2014/10/15 by Deborah Lupton, D. Lupton · 351 citations
Health Professions · Medicine · Nursing · Social Sciences · #Acknowledgement #Computer science #Computer security #Digital health #Government (linguistics) #Health Literacy and Information Accessibility #Health care #Health policy #Health promotion #Medicine #Mobile Health and mHealth Applications #Nursing #Political science #Politics #Promotion (chess) #Public health #Public relations #Social Media in Health Education #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/heapro/dau091
published in Health Promotion International 30(1), 174-183 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2014/10/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
A range of digitized health promotion practices have emerged in the digital era. Some of these practices are voluntarily undertaken by people who are interested in improving their health and fitness, but many others are employed in the interests of organizations and agencies. This article provides a critical commentary on digitized health promotion. I begin with an overview of the types of digital technologies that are used for health promotion, and follow this with a discussion of the socio-political implications of such use. It is contended that many digitized health promotion strategies focus on individual responsibility for health and fail to recognize the social, cultural and political dimensions of digital technology use. The increasing blurring between voluntary health promotion practices, professional health promotion, government and corporate strategies requires acknowledgement, as does the increasing power wielded by digital media corporations over digital technologies and the data they generate. These issues provoke questions for health promotion as a practice and field of research that hitherto have been little addressed.