Complicating Digital "Echo-Chambers"

• In Event: Situating Methods

Abstract

Over the last decade, it has become particularly common for people who struggle with health-issues to discuss these within peer communities online. This trend is increasingly causing public concern about the digital spread of misinformation, not least because social media displayed lay discussions regularly mediate contested health-information. In the ‘era of big data’ (boyd & Crawford 2012), it is tempting for researchers interested in understanding the impacts of social media, to employ the vast amounts of digital material that present themselves as unobtrusively available as ‘data’. However, this paper complicates the eligibility of privileging digital traces as predominant forms of social evidence.
Through ethnographic research in health-related Facebook-groups and among their users, the paper analyses how these communities operate with the consensus that everyone has the right to share their situated knowledges and that participants’ contributions are inherently appreciated as situated perspectives, not universal truths. At the same time, these communities operate with the mutual understanding that direct critique of knowledges should largely be avoided as these impair users’ willingness to share their subjective experiences and health-related insecurities.
Consequently, on the level of the digital, these communities easily give off the impression of being echo-chambers that naively accept anything at face value, whereas ethnographic inquiry highlights that the absence of critique is actually fundamental to sustaining in-group intimacy.
Thus, the paper contributes to STS by exemplifying how meaning in digitally saturated contexts sometimes resides beyond the digital and how the direction of the researcher’s attention matters to the analytical outcome.

Author

• Ane Kathrine Gammelby, Aarhus University