For this course, I need to choose a topic that involves digital research. Last semester in Dr. Baake's Rhetoric of Science class, I looked at four publicly available medical websites and compared the information contained within the websites for two diagnoses, one terminal and one not terminal (pancreatic cancer and pancreatitis). There is a considerable wealth of research opportunities following a similar path and this would directly apply to my dissertation. For my dissertation, I am interested in the ways that patients self educate after receiving a diagnosis from a physician and how they bring that information back into the physician's office. A great research opportunity would be to start collecting information from patients about how they self educate, but due to the processes involved with IRBs and interviewing patients, this research is probably beyond the scope of an eight week course.
I have also worked with an online medical journal and I could compare the content of an online journal with an print journal to find the differences. This could yield some valuable information about the online representation of information versus a more traditional representation. This information could also apply to a dissertation because patients are more likely to turn to the internet for answers than to traditional medical textbooks or home medical handbooks.
However, after talking to a professor in the department, I am also interested in a controversy that began when Howard Rheingold asked Jurgen Habermas at a public talk, "what he thought of the future and health of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era he wrote about has been supplanted by an infosphere in which so many people use the infosphere to express political opinion."(Rheingold) Habermas did not answer the question. This has caused some controversy and demonstrates a dichotomy between theories of the public sphere and one of the most visable modern examples: the internet. While Dr. Habermas is the best person to answer the question, I would like to gain a deeper understanding of some of the theories and philosophy regarding the issue and to do that I would like to read the following books:
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Basic Books, 2002.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: UChicago Press, 2006.
I am trying to resolve my insatiable curiosity and the requirements of the course. I believe the knowledge gained from reading Habermas, Rheingold and others will give me a greater understanding and a foundational knowledge necessary to continue in TC. If I pursue this avenue and follow this controversy, I am not sure that it will provide enough research material for a paper or follow a traditional research project.
Work cited
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs>>Blog Archive>>Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere. November 5th, 2007.
4 comments:
David - I think your research ideas are very interesting. I especially like the question "how do patients self-educate themselves and how do they bring it back to the physician's office?" I would ask, "how often do they bring it back to the physician's office?" I never thought until a few years ago that medical information posted on the internet might be incorrect. How does a patient sift through the mountain of information, sort out fact from fiction, and then compile the information to have an educated discussion with a doctor? With the vast amount of information available to sift through, I wonder if patients are able to adequately self-educate themselves on rare diseases.
Have you ever thought about researching online support groups that deal with medical issues? I know a coworker of mine has a son who is very ill. He posted his son's information on the web and wrote a daily blog to keep friends, coworkers, and neighbors informed of his son's progress. I always wondered if this new digitalized grieving compares to the traditional methods in a positive or perhaps negative way.
That is a very interesting dissertation topic and one that influences many.
I wonder what the design and usability considerations are behind self-doctoring websites. As for those that allow users to provide comments, does the patient doing the inquiry get the most useful information through the designed website, or on the discussion boards with other patients? You can see how this information overload/ damage control really changes the physician-patient communication process.
David - What about looking at something like WebMD.com which has lots of message boards and people can finid information and discuss diagnosis in a public forum. I wonder if you could find some people on there making self-diagnosis attempts? I'm sure this is a wealth of suprising information in the archives of the logs you just have to be willing to search for it and sounds like you have that curiosity and drive.
I'm with the others, David. I like the idea of doing research that will be tangential to/inform your dissertation. What about doing a content analysis of the content on a/a group of websites designed to inform about a particular affliction? I think looking at publicly available information and seeing how/what information it contains is acceptable sans IRB. We can continue to brainstorm....but think about something along the lines of your MAIN research interest...or a secondary one, if it applies.
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