Traversing the Online Landscape: A Remote Indigenous Community Perspective

Abstract

This chapter attempts to tackle a sweeping assumption that globalisation and technology has created an equal playing field and homogenised users of the Internet and social media. Health services and its online interventions have perceived technology to be culturally blank and therefore may act as an intermediary between the Western biomedical discourse and the assumed ‘hard-to-reach’ Indigenous users. We argue that this is problematic because there is no evidence of the integration of a Western concept of health and wellbeing with Indigenous knowledges. The deficit model continues to frame poor health outcomes in remote Indigenous communities lacking in education and health information despite an acknowledgement of the forces playing in the background—the social determinants of health. We propose a small step forward in this complex problem from a co-design departure, arguing that the digital landscape is constructed by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous users and their perceptions of what it means to be healthy and live well. We bring together an interdisciplinary approach, marrying the public health efforts on the Internet with a grounded abductive approach embracing Indigenous subjectivities through a co-design framework that blurs the boundaries between the intended behaviour change intervention, community consultation, participatory research and design.