Page 272 - Proceedings Collega2023

Health discourse in mediatised society

Because of its interactivity and connectedness, digital media such as Facebook allows users to
have better control over their health communication. Patients, for example, are found to use the
application to deliver informational and emotional support (Myrick et al., 2016), create disease awareness
(Al Mamun et al., 2015) and share personal health experience (Fox, 2014) to enhance their community
well-being. With the advantage of the hyperlink, information sharing and acquisition in the space can be
promoted endlessly, forming sustainable communities centred around specific subjects. Furthermore,
individuals dealing with particular health conditions commonly use online health resources to seek advice
and insights from fellow other users about their health (Lin et al., 2016). A prior study conducted by Laranjo
et al. (2014) found that such information is very helpful in building up individuals self-health monitoring
capacity and better-informed treatment decisions. Notably, the proliferation of media has transformed
social media users into important information gatekeepers while also altering their communicative
behaviour.
There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that different communicative behaviour are
interconnected. Valenzuela (2013) discovered that activism and opinion expression mediated the
relationship between overall social media use and protest behaviour. In the context of health, Myrick et
al. (2016) found that expressing social and emotional support through social media networks affected self-
health monitoring and information sharing among cancer communities. In evaluating the impact of user-
generated content (UGC) and breastfeeding through Facebook on female college students, Jin et al. (2015)
discovered that different message style (i.e., testimonial comment) contributed significantly to the
breastfeeding attitudes and behaviours. Strekalova (2017) argued that while social media users tend to
comment on current health promotions, they are still actively seeking information on Ebola disease that
has previously been posted.

Previous studies have found that social media users who are motivated to address their health
issues through social media networking may attempt to acquire, share, or transmit more information for
decision-making purposes. X users, for example, select information available on the "timeline," transmit
them to other users via the "repost" function, and seek additional information from multiple information
sources (Yoo et al., 2018). Likewise, with the presence of popular features such as "sharing,"
"commenting," and "liking," Facebook offers more than an information search experience. Those buttons
enable users to share their health experience, ask questions related to health, or offer emotional support.
Additionally, users with a similar health problem can have a more personalised conversation in the
Facebook group (Chen & Lee, 2014). Correspondingly, Fox (2014) found that in the United States, adult
users posted health-related information or commented online to help others with similar health problems.
In the meantime, the study also reported that one in four adults who use the internet reported having
read or watched someone else's personal health storey on health or medical issues, while another 16%
respondents going online to find other people who have the same health concerns.

Drawing upon the empirical arguments presented above, our methodology attempts to place
online contributions made by users of social media platforms, specifically Facebook, within the context of
dengue prevention and control efforts, thus embedding them in their respective local knowledge contexts.
Our goal is to discover how group members use, navigate, or adapt the local knowledge resources in the

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