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Many older adults are increasingly embracing digital technology in the Republic of Korea. This study investigated the relationship between the digital skills of Korean older adults and their perceived health status and digital technology application for health promotion. This mixed-method study comprised a community survey of 434 older adults aged ≥65 in two cities in South Korea, followed by focus group interviews. Five types of digital skills, 'operational internet skills', 'information navigation skills', 'social skills', 'creative skills', and 'mobile skills', were measured using the LSE digital skill measurement instrument. Multivariable analysis identified the influence of digital skills on health-related outcomes. Among them, 'social skills' associated positively with self-rated health (ß 0.37, 95%CI 0.08, 0.65). 'Information navigation skills' contributed positively to the use of digital technology and the internet for a healthy lifestyle in terms of improving eating habits (ß 0.43, 95%CI 0.09, 0.77), accessing healthcare (ß 0.53, 95%CI 0.21, 0.85), and accessing long-term care services (ß 0.45, 95%CI 0.11, 0.79). Thematic analysis revealed that the study participants use Korean language-based resources such as Naver and Kakao Talk for social connection to promote a healthy lifestyle. This study concludes that encouraging initial and sustained use of the internet and enhancing digital skills among Korean older adults can promote active and healthy aging.

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Deborah Lupton é uma renomada acadêmica, cuja trajetória trouxe grandes contribuições para os estudos da sociologia digital e das dimensões socioculturais da medicina e da saúde pública. Em entrevista à Reciis, Lupton comenta sobre um dos principais desafios da contemporaneidade -a desinformação e as fake news- por meio da sociologia digital e aborda as perspectivas socioculturais do risco a partir do lançamento da terceira edição de seu livro Risk, em que traz um capítulo inédito sobre as problemáticas envolvendo o risco e a disseminação de desinformação durante a pandemia de covid-19. Com comentários sobre os cenários australiano e brasileiro, Lupton discorre sobre a questão do anticientificismo, do negacionismo e do papel ocasionado por governos populistas no combate à doença. Por fim, ela discorre sobre as potencialidades dos métodos criativos para os estudos qualitativos, especialmente naqueles que buscam entender as racionalidades, as lógicas e os sentimentos das pessoas

Deborah Lupton is a renowned academic whose research has made significant contributions to the field of digital sociology and the sociocultural dimensions of medicine and public health. In an interview with Reciis, Lupton discusses one of the main contemporary challenges - misinformation and fake news - through the lens of digital sociology and addresses the sociocultural perspectives of risk based on the release of the third edition of her book Risk. In this edition, she includes a new chapter on the issues related to risk and the spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. With comments on the Australian and Brazilian scenarios, Lupton delves into the issues of anti-science, denialism, and the role played by populist governments in combating the disease. Finally, she explores the potential of creative methods in qualitative studies, especially those that seek to understand people's rationalities, logics, and feelings

Deborah Lupton es una académica de renombre, cuya trayectoria ha aportado grandes contribuciones a los estudios de sociología digital y a las dimensiones socioculturales de la medicina y la salud pública. En una entrevista con Reciis, Lupton comenta uno de los principales desafíos contemporáneos - la desinformación y las noticias falsas -, a través de la sociología digital, y aborda las perspectivas socioculturales del riesgo a partir del lanzamiento de la tercera edición de su libro Risk, en el que incluye un capítulo inédito sobre los problemas relacionados con el riesgo y la difusión de desinformación durante la pandemia de covid-19. Con comentarios sobre las situaciones en Australia y Brasil, Lupton habla sobre la cuestión del anticientificismo, el negacionismo y el papel desempeñado por los gobiernos populistas en la lucha contra la enfermedad. Finalmente, ella reflexiona sobre las posibilidades de los métodos creativos en los estudios cualitativos, especialmente en aquellos que buscan comprender las racionalidades, lógicas y sentimientos de las personas.

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The notion of digital health often remains an empty signifier, employed strategically for a vast array of demands to attract investments and legitimise reforms. Rather scarce are attempts to develop digital health towards an analytic notion that provides avenues for understanding the ongoing transformations in health care. This article develops a sociomaterial approach to understanding digital health, showing how digitalisation affords practices of health and medicine to cope with and utilise the combined and interrelated challenges of increases in quantification (data-intensive medicine), varieties of connectivity (telemedicine), and unprecedented modes of instantaneous calculation (algorithmic medicine). This enables an engagement with questions about what forms of knowledge, relationships and control are produced through different manifestations of digital health. The paper then sets out, in detail, three innovative strategies that can guide explorations and negotiations into the type of care we want to achieve through digital transformation. These strategies embed Karen Barad's concept of agential cuts suggesting that responsible cuts towards the materialisation of digital health require participatory efforts that recognise the affordances and the generativity of technology developments. Through the sociomaterial approach presented in this article, we aim to lay the foundations to reorient and sensitise innovation and care processes in order to create new possibilities and value-centric approaches for promoting health in digital societies as opposed to promoting digital health per se.

