Unequal Consumers: Consumerist healthcare technologies and their creation of new inequalities
研究消费主义技术如何在医疗中创造患者间的新不平等，分析一种通信技术如何将患者消费者化，并基于对个人在线健康社区的实证分析，识别出医护人员应对差异的四种实践，最终都导致新不平等。
This article examines how consumerist technology creates new inequalities among patients in healthcare. More specifically, we analyse a communication technology that presents a case of consumerization of patients. Using critical diversity literature, we theorize how consumerism embedded in technology assumes a ‘universal individual’, creating a tension for healthcare professionals between acknowledging differences among patients while aiming for equal treatment of all patients. Based on our empirical analysis of so-called personal online health communities, we explore, at the micro level, how healthcare professionals deal with this tension. We identify four different practices: lacking awareness of differences, downplaying differences, discomfort around acknowledging differences and actively accommodating differences. We theorize how they ultimately all create new inequalities.