Consuming health or status? Navigating new technology-driven public health programs

• In Event: Consumption and Inequality

Abstract

Studies have shown that individuals often conspicuously consume objects and adorn their bodies as a cultural display of taste to obtain cultural capital and signal their social status. In means-tested government programs, however, other scholars have found that individuals are interpellated by the government and often stigmatized. Current literature thus presents us with contradictory claims regarding how status might operate through objects of consumption and through government social programs. This study chips at this gap with a case study by examining how status might operate when the government distributes objects of consumption in state-run social programs. Using the case of government-distributed digital health technologies, this study investigates how participants of Singapore’s National Steps Challenge experience and navigate status implications with 24 semi-structed interviews. I find a surprisingly pervasive class anxiety as respondents take pains to justify their participation in the program and address status threats. My study suggests that objects of consumption, like fitness trackers, became entangled with the classed meanings attached to other components of such expansive social programs. Objects like fitness trackers are then not just sources of health information on the body, but also signifiers of status and social position; when distributed by the government, these digital health technologies can classify participants in undesirable ways. Thus, when governmentality works through objects of consumption, matters of distinction become a matter of public health policy.

Author

• Carmen Choong, University of Washington