‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet

Narratives about health have an established place in the study of the nature of illness and lay encounters with medical expertise. This article is based on research in the electronic realm of the Internet. Within this new and unique space, people have constructed ‘home pages’ that contain accounts of their health and illness. The interactive and dynamic nature of the Internet means that these web pages represent far more than conventional illness narratives. Based on an analysis of home pages a four-fold typology is presented. This framework is used to map the transformation of people from consumers of health information and care to producers of information and care. It is suggested that home pages constitute the emergence of a new genre that forms part of a broader reconfiguration of the relationship between lay and medical expertise.

[1]  John December,et al.  Units of Analysis for Internet Communication , 1996, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[2]  Arthur W. Frank,et al.  The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics , 1995 .

[3]  M. Hardey.  Doctor in the house: the Internet as a source of lay health knowledge and the challenge to expertise , 1999 .

[4]  Daniel Chandler,et al.  Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web , 1998 .

[5]  T. Parsons.  The Social System , 1953 .

[6]  Roger Burrows,et al.  VIRTUAL COMMUNITY CARE? SOCIAL POLICY AND THE EMERGENCE OF COMPUTER MEDIATED SOCIAL SUPPORT , 2000 .

[7]  D. Lupton.  Consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter. , 1997, Social science & medicine.

[8]  A new medical pluralism , 1999 .

[9]  A. Radley.  The aesthetics of illness: narrative, horror and the sublime , 1999 .

[10]  M. Bury.  Chronic illness as biographical disruption. , 1982, Sociology of health & illness.

[11]  Anthony F. Peressini,et al.  Development, Acceptance, and Use Patterns of a Computer-Based Education and Social Support System for People Living With AIDS/HIV Infection , 1995 .

[12]  A. Frank.  The Rhetoric of Self-Change: Illness Experience as Narrative , 1993 .

[13]  M. Calnan.  Modern medicine : lay perspectives and experiences , 2001 .

[14]  J. Slevin.  Internet and Society , 2000 .

[15]  S. Turkle.  Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet , 1997 .

[16]  M. Bury.  The sociology of chronic illness: a review of research and prospects , 1991 .

[17]  C. Shilling.  The Body And Social Theory , 1995 .

[18]  Lars-Christer Hydén,et al.  Illness and narrative , 1997 .