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Resumo Este artigo tem por objeto o uso de metáforas de virilidade nas ações políticas de ciberativistas de extrema direita. Vamos examinar os ataques trocados entre agentes do mesmo campo da extrema-direita, em particular aqueles dirigidos contra o então presidente Jair Bolsonaro por homens que são seus seguidores e compartilham de seu antifeminismo. Veremos que as metáforas da virilidade têm um papel duplo nessas disputas: como forma de compreender e avaliar tanto adversários e disputas quanto a si mesmos. Esse papel nasce da articulação entre três elementos: i) crenças e atitudes baseadas em um ideal de virilidade; ii) uma experiência vivida de ser e tornar-se homem; e, iii), o modo de funcionamento das plataformas digitais. Argumentamos que existe uma afinidade eletiva entre, de um lado, a forma de socialização masculina definida por Welzer-Lang com seu conceito de "casa dos homens", e, de outro, a arquitetura das plataformas digitais desenhada como um espaço competitivo e anti-institucional no qual se constrói visibilidade e reputação.

Resumen Este artículo se centra en el uso de metáforas de virilidad en las acciones políticas de los ciberactivistas de extrema derecha. Examinaremos los ataques intercambiados entre agentes del mismo campo de extrema derecha, en particular los dirigidos contra el expresidente Jair Bolsonaro por sus seguidores hombres que compartían su antifeminismo. Veremos que las metáforas de la virilidad desempeñan un doble papel en estas disputas: ellas son una forma de entender y evaluar tanto a los oponentes y disputas como a ellos mismos. Este rol nace de la articulación entre tres elementos: i) creencias y actitudes basadas en un ideal de virilidad; ii) una experiencia vivida de ser y devenir hombre; iii) el funcionamiento de las plataformas digitales. Argumentamos que existe una afinidad electiva, por un lado, entre la forma de socialización masculina definida por Welzer-Lang con su concepto de "casa de hombres", y, por otro lado, la arquitectura de plataformas digitales que se diseña como un espacio competitivo y anti-institucional donde se construye visibilidad y reputación.

Abstract This article focuses on the use of virility metaphors in the political actions of far-right cyberactivists. It examines the attacks exchanged between agents within the far-right, in particular those targeted against Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian president from 2019 to 2022, by his male followers who share his anti-feminism. It is argued that, in these disputes, metaphors of virility have a dual role: they are a way of interpreting and of evaluating opponents, disputes and men themselves. This role results from the articulation between three elements: i) beliefs and attitudes based on an ideal of virility; ii) a lived experience of being and becoming a man; and, iii), how digital platforms operate. Our hypothesis is that there is an elective affinity between, on the one hand, the form of male socialisation defined as the "men's house" by Welzer-Lang and, on the other hand, the architecture of digital platforms designed as a competitive, anti-institutional environment in which visibility and reputation are built.

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As technology has changed people's lives, criminal phenomena are also constantly evolving. Today's digital society is changing the activities of organized crime and organized crime groups. In the digital society, very different organized crime groups coexist with different organizational models: from online cybercrime to traditional organized crime groups to hybrid criminal groups in which humans and machines 'collaborate' in new and close ways in networks of human and non-human actors. These criminal groups commit very different organized crime activities, from the most technological to the most traditional, and move from online to offline. They use technology and interact with computers for a variety of purposes, and the distinction between the physical and virtual dimensions of organized crime is increasingly blurred. These radical developments do not seem to be accompanied by a new criminological theoretical interpretive framework, with a definition of organized crime that is able to account for the changes that digital society brings to organized crime and generate modern research hypotheses. This article proposes the concept of digital organized crime and the spectrum theory of digital organized crimes, to be embedded within a current, revised sociological theory of the organization of crime and deviance in digital society (a new theory of digital criminal organizing) and argues that the study of digital organized crime will increasingly require a digital sociology of organized crime. Criminologists are called upon to work in this direction.

