Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood

The book "Mediating Alzheimers" explores how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging, particularly in relation to Alzheimer's disease. It demonstrates how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with the disease. The author focuses on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, and shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer's. The book contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 24 May 2022
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer's disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer's, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease's relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease.

Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer's threatens, such as memory, are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer's.

Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging. Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer's contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer's disease and aging in America.

Dimension: 216 x 140 x 51 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517902292