ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how social media technologies and virtual health communities are transforming the current healthcare system. Providing examples from virtual health platforms, we explore the new forms of empowerment that are occurring, and articulate changes in consumer online health information seeking and learning. These changes also open up wider possibilities of post-consumer, post-corporate forms of organizing our world with the help of digital technologies. By enabling transformation of roles and relations among market actors, Web 2.0 technologies –
technologies that facilitate user contributions, collaborations, collective intelligence, co-creation, and cloud-based services (O’Reilly 2009) – increase the potential for collaboration among these actors. These technologies emphasize innovative, data-oriented, service-centered collaboration; increased levels of user contribution; organization of content through non-hierarchical methods; and increased aspirations of community building, sharing and interaction (Bleicher 2006). Despite conflicting views (Eysenbach et al. 2004; Jadad et al. 2006), Web 2.0 applications present the potential to transform the top-down approach in healthcare. The use of social media for information sharing, collaboration and user-generated content has disrupted the conventional superior-physician/inferior-patient dialectic (Tyson 2000), which had previously led to a one-way surveillance and management of patient care by those claiming superior medical knowledge and rationality (Foucault 1975). Social media applications in healthcare enable the origination and continuation of a mindset that increasingly seeks to navigate alternative platforms for sharing and connecting to different market actors and forming communities with them. Patients now conduct real-time clinical research with other healthcare actors, and manage their own and others’ care through social media (Jadad 1999; Perfetto and Dholakia 2010). In this emerging participatory culture, sharing becomes much more prevalent in online platforms than offline platforms (Belk 2010). Through collaborative ownership and collective sharing, online community members together add to knowledge generation, slice and splice it up, reorganize and
give it away without losing it (Belk 2007). Health-related collaboration can be seen as part of a wider movement of technology-aided collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers 2010). Consumer empowerment through involvement in social media-induced co-production processes is usually imbued with the capability to give away, deliver and distribute available resources of knowledge and experience to others (Hemetsberger 2002). In the following sections, we will discuss how virtual health communities and social media
applications in healthcare are transforming the roles and relations among healthcare actors, and articulate the shifts in information seeking in healthcare.
