Socio-technical Practices of Providing and Using Online Health Information

Copyright You are allowed to download this paper for personal use only. This paper must not be published elsewhere without the author's explicit permission. The paper must not be used for commercial purposes. While most of the existing research about online health information (OHI) focuses exclusively on either the provider or the user side of communication circuits, this paper aims to integrate and discuss both sides and their mediated relation to one another. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory it conceptualizes the provision and use of OHI as socio-technical. It questions concretely how website providers position their websites and information, how users browse through the web and assemble information and interrogates the various concepts of OHI these different practices imply. It further asks how search engines and Google in particular come to play such a dominant role in the way health-related web information is provided and used. The paper concludes by evaluating the implications of the findings in regard to debates about the quality of OHI and the way web information is distributed and acquired on a broader scale at the present day.