La salute digitale e le sue ecologie connettive. Quali narrazioni per riflettere sull'Antropocene?

Abstract

More-than-human, trans-organicity and eco-data-sympoiesis are some of the key concepts through which the narratives on digital-health unfold, and that will be useful to reflect on the era of the Anthropocene.

In this paper, narratives on digital-health will be presented as the analytic field of new connective ecologies to rethink the relationship with the so-called natural environment (usually perceived as that which is extraneous to us humans), and a new way of understanding our more-than-human identity as well as “our” biological specificity. Narratives on digital-health will also be useful to rethink health beyond the idea of a “state” exclusively bound to the human body, reconnecting ties linking the health of all species, the environment and new technologies.

Narratives on digital health represent an excellent analytic field to address critical Anthropocene issues, which: 1. lead to rethinking agency (who does what) in terms of entanglement of all things; 2. propose new approaches to health according to models of human and non-human hyper-complexity; 3. consider the human body (and in a broader sense society as well) through trans-organic processes in which the biological, the technological and the natural become contaminated, but also where the boundary between the inside and the outside of bodies (environment) becomes increasingly tenuous.

Digital-health will highlight new ways of knowing about contemporary phenomena, which in the words of Donna Haraway, are showing their increasingly sympoietic nature; that is, their connective, trans-organic and symbiotic dimensions.

Keywords: digital-health; sympoiesis; anthopocene; trans-organic; one-digital-health; one-health; digital environment; more-than-human.