Introduction

Ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards, two counter imaginaries have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature. The first imaginary deals with the techno- utopian dimensions of novel digital technologies: that is, the almost magical benefits they can supposedly offer human lives in terms of promoting social networks and communication, improving health and productivity, solving mundane problems and removing the tedium of low-skilled work. The second imaginary is directly opposed in its dystopian directions, positioning digital technologies as manipulating people, knowing ‘too much about them’, profiting from their personal data without their knowledge or consent, taking away their jobs, de-humanizing personal relationships, de-skilling children and young people and so on. Both imaginaries are simplistic, techno-determinist and hyperbolic, yet they continue to receive widespread attention and promotion (Wajcman, 2017).

Techno-dystopian visions of new digital technologies can be characterized as a broader affective atmosphere (Anderson, 2009) experienced by countries of the Global North, in which the future is increasingly imagined as disastrous, with little hope for redemption (Urry, 2016; Tutton, 2017). Sociologists of the future have identified the seemingly intractable pessimism that pervades future-oriented imaginaries. Tutton (2017) characterizes this approach as outlining ‘wicked futures’, replete with imaginaries of social problems that are difficult to solve. For Urry (2016, p. 33), the dystopian portrayal of novel technologies and other trends such as environmental pollution and climate change is born of what he describes as ‘new catastrophic futures’: a pessimistic sentiment about the future that began to emerge in the early 2000s.

This timeline is evident in the altered visions of digital technologies. Devices and software that in the late 20th century seemed to hold much promise for contributing to human flourishing, by the turn of the century had begun to feel tarnished, their potential for democratic expression, activism and civil society overtaken by what Zuboff (2019) describes as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Surveillance capitalism refers to the commodification of the digitized information about people that is generated when they go online and use mobile devices and apps. Zuboff's influential book on this subject is replete with generalizing and hyperbolic statements about the manipulation and exploitation of internet users by the major tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

One of the most lively areas of theoretical debate in social and cultural theory in recent times is that addressing the phenomenon of risk and the role it plays in contemporary social life and subjectivities. Three major theoretical perspectives on risk emerging since the early 1980s and gaining momentum in the 1990s may be distinguished. The first is offered by the work of Mary Douglas, who began in the early 1980s setting forth an influential perspective on risk, one that adopts a cultural anthropological approach (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Douglas, 1985, 1990, 1992). The German sociologist Ulrich Beck's book Risk Society, published in English in 1992, has provided a major impetus to recent sociological examination of risk (for some of his other writings on risk in English see also Beck, 1992a, 1992b, 1994, 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Beck and Gernsheim, 1995). The English sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994, 1998), adopting a similar perspective to that of Beck, has also influenced sociological diagnoses of the role of risk in society. A third perspective is offered by the several theorists who have taken up Michel Foucault's writings on governmentality (for example, Foucault, 1991) to explore the ways in which the state and other governmental apparatuses work together to govern – that is, manage and regulate – populations via risk discourses and strategies (Castel, 1991; Ewald, 1991; O'Malley, 1996; Dean, 1997).

I have elsewhere identified these three major approaches respectively as the ‘cultural/symbolic’, the ‘risk society’ and the ‘governmentality’ perspectives (see Lupton, 1999).

Introduction

In an article in a weekend newspaper supplement, entitled ‘Mother love gone wrong’, Elizabeth Bellamy writes of her experience of what was professionally diagnosed as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She has suffered from this twice in her life – both times when she was pregnant. The disorder first manifested itself when she was five months pregnant with her first child as an extreme worry that something she ate or did would harm her foetus: ‘I came to believe that every familiar object was contaminated in some way – food, crockery, cutlery, clothes, sheets, books, and so on. The world was swarming with harmful bacteria that I couldn't control or eradicate’ (Bellamy, 1998: 16, original emphasis). In the first episode of this state of anxiety, Bellamy was admitted to a psychiatric hospital ward for five weeks. She recovered completely when her baby was born healthy. ‘As I had tried to explain to the doctors, I was only concerned about the health of the baby. I didn't give a damn about me’ (16). After much deliberation, Bellamy and her husband decided to have another child. This time, she dealt with her fears not by attempting to discount them, but by giving in to them. She washed her hands repeatedly and only ate food that she prepared herself. As a result, she was able to cope with her anxieties about the foetus' health and did not require psychiatric treatment. Again, her anxieties and obsessions vanished with the birth of her baby.

This woman's experience is clearly extreme. It was treated by professionals and represented by the woman herself as an individual's psychiatric disorder, a rare pathological response to pregnancy.