ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we claim that cyberspace has become another media platform through which the governance of health behaviour now takes place. We examine this process by drawing on a number of online resources oriented towards healthy lifestyles that connect with wider concerns about the exponential growth in obesity. Digital environments have been appropriated by various health-promoting agencies and companies as a means of broadcasting health promotion advertisements, tools, services and products. A proliferation of cybertechnologies now enable the lay public to use the Internet to regulate their body size, shape, weight, diet and physical activity. Collectively, these resources can be considered as part of an ‘e-health discourse’ that combines imperatives associated with ‘new public health discourses’ with those ‘e-society’ discourses that are oriented towards consumerism (Henwood 2006). Such resources include Internet sites on health promotion produced by health organizations, intervention programmes, and commercial resources such as health screening, online personal training and weight management sites, all of which play their role in a virtual medical construction of the healthy body. In this sense, we argue that cyberbodies have become inscribed with medicalized information associated with healthism.
