Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
occasionally linked together (Hardey 2002). Those who are looking for such
material on the web are forced to spend a lot of time fi nding sites.
3
Second,
many homepages with illness stories do not exist for long, and others are
continuously reorganized and old information deleted (ibid.). But this does
not characterize the illness narratives on the Aneurysm Support Homepage.
The homepage has existed since 1996 and the narratives on the Brain
Aneurysm Narrative-site are accessible to everybody in their original form.
Furthermore, the site offers easy access to all of the more than 800 narratives
which are neatly ordered with a more or less informative heading.
Usually, media studies are classifi ed as a production, representation
or reception study (Seale 2003). In studying the Internet, this distinction
is sometimes hard to maintain as this new media offers interactive forms
of communication. Some places on the Internet offer no more interactive
opportunities than a traditional health brochure, and it is easy to distinguish
between representations, producers and recipients. But in other cases the
three are intertwined.
The Brain Aneurysm Narrative-site is not constructed as a chatroom
allowing visitors to take part in current conversation and in that sense
interactive. But it is evident from the stories that many storytellers have fi rst
visited the site and read the stories before posting their own. It is also evident
that the contributors have started to communicate with each other on the
'narrative Internet stage', as well as behind the stage, by sending e-mails to
each other. They are in this sense both recipients and producers and, I would
argue, co-creators of a representation of aneurysm.
The illness narratives on this site belong to a mixed genre. They are not
the result of an interview, but neither are they part of a naturalistic face-to-
face conversation. Rather, they are infl uenced by the diary format, at the
same time as they are presented to a selected but unknown audience. This
involves, as Hardey points out, 'a blurring of the distinction between the
private world of the self manifest in the homepage and the public world
of the Internet (2002: 43). All the illness stories are 'molded by rhetorical
expectations that the storyteller has been internalizing ever since he fi rst
heard some relative describe an illness', as Frank points out (1995: 3) and
thus they blur the difference between the public and the private.
Writing and publishing the narratives on the Internet site seems to serve
several purposes such as making sense of upsetting experiences, reconstructing
identities and sharing experiences with others in a similar situation. In a
study of personal homepages that contain accounts of illness, Hardey (2002)
distinguishes between four different kinds: (1) narratives which primarily
were constructed to explain illness and the consequent emotional and social
changes, (2) those which give expert advice to others who have the same or
a similar condition, (3) those which promote a particular approach to an
illness, or indirectly and fi nally (4) those that directly sell products through
the Internet. On the Brain Aneurysm Narrative-site, the authors in addition
to telling their own story also ask for help or give advice to the assumed
