The Banner article built on the readings/discussion from the ultrasound session about the change in power dynamics when patients started seeing doctors in offices/hospitals instead of doctors seeing patients in their homes. The emergence of and vibrancy of these forums, at least w/r/t FM/CFIDS and PLMS, is in large part due to an awareness that medical professionals often ignore or dismiss women with these conditions. Especially for patients that are women/poc, doctors occupy this privileged position in their “home turf” of hospitals/offices where they interact with a patient’s illness as disembodied from the patient themselves. It’s weird because people seem to be drawn to forums because of the lack of affective connection/emotion in “official” medical spaces, which in large part is due to a fetishization of data that disregards the testimony/fuzzy feelings of patients, but they find that missing affective connection in forums by participating in that same kind of fetishization of data.
“Offline” and “Online” is such a better way to describe the difference we try to invoke when we say the “virtual” or the “real” world. It would be interesting to read an ethnography of the people responsible for developing the terminology/language of certain social media platforms—e.g. the people who came up with “friend” “like” and “status” for Facebook. One thing missing from UCL study is how the language embedded in the platforms themselves influence people’s conceptions and uses of them. Do certain associations change when those words are translated into different languages?
Social media has different if not contradictory consequences across different cultures which makes sense intuitively but can be hard to talk or think about without the specific details/examples provided in this chapter. I wonder how our (American) experience of social media would change if we imported platforms instead of exporting them. Except in China, the chapter described people consuming and adapting to platforms designed by Americans. Although every field site worked with the apparatus to produce a site-specific social media, it seems like there still might be something ‘American’ immutably built into the platforms by virtue of who the designers are and who they think themselves to be designing for. From the privacy settings to conglomeration of ‘features’ to the terminology, do these platforms reflect and potentially encourage American ways of thinking and acting?
Also, I’ve always been curious about why Google + was such a bust…
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