Social Media and Crowd Diagnosis

Abstract

The chapter aims at exploring social media platforms as used by individuals to obtain (first or second) opinions in the form of crowd-diagnosis (Nobles et al. 2019) within a social media-critical discourse study (SM-CDS, KhosranoviNik 2018a) perspective. This study explores the communicative ‘territory’ of medical history presentation and, more particularly, it reports results on the communicative skills used by online users to present their own history and design it as challenging. To this end, this work adopts a critical discourse-based perspective on the language used for history-giving. I shall focus on the communicative resources which are employed by patients to be ‘visible’ at the intersection between health and media discourse. There seems to be an increasing pressure for patients to obtain medical information online and get an internet diagnosis (Gass 2016; McCarthy et al. 2017). This paper could help to bring to the surface the opportunities and challenges of health exchanges between patients and crowdsourcers, which, individually and contextually, reflect frameworks for how health discourse is framed in social digital contexts.