Cybersociality Readings

I found the readings this week to be very helpful for developing my own course of action for the virtual ethnography project. In particular, the analyses of PatientsLikeMe and CareCure provided lots of concrete examples of both research methods and useful topics/frameworks that can be applied to other studies of online communities.

Olivia Banner's study of online biosociality on PatientsLikeMe was particularly interesting to me because of its focus on gender and how the PLM FM/CFIDS community has been shaped by the fact that the majority of its members are women. Because most patients with FM/CFIDS are female and there has been a long history of "female" diseases given psychosomatic etiologies, this alternative media intimate public sphere is very much influenced by the "female complaint" and the feelings of anger and frustration that many users share about their medical treatment. In my ethnography I also plan on discussing a gendered community, and I think this paper is a good example of demonstrating the essential role that gender plays in shaping the nature of this community, rather than relegating it to a side note after the main analysis.

Professor Song's chapter about CareCure demonstrated how and why such a website can function an online gathering place for the SCI community, which is constrained in many ways by physical immobility. I found the section on the digital architecture of CareCure to be especially interesting because it took into account the effects of the actual platform on users interactions, and I think that's an important aspect of digital communities to consider. Many features of a platform can seem arbitrary or be taken for granted, but in this analysis, the display of users' online status and the fact that most recent posts surface first, for example, play a big role in creating the sense of community on CareCure, which then influences what users post and how they respond to others.

In Ilana Gershon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," different digital communication medias are considered, rather than one particular cohesive community. The main argument of this chapter is that the medium of communication is as important as the content in terms of actually communicating--that media ideologies, "beliefs about how a medium communicates and structures communication," shape how people receive and interpret information from different communication media. Media ideologies, however, are not set in stone. Especially for new (online, digital) media, there are not widely accepted norms yet, so personal ideologies often clash or cause misunderstandings. Email, for example, is considered very differently by different generations. For very emotionally charged situations such as the dissolution of a romantic relationship, the medium used to conduct the exchange is especially important and scrutinized carefully for the information/connotation that it carries.