Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation aims to highlight how digital platforms shapes postpartum support in France. By drawing upon a corpus of 500 publications gathered from five major social media platforms, I propose a mapping of online actors and their discourses on postpartum care.

Paper Abstract:

In France, over the past two decades, the term “postpartum” has gained significant public attention. While this issue was considered well before the advent of social media (Vozari, 2021), a dual process is now emerging: as current healthcare plans are being criticized, many new paths are blossoming online : a plethora of individuals offers to provide support for postpartum period. This presentation aims to discuss the relevance of surveying digital discourses related to post-partum support. Relying on data gathered from my doctoral research on discursive areas (Ollivier-Yaniv, 2017). My focus is two-fold: firstly, I intend to show that considering online discourse can make a valuable contribution to this field of research. Secondly, I raise the methodological question on how to implement this study. I intend to do so by relying on preliminary data obtained from the mapping of five social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Facebook) (Severo, Venturini, 2016). The data consists of a corpus of the first 100 publications on each plateforms selected by looking up the expression “postpartum support”. This corpus of 500 publications (2014 until today) allows me to conduct an analysis of the discourse of different categories of actors, as well as the relationship between each other by using network analysis performed by the Gephi software. Textometric analysis will then complete this first round of observation by revealing the thematic structure of the discourses. While algorithmic bias doesn’t allow full representativity, this corpus still highlights the major trends of the online debates revolving around postpartum.