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The mundane realities of the everyday lay use of the internet for health, and their consequences for media convergence
Author(s) -
Nettleton Sarah,
Burrows Roger,
O'Malley Lisa
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2005.00466.x
Subject(s) - the internet , convergence (economics) , sociology , sociology of health and illness , concordance , quality (philosophy) , public relations , order (exchange) , internet privacy , epistemology , social psychology , psychology , health care , political science , computer science , law , medicine , business , world wide web , philosophy , finance , economics , economic growth
The internet is now a major source of health information for lay people. Within the medical, sociological and popular literatures there have been three main responses to this development. We classify these as ‘celebratory’, ‘concerned’ and ‘contingent’. This paper falls into the third category and, drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, examines people's accounts of their use of online health resources. It identifies six implicit rules – which we call ‘rhetorics of reliability’– that people readily draw upon when articulating why they trust some online sources and not others. In addition participants locate their accounts within broader discursive frameworks in order to present themselves as ‘sensible’ users. The article concludes by suggesting that there is an emerging concordance between the lay use of the internet for health and illness and dominant (generally) biomedical conceptions of what constitutes ‘good quality’ health information.