Parents have accessed websites, online discussion forums and blogs for advice, information and support since the early days of the World Wide Web. In this article, we review the literature in sociology and related social research addressing the ways in which digital media have been used for parenting‐related purposes. We begin with the longer‐established media of parenting websites, online discussion forums, blogs, email, mobile phones and message and video services and then move on to the newer technologies of social media and apps. This is followed by a section on data privacy and security issues. The concluding section summarises some major issues arising from the review and points to directions for further research.
In this article we draw on the findings of a critical discourse analysis of pregnancy-related mobile software applications designed for smartphones ('apps') to examine how such apps configure pregnant embodiment. Drawing on a detailed analysis of all such apps available in June 2015 in the two major global app stores Google Play and Apple App Store, we discuss how such technologies (the 'threats' mode of representation) portray the pregnant body as a site of risk requiring careful self-surveillance using apps to reduce potential harm to women and particularly their foetuses. We show that the second dominant mode of representation ('thrills') constructs the pregnant body and self-tracking in more playful terms. App developers use ludification strategies and encourage the social sharing of pregnancy-related details as part of emphasising the enjoyable aspects of pregnancy. We found that both types of pregnancy-related apps endorse expectations around pregnancy behaviour that reproduce heteronormative and gendered ideals around sexuality, parenthood, and consumption. These apps are socio-cultural artefacts enacting pregnant bodies as sites of both risk and pleasure. In both cases, users of the apps are encouraged to view pregnancy as an embodied mode of close monitoring and surveillance, display, and performance.
This article highlights the importance of dissecting the complex relationship between stigma, health, and place. Drawing on qualitative research with young people in a post-industrial town in the UK, I explore how these young people reflect on their broad sense of health in a stigmatized community. I capture the multiple senses of place experienced by young people and how they come to imagine, negotiate, resist, and accommodate this stigmatization. I conclude by unpacking what implications place-based stigma has for policy as well as for studying young people's health and wellbeing.
The premise that ultrasound technologies provide reassurance for pregnant women is well-rehearsed. However, there has been little research about how this reassurance is articulated and understood by both expectant mothers and health care professionals. In this article, we draw on two qualitative UK studies to explore the salience of ultrasound reassurance to women's pregnancy experiences whilst highlighting issues around articulation and silence. Specifically, we capture how expectant parents express a general need for reassurance and how visualisation and the conduct of professionals have a crucial role to play in accomplishing a sense of reassurance. We also explore how professionals have ambiguities about the relationship between ultrasound and reassurance, and how they subsequently articulate reassurance to expectant mothers. By bringing two studies together, we take a broad perspectival view of how gaps and silences within the discourse of ultrasound reassurance leave the claims made for ultrasound as a technology of reassurance unchallenged. Finally, we explore the implications this can have for women's experiences of pregnancy and health care professionals' practices.
Many mobile software applications ('apps') related to pregnancy have been developed for the global market, yet little research has explored how expectant or new fathers are represented in such technologies. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the descriptions of pregnancy apps available in two major online stores, we identify how these media artefacts represent a problematic version of performing fatherhood. On the one hand, notions of 'intimate' fatherhood are enacted by emphasising the importance of men acquiring knowledge about pregnancy/childbirth and providing emotional and informed support to their partner as she experiences pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood. However, many apps also condescend to expectant fathers and trivialise their role, assuming that they need entertainment, humour and encouragement to promote their involvement. We suggest that such meanings are reflected in wider social expectations, norms, and paradoxes in relation to the role of men in contemporary parenthood. Further research is required to explore how men engage with apps and how apps contribute to their understandings and practices of expectant and new fatherhood.
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