The Smartphone Pandemic team finally together

At last, an in-person meeting to wrap up The Smartphone Pandemic project! The last two years, our team has studied the political and social implications of the rapidly evolving use of smartphone technologies in official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Smartphone Pandemic team at Centre for Development and the Environment

The project engaged over 10 researchers from diverse disciplines and four continents, to study how national authorities integrated smartphones in their response to COVID-19 in Norway, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, Japan, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

 

The country case studies highlight how the use and impacts of digital technologies depend on contextual factors, such as the approach to primary health care, the social and political determinants of health, and the view on technology. For example, the kinds of technologies used in Western and Asian countries were not considered necessary to manage COVID-19 in Sierra Leone, partly due to the limitations of technical solutions experienced during the Ebola epidemic.

 

A key project finding is that the pandemic has prompted the establishment of new partnerships between big tech corporations and public health authorities. Examining digital contact tracing, epidemic modelling and public health communication, Storeng and de Bengy Puyvallée found that tech corporations have waived tremendous power to influence public health. Many technical solutions have been attractive to politicians, but they tend to have uncertain effectiveness, unclear societal implications, and challenge countries’ ability to make decisions on their own premises.

 

The project has identified many of the unfulfilled promises and failures of digital responses to COVID-19. Erikson has argued that apps designed to locate, contact trace, and report on social distancing have not shown good return on investment, do not solve governance challenges, and fail to help people most at risk. For example, the UK was one of the countries that invested heavily in contact tracing apps, but received extensive criticism, obtained poor results, and experienced a displacement effect from manual contact tracing.

 

The project findings emphasize the need for new international governance and regulatory frameworks for the use of smartphone technologies and data in pandemic response to protect citizens from corporate and commercial interests. The use of digital technologies has also raised several ethical issues, which was discussed during the Oslo workshop. Venkatapuram has identified the need to involve ethicists in pandemic response and focus more on a broader public health ethics that put the most vulnerable in the centre.  

 

Event at the Oslo House of Literature

 

The project findings were disseminated at a public event at the Oslo House of Literature on June 20. The different country experiences were highlighted as part of a panel discussion, while anthropologists Daniel Miller and Thomas Hylland Eriksen gave talks related to the use of more generic smartphone functions for health purposes.

 

Published July 15, 2022 11:23 AM - Last modified July 15, 2022 11:44 AM