The mundane realities of the everyday lay use of the internet for health, and their consequences for media convergence

TLDR

The internet has become a primary source of health information for laypeople, prompting three main scholarly responses—celebratory, concerned, and contingent—identified across medical, sociological, and popular literature. This study, positioned within the contingent category, uses discourse analysis to examine how people describe their use of online health resources. Through discourse analysis, the authors identify six implicit “rhetorics of reliability” that users invoke to justify trust in certain online sources and situate their accounts within broader discursive frameworks to portray themselves as sensible users. The article concludes that lay use of the internet for health increasingly aligns with dominant biomedical conceptions of what constitutes high‑quality health information.

Abstract

Abstract The internet is now a major source of health information for lay people. Within the medical, sociological and popular literatures there have been three main responses to this development. We classify these as ‘celebratory’, ‘concerned’ and ‘contingent’. This paper falls into the third category and, drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, examines people's accounts of their use of online health resources. It identifies six implicit rules – which we call ‘rhetorics of reliability’– that people readily draw upon when articulating why they trust some online sources and not others. In addition participants locate their accounts within broader discursive frameworks in order to present themselves as ‘sensible’ users. The article concludes by suggesting that there is an emerging concordance between the lay use of the internet for health and illness and dominant (generally) biomedical conceptions of what constitutes ‘good quality’ health information.