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- Convenor:
-
Tanja Bukovcan
(University of Zagreb)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 20 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel presents three different contexts – an earthquake, Fb group on mental health and social media on diabetes – to critically discuss the roles, potentials and limitations of social media in shaping the stories of our lives.
Long Abstract:
The panel presents three different contexts – an earthquake, Fb group on mental health and social media on diabetes – to critically discuss the roles, potentials and limitations of social media in shaping the stories of our lives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 20 January, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
At 6:24 AM on March 22, 2020, a strong earthquake hit Zagreb, completely locked down due to COVID-19. With no official instructions on what to do, fake news became true stories. This paper tries to determine reasoning and narrative strategies of the people experiencing the two parallel disasters.
Paper long abstract:
At 6:24 AM on Sunday, March 22, 2020 a strong earthquake, 5.5 in magnitude on the Richter’s scale, hit the Zagreb city centre. At that moment, Zagreb and Croatia were in almost complete lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic. In the minutes that followed the earthquake, the official, confidential information not only as to what happened, but more urgently as to that to do, was completely missing. In the absence of official instructions, a shocking piece of misinformation (Krause et al 2020), - that the second, much bigger quake is surely coming – which was shared and quickly spread through social media, was accepted by many as a coherent and trustworthy standard and made people act upon it. As an example of a rapid ethnography, this paper tries to determine the pathways of normative, narrative and moral reasoning (Mattingly 1991, Garro and Mattingly 2001), on the side of the people experiencing the two parallel disasters through which a piece of fake news became a story.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation presents the results of a qualitative research on the Facebook group called ‘Porcelanowe Aniołki’ [‘Porcelain Angels’]. The main aim of the presentation is to present the role of storytelling about a disease in shaping the identity of those struggling with a mental health problem.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation presents the results of a qualitative research on the Facebook group called ‘Porcelanowe Aniołki’ [‘Porcelain Angels’]. The main aim of the presentation is to present the role of storytelling about a disease in shaping the identity of those struggling with a mental health problem, and how the functioning of the analysed support group allows these tales to resonate. The author argues that such a community provides a space for stories, which are easier to tell on the Internet and through it. Owing to this, it is possible to construct tales about experiencing an illness subjectively. The empirical foundation of the presentation consists of requested biographical data in the form of letters written by the group members. The main researched material is enriched with Internet-based participant observation as well as with individual in-depth interviews with psychologists, which reveal the broader context of the group’s functioning. The presentation includes a literature review regarding the fields of sociology and anthropology of health, sociology of interaction, and sociology of the Internet, as well as an overview of previous Polish Internet-based studies on support groups. The considerations lead the researcher to the conclusion that in and through the support group, the authors of the letters can better understand the history of their own illness, one beyond medical definitions.
Paper short abstract:
Basing on the experience of digital anthropology research of online narratives and narration practices of people with diabetes in Russia, the paper will critically engage on the potential and limitations of social media study in the field of medical anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Research of everyday life with a chronic disease or along with a person with one necessarily requires in-depth analysis of vernacular narratives and practices. One of the principal sources for such narratives are public spaces of social media, where people explore others’ experiences of life with disease, share emotions, develop strategies of coping, self-help and collaboration with medical specialists.
Within a research based on the general framework of the global “Cities Changing Diabetes” project (Novo Nordisk, UCL), we initiated a specific step in Russia: a digital anthropology research to collect data on requests, values, practices and vulnerabilities of the people with diabetes basing on their unprovoked judgments in social media. The key target of this research was to define the barriers to diabetes compensation practices, and settle hypothesis for the qualitative stage of research. Among the key findings were significant gender differences of social media activity, differences based on the type of disease (T1D and T2D), and barriers not only for medical compliance or conducting healthy life style among people with diabetes, but also barriers for mutual help and collaboration.
However, extracting relevant and representative meaning from a vast corpus of narratives (in our case, almost 500 000) using either algorithmic or qualitative approaches is anything but unproblematic. The presented paper will critically engage on the ethics, potential and limitations of investigating social media data for this purpose, reflect on the use of qualitative and quantitative methods in social media research and outline of the “diabetes media environment” in Russia.