‘What was your blood sugar reading this morning?’ Representing diabetes self-management on Facebook
Abstract
Social networking sites have swiftly become a salient venue for the production and consumption of neoliberal health discourse by individuals and organisations. These platforms offer both opportunities for individuals to accrue coping resources and a means for organisations to promote their agendas to an online audience. Focusing specifically on diabetes, this article examines the representation of social actors and interactional styles on three organisational Pages on Facebook. Drawing on media and communication theories, we situate this linguistic analysis in relation to the communicative affordances employed by these organisations as they publish content online. Diabetes sufferers are represented as an at-risk group whose vulnerabilities can be managed through forms of participation specific to the respective organisation. More popular diabetes Pages draw on the opportunities for social interaction afforded by Facebook and combine informational and promotional content to foster communication between the organisation and its audience. By encouraging reflexive management of diabetes risks, these Pages contribute to the construction of ‘biological citizens’ who interweave habitual interactions on social networking sites with responsible self-care, consumption of health information and health activism.
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Biographies
Daniel Hunt is a research associate on the ‘Chronic illness and online networking: expectations, assumptions, and everyday realities’ project in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London. His previous work has used corpus linguistics techniques to investigate discussions of depression and eating disorders in online patient communities and clinician focus groups.
Nelya Koteyko is a reader in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London and is the principal investigator on the ‘Chronic illness and online networking’ study. Her previous research has examined the framing of media and policy responses to developments in science, technology and medicine, including the representations of emerging infectious diseases, probiotics and climate change.
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Article first published online: April 23, 2015
Issue published: July 2015
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