Virtual Special Issue

Sociological perspectives on the internet, health and illness
Edited by Clive Seale

Announcing an investigation of the ‘new and unique medium of the internet’ Michael Hardey (1999), in the first article about the internet published in the journal,  reported a study of households in the UK, recruited through email discussion groups, who were interviewed about their use of information retrieved from the internet about health and illness. This widely cited article set the parameters for much subsequent work by medical sociologists, because it related findings to an existing central concern within the discipline: the asymmetrical distribution of expertise.

Hardey suggested that the internet provided people with the means to challenge professional expertise by becoming experts themselves, saying that this new medium possessed the capacity to ‘transform the relationship between the health professions and their clients’. In this respect Hardey, too, was in tune with the generalised enthusiasm about the democratising potential of the internet that accompanied its early growth, which led to celebratory accounts of what might be achieved by groups normally in a marginal position in relation to conventional mass media, who could now have easy access not only to information posted on the web, but (through the creation of web sites) to the means of producing and disseminating their own knowledge.

As is well known, medical authorities commonly stress the need to evaluate internet sources critically in order to avoid harm, and promote schemes to ‘kitemark’ web sites which provide advice in line with current medical thinking. In part, this can be understood as a defence of the cultural authority of medicine, in parallel with the similar worries expressed by members of the medical profession when radio, film and television began to disseminate medical knowledge through soap operas like ‘Doctor Kildare’ in the early to mid twentieth century.

Read the full editorial

List of articles appearing in the Virtual Special Issue

Mark Davis, Graham Hart, Graham Bolding, Lorraine Sherr, Jonathan Elford (2006) E-dating, identity and HIV prevention: theorising sexualities, risk and network society, Sociology of Health & Illness, , Volume 28, Issue 4, Date: May 2006, Pages: 457-478

Patricia Drentea, Jennifer L. Moren-Cross (2005) Social capital and social support on the web: the case of an internet mother site, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 27, Issue 7, Date: November 2005, Pages: 920-943

Nick Fox, Katie Ward, Alan O'Rourke (2005) Pro-anorexia, weight-loss drugs and the internet: an 'anti-recovery' explanatory model of anorexia, Sociology of Health & Illness, , Volume 27, Issue 7, Date: November 2005, Pages: 944-971

Chris Ganchoff (2004) Regenerating movements: embryonic stem cells and the politics of potentiality, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 26, Issue 6, Date: September 2004, Pages: 757-774

James Gillett (2003) Media activism and Internet use by people with HIV/AIDS, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 25, Issue 6, Date: September 2003, Pages: 608-624

Michael Hardey (1999) Doctor in the house: the Internet as a source of lay health knowledge and the challenge to expertise, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 21, Issue 6, Date: November 1999, Pages: 820-835

Flis Henwood, Sally Wyatt, Angie Hart, Julie Smith (2003) 'Ignorance is bliss sometimes': constraints on the emergence of the 'informed patient' in the changing landscapes of health information, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 25, Issue 6, Date: September 2003, Pages: 589-607

Pru Hobson-West (2007) 'Trusting blindly can be the biggest risk of all': organised resistance to childhood vaccination in the UK, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 29, Issue 2, Date: March 2007, Pages: 198-215

Judith Horne, Sally Wiggins (2009) Doing being 'on the edge': managing the dilemma of being authentically suicidal in an online forum, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 31, Issue 2, Date: March 2009, Pages: 170-184

Kathryn Jones (2008) In whose interest? Relationships between health consumer groups and the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 30, Issue 6, Date: September 2008, Pages: 929-943

Joëlle Kivits (2009) Everyday health and the internet: a mediated health perspective on health information seeking, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 31, Issue 5, Date: July 2009

Steve Kroll-Smith (2003) Popular media and 'excessive daytime sleepiness': a study of rhetorical authority in medical sociology, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 25, Issue 6, Date: September 2003, Pages: 625-643

Sarah Nettleton, Roger Burrows, Lisa O'Malley (2005) The mundane realities of the everyday lay use of the internet for health, and their consequences for media convergence, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 27, Issue 7, Date: November 2005, Pages: 972-992

Emma Rich (2006) Anorexic dis(connection): managing anorexia as an illness and an identity, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 28, Issue 3, Date: April 2006, Pages: 284-305

David A. Rier (2007) Internet social support groups as moral agents: the ethical dynamics of HIV+ status disclosure, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 29, Issue 7, Date: November 2007, Pages: 1043-1058

Anne-Grete Sandaunet (2008) The challenge of fitting in: non-participation and withdrawal from an online self-help group for breast cancer patients, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 30, Issue 1, Date: January 2008, Pages: 131-144

Rebecca Schaffer, Kristine Kuczynski, Debra Skinner (2008) Producing genetic knowledge and citizenship through the Internet: mothers, pediatric genetics, and cybermedicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 30, Issue 1, Date: January 2008, Pages: 145-159

Susie Scott (2006) The medicalisation of shyness: from social misfits to social fitness, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 28, Issue 2, Date: March 2006, Pages: 133-153

Clive Seale (2005) New directions for critical internet health studies: representing cancer experience on the web, Sociology of Health & Illness, Volume 27, Issue 4, Date: May 2005, Pages: 515-540

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