has ADHD, everyone needs iron, everyone needs to loose weight, everyone is depressed, everyone has chronic-anxiety. And, guess what? We have a pill for everyone of those things, available to you for a ludicrous price.

We slowly become slaves to the promise of health.

But how can consumerism sell us this myth? This now brings me to the marketing apparatus that is all to common in selling us bullshit -- romantics. The Celebrex commercial of people running in fields, the memoirs of overcoming depression, the Oprah shows about how great it is to be thin, the multi-million dollar publications on how to help your child concentrate. I am in no way denying that depression and other illness are real and they affect many, but I refuse to acknowledge that we are all participants in the field.

Of-course, when capitalism romanticizes its product we need to expect the tokenism of minority groups, after all, white supremacy is an essential component of successful capitalism. Mass media then becomes an efficient way to market the product. This further problematizes an already loaded issue, as it promotes capital gains through the romanticizing of people’s realities, here -- illness. An appropriate example of this is a music-video clip put out by Human Music & Sound Design, they are a company that creates original commercials on pressing issues such as AIDS to build awareness. The one-minute clip shows a black woman with AIDS being filmed for ninety days in her bed, they show the women loosing weight and become more and more ill in fast-motion. It is very disturbing. At the end we find out that what we think was the 90th day, when she was the most ill, is actually the first. They then tell us that AIDS is treatable and that WE can help be getting involved and donating.

This motif of bleeding-heart liberal romantics is very common. I am interest in the internal politics of these “awareness commercials.”

The poor black women continues to be the token-poster child of what is wrong with the world, and we can make a trendy video on how to “fix” the problem, without first asking the question: why, in the year 2010, this woman is where she is. If the exploitation of this women wasn’t bad enough, we continue to have the audacity to considers our-selves the chosen ones to help.

White-Messiah Complex

Our political discourse is filled with it, and we refuse to acknowledge it. Should we help those in need? Yes. But we should not, as we do, commercialize people’s pain and illness, and sell a hollow product of “help.” Our ten dollars a month are not going to help, if we don’t first realize that this destructive consumer-based system allows us to think we are helping when we are in fact destroying. Our owners need to stop representing illness through black women and queers.

Most importantly, we must reclaim agency and sterilize the status of illness from capitalism.