Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
access the usefulness and quality of the information they collect' (1999:
832). A study by Eysenbach and Köhler (2002) indicates however that we
do not remember which websites we retrieve information from. Henwood
et al
. (2003) draws a similar conclusion from a study of mid-life women.
Also Hardey has found that we can 'move between web sites that originate
in different countries and continents without realising that we have left the
site we fi rst accessed' (1999: 826). Rather, we are constructing our own new
narrative, a hypertext, when we go along (ibid.: 828).
In the 'informed patient discourse' it sometimes seems as if it is possible
for us to avoid the infl uence of implicit messages in advertisement, the taken
for grantedness in dominant discourses or the familiarity of core icons of
occurring representations when we are dealing with information and making
our choices. The informed patient discourse assumes a careful examination
and a weighing of alternatives (Mechanic 1989). Furthermore, a rationally
informed choice is sometimes regarded as a choice which is based on relevant
'true' beliefs (Savulescu and Momeyer 1997).
Hardey (1999), on the other
hand, argues that his research on a group of healthy Internet users supports
Giddens' idea that people in late modernity act as self-refl exive consumers
who search for information from various sources to make reasonably
informed choices. It should be noticed that Hardey talks about a
reasonably
,
and
not a
rationally
, informed choice. But what kind of behaviour did
the participants in his study demonstrate? Were they engaged in strategies
to search for the truth (in a philosophical sense)? Or did they primarily
weigh pros and cons of the information they had collected? His data rather
indicate the latter. They evaluated different standpoints and sometimes
even challenged expert knowledge. This discussion on people's strategies
as they make choices amounts to that most people in late modernity may
be infl uenced by what Giddens describes as a principle of radical doubt,
and they may now and then insist that all knowledge takes the form of
hypotheses. This does not necessarily mean that we no longer are involved
in maintaining and creating discourses and social representations and are
infl uenced by them in our selection and evaluation of health information and
decision-making concerning our health.
Visitors to the Internet can be more or less aware of who stands behind
one or another particular standpoint, as Henwood
et al
. (2003) describe
in their study of women in mid-life, but yet hardly avoid being infl uenced
by the multitude of different discourses and representations concerning a
certain health condition. A specifi c representation of a condition on the
Internet may be a result of a conscious effort by a pressure or activist group
in opposition to an offi cial one, as has been shown for example in the case of
HIV/AIDS (Gilette 2003). Others may emerge as an unintended consequence
of the ways people try to make sense of their illness experiences on the
Internet. Both types of representations may infl uence the decisions of others
when they, at a fateful moment due to a serious condition, are searching for
more information.
