Topic 1.3: Dating, Intimacy and Sexuality
Pascoe: Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media
p. 117-8
- Young people are at the forefront of developing, using, reworking, and incorporating new media into their dating practices ... teens have put new media tools to use in their courtship practices such as meeting, flirting, going out and breaking up
p. 120
- In their intimacy practices youth use three primary technologies - mobile phones ... instant messaging ... and social network sites
- Mobile phones provide youth a way to maintain private channels of communication, maintain continual contact, and also serve as a "leash" through which teens in a relationship keep "tabs on" one another
- Teens use instant-messaging technologies to maintain frequent casual contact with their intimates
- Social network site profiles are key venues for representation of intimacy, providing a variety of ways to signal the intensity of a given relationship both through textual and visual representation
p. 122
- It is easier to talk to girls there (MySpace) than in person, because one can manage vulnerability through what Christo Sims has termed "controlled casualness"
p. 123
- Teens' normative practice is not necessarily meeting strangers online but rather using these mediated technologies to get to know the friend of a friend or further get to know someone with whom one has had only a casual or brief meeting
p. 125
- Deliberately casual messages are evidence of what Naomi Baron describes as the "whatever theory of language" supported by online communication, in which people are increasingly using more informal linguistic forms to write and communicate
Topic 1.4: Health: What My Doctor Didn't Tell Me
Gunther Eysenbach: Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness
- The emergence and broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches coincides with the more recent emergence of Personal Health Application (PHA) Platforms (also called Personally Controlled Health Record [PCHR] platforms or “health record banks”) such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia, where data is—at the request of the consumer—pulled from various sources (includingthe electronic health records).
On the Scope and Definition of Medicine 2.0
- The ideal Medicine 2.0 application would actually try to connect different user groups and foster collaboration between different user groups (for example, engaging the public in the biomedical research process)
- Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual-reality tools, to enable and facilitate specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between these user groups.
- Medicine 2.0 also stands for a new, better health system, which emphasizes collaboration, participation, apomediation, and openness, as opposed to the traditional, hierarchical, closed structures within health care and medicine.
Social Networking
- Social networking is central to many Web 2.0 and Medicine 2.0 applications and involves the explicit modeling of connections between people, forming a complex network of relations, which in turn enables and facilitates collaboration and collaborative filtering processes.
- enables users to see what their peers or others with a predefined relationship (“friends”, “colleagues”, “fellow patients” etc.) are doing
- enables automated selection of “relevant” information (based on what peers are doing and reading on the Web)
- enables reputation and trust management, accountability and quality control, and fosters viral dissemination of information and applications
Participation
- Wikis are the perfect example to illustrate that the “participation” theme is also relevant for other user groups, such as scientists or health professionals, and can be adopted for tasks like scholarly communication.
- These platforms provide—at least theoretically—unique opportunities to address directly the concerns of patients regarding secondary use of their data for research, and to facilitate obtaining informed consent for participation and data use in research studies in an ethical manner.
- PCHR platforms allow consumers to access and control their personal health information and provide the possibility to obtain consent in a different setting than during a clinical consultation: through the Internet, where it is contextualized by educational information. It can even be argued that patient-access to their own data is a prerequisite for engaging the public
Apomediation
- Apomediation is a new socio-technological term that was coined to avoid the term “Web 2.0” in the scholarly debate. It characterises the “third way” for users to identify trustworthy and credible information and services.
- The first possible approach is to use intermediaries (ie, middlemen or “gatekeepers”), for example health professionals giving “relevant” information to a patient
- The second possibility is to bypass “middlemen” completely, which is commonly referred to as disintermediation. Examples are patients searching for information on the web, or travelers booking their flights directly on the booking system of an airline, bypassing travel agents.
- The third way, prevalent in the age of Web 2.0, is a special form of disintermediation: an information seeking strategy where people rely less on traditional experts and authorities as gatekeepers, but instead receive “guidance” from apomediaries, ie, networked collaborative filtering processes
- The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands “in between” the consumer and information, meaning that he is a necessary mediating agent to receive the information in the first place. As a result, the credibility and quality of the intermediary heavily determines the credibility and quality of the information a consumer receives. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which “stand by” to guide a consumer to high quality information and services without being a prerequisite to obtain that information or service in the first place, and with limited individual power to alter or select the information that is being brokered.
Collaboration
- Collaboration specifically means to connect groups of people with each other who have not, or have insufficiently, interacted with each other. In the “researcher” corner of the Medicine 2.0 triangle, this may refer to bringing together scientists using tools and approaches
- also involves encouraging collaboration between diverse user groups, including for example fostering public participation and engagement in research issues, and user engagement in health care decisions.
- Collaboration between researchers on one hand, and the public or health professionals on the other hand, also means improved possibilities for knowledge translation and getting research findings into practice.
Openness
- On one level—the technical level—Web 2.0 stands for transparency, interoperability, open source, and open interfaces
- What is perhaps most significant about this development is that the “openness” philosophy of Web 2.0 tools will also raise the expectations of the Facebook generation in terms of dealing with their health data.
- Patients 2.0 will demand full control over their data
- On another—societal—level, Medicine 2.0 also implies openness and transparency which enables access to other kinds of information and data the public has historically had limited access to, for example research and research data (open access journals, open data etc.), and which even allows the public to engage in the research process itself (open peer-review).
