ABSTRACT
Digital media are increasingly significant for everyday encounters with health and biomedicine, including immunity. This chapter examines the mixture of immunity-related consumer product advertisements, health advice webpages and news media and magazines articles on immunity and how they employ the key narratives and metaphors of immunological explanation. It also considers how these digital products, via self-defence rationality, provide forms of reassurance, giving consumption of them, in and of itself, the quality of bodily and psychological immunisation against threat. Probiotic food supplements, diet schemes and mental health and fitness regimes, for example, offer hope for resilience in the face of threats to health. So mingled is immunity with these digital products that this chapter considers how digital media might itself be an ‘immune system’. In addition, Google Trend data and the topics of the news and magazine items during the COVID-19 pandemic foreground immunity’s temporal qualities and its valuing in the period until such time as vaccination could be secured for the world’s population. Related concerns of uncertainty and the truth claims of products marketed to boost immunity are also considered.