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This article scrutinises the linkage between ethnicity and people's behaviour on Twitter. It examines how offline culture manifests itself online among Arabs. The article draws upon the literature to identify the offline ethnic characteristics of Arabs, and through interviews with and observations of Arab social media users, discovers their online ethnic characteristics. It then compares these online and offline characteristics and, through this comparison, finds that offline culture has been enacted online among Arabs, sustaining expressions of generosity, religiosity, traditionalism, female privacy, over-flattery, collectivism, tribalism, pan-Arabism, and social contracts; however, in other ways, offline culture has been counteracted online, which has led to the destabilisation of power relations between genders, elites and non-elites, and majorities and minorities. A further finding is that online culture has been enacted offline among Arabs in that online performance has exerted influence over offline ethnic identity expectations. In short, there are three main findings: offline culture has been enacted online, offline culture has been counteracted online, and online culture has been enacted offline. The take-home finding of this study is the existence of 'e-ethnic culture', that is, although ethnic activity online tends to be based on and reinforces offline realities and may alter offline realities as well, not all online performances have roots offline.

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During unprecedented events such as COVID-19, the fabric of society comes under stress and all stakeholders want to increase the predictability of the future and reduce the ongoing uncertainties. In this research, an attempt has been made to model the situation in which the sentiment "trust" is computed so as to map the behaviour of society. However, technically, the purpose of this research is not to determine the "degree of trust in society" as a consequence of some specific emotions or sentiments that the community is experiencing at any particular time. This project is concerned with the construction of a computational model that can assist in improving our understanding of the dynamics of digital societies, particularly when it comes to the attitude referred to as "trust." The digital society trust analysis (D.S.T.A.) model that has been provided is simple to configure and simple to implement. It includes many previous models, such as standing models, Schelling's model of segregation, and tipping points, in order to construct models for understanding the dynamics of a society reeling under the effects of a COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation, fake news, and other sentiments that impact the behaviour of the different groups.

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Digital technologies are increasingly embedded in clinical encounters, reconfiguring the basis on which health care is delivered. Thereby, the delivery of care shifts from territorial locations in clinics and temporal modes of co-presence towards digital platforms. Drawing on a sociotechnical evaluation of digitised patient follow-up in HIV care, this paper argues that the forms of interactivity practised in platform encounters cannot be adequately understood through traditional interaction frameworks such as Erving Goffman's interaction order. To conceptualise the new informational space and temporal mode of 'response presence' within which platform encounters are conducted, the paper draws on theoretical advances made by Karin Knorr Cetina who further developed Goffman's interaction order to describe interactions augmented by 'scopic media'. A comprehensive framework is presented to elaborate the distinct qualities of interactions occurring in face-to-face, tele-interaction and platform encounters and to analyse their affordances based on doctor and patient experiences. This framework is intended to stimulate further research on how new interactional forms between doctors and patients will reconfigure roles and responsibilities as well as wider structures of digital society. Furthermore, it can also support practical guidance of when and how different forms of clinical encounters may be integrated in care pathways.

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An increasing number of sociologists today are examining the social production of digital technology. Although younger researchers may be digital natives and write from "within the algorithm," and older sociologists may begin by trying to define terms and concepts that have become commonplace in the tech "space," all share the goal of unpacking the "black box" of computer software by analyzing how, where, and by whom it is developed and asking who benefits most by its use. Some of the articles in this special issue of Theory and Society focus on questions of connectivity, privacy, and equity in light of classical sociology's concern with the state, the self, knowledge, and power; others look critically at forms of inequality in the operations of specific platforms, algorithms, urban tech ecosystems, and coworking spaces.

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Apps on smartphones are increasingly used for self-care for depression and anxiety, yet how and why they are accessed, and their social effects, remain under-investigated. Sociologists have begun to theorise how these technologies affect and relate; crucial questions for a contemporary sociology of health. This study seeks to contribute to our conceptualisation of how digital health technologies are implicated in health by investigating the motivations, experiences and relations of people using mobile apps for depression or anxiety. We interviewed 14 individuals living in England with a diagnosis of depression or an anxiety disorder, who used smartphone apps as part of self-care. Analysis followed a thematic approach. Three themes were identified. Apps exist within relational contexts - alongside smartphones, beliefs about mental health and other support - which shape app use and lead to an imprecise, casual approach. People engage with apps in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner, leading to immediate symptomatic alleviation, but to limited longer term benefit. The contradiction between the apps' promise as tools of individual empowerment, with their ability to promote responsibilising frameworks that restrain users' reflexivity, is central to their implications. Apps can thus contribute to isolation from interpersonal support and promote reductionist biomedical conceptualisations of mental ill health.

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In this editorial introduction, we explore how digital health is being explored at the intersection of sociology of health and science and technology studies (STS). We suggest that socio-material approaches and practice theories provide a shared space within which productive tensions between sociology of health and STS can continue. These tensions emerge around the long-standing challenges of avoiding technological determinism while maintaining a clear focus on the materiality and agency of technologies and recognising enduring sets of relations that emerge in new digital health practices while avoiding social determinism. The papers in this Special Issue explore diverse fields of healthcare (e.g. reproductive health, primary care, diabetes management, mental health) within which heterogenous technologies (e.g. health apps, mobile platforms, smart textiles, time-lapse imaging) are becoming increasingly embedded. By synthesising the main arguments and contributions in each paper, we elaborate on four key dimensions within which digital technologies create ambivalence and (re)configure health practices. First, promissory digital health highlights contradictory virtues within discourses that configure digital health. Second, (re)configuring knowledge outlines ambivalences of navigating new information environments and handling quantified data. Third, (re)configuring connectivity explores the relationships that evolve through digital networks. Fourth, (re)configuring control explores how new forms of power are inscribed and handled within algorithmic decision-making in health. We argue that these dimensions offer fruitful perspectives along which digital health can be explored across a range of technologies and health practices. We conclude by highlighting applications, methods and dimensions of digital health that require further research.

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The Australian government's Australian Digital Health Agency is working towards its goal of enrolling every Australian in My Health Record, its national electronic health record system. This article reports findings from a qualitative project involving interviews and focus groups with Australian women about their use of digital health across the range of technologies available to them, including their attitudes to and experiences of My Health Record. A feminist new materialism perspective informed the project, working to surface the affordances, affective forces and relational connections that contributed to the opening up or closing off potential agential capacities when people come together with digitised systems such as My Health Record. These findings demonstrate that people's personal experiences and feelings, the actions of others such as the agencies responsible for system implementation and function, their healthcare providers and broader social, cultural, technological and political factors are important in shaping their knowledge, interest in and acceptance of an electronic health record system. Even among this group of participants, who were experienced and active in finding and engaging with health information online, uncertainty and a lack of awareness of and interest in My Health Record were evident among many. Affordances such as technical difficulties were major barriers to enrolling and using the system successfully. No participants had yet found any benefit or use for it. Affective forces such as lack of trust and faith in the Australian government's general technological expertise and concerns about data privacy and security were also key in many participants' accounts.

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In reaction to polarised views on the benefits or drawbacks of digital health, the notion of 'ambivalence' has recently been proposed as a means to grasp the nuances and complexities at play when digital technologies are embedded within practices of care. This article responds to this proposal by demonstrating how ambivalence can work as a reflexive approach to evaluate the potential implications of digital health. We first outline current theoretical advances in sociology and organisation science and define ambivalence as a relational and multidimensional concept that can increase reflexivity within innovation processes. We then introduce our empirical case and highlight how we engaged with the HIV community to facilitate a co-design space where 97 patients (across five European clinical sites: Antwerp, Barcelona, Brighton, Lisbon, Zagreb) were encouraged to lay out their approaches, imaginations and anticipations towards a prospective mHealth platform for HIV care. Our analysis shows how patients navigated ambivalence within three dimensions of digital health: quantification, connectivity and instantaneity. We provide examples of how potential tensions arising through remote access to quantified data, new connections with care providers or instant health alerts were distinctly approached alongside embodied conditions (e.g. undetectable viral load) and embedded socio-material environments (such as stigma or unemployment). We conclude that ambivalence can counterbalance fatalistic and optimistic accounts of technology and can support social scientists in taking-up their critical role within the configuration of digital health interventions.

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The concept of affective atmospheres has recently emerged in cultural geography to refer to the feelings that are generated by the interactions and movements of human and nonhuman actors in specific spaces and places. Affective atmospheres can have profound effects on the ways in which people think and feel about and sense the spaces they inhabit and through which they move and the other actors in those spaces. Thus far, very little research has adopted this concept to explore the ways in which digital health technologies are used. As part of seeking to redress this lacuna, in this essay I draw on previously published literature on affective atmospheres to demonstrate and explain the implications of this scholarship for future theoretical and empirical scholarship about digital health practices that pays attention to their affective and sensory elements. The article is structured into six parts. The first part outlines the concepts and research practices underpinning affective atmospheres scholarship. In the second part, I review some of the research that looks at place, space and mobilities in relation to affective atmospheres. In the third part I focus more specifically on the affective atmospheres of medical encounters, and then move on to digital technology use in the fourth part. I then address in the fifth part, some relevant scholarship on digital health technologies. I end the essay with some reflections of directions in which future research taking up the concept of affective atmospheres in the context of digital health technologies can go. The key research question that these topics all work towards is that asking 'How does digital health feel?'