Health Vlogs silently changing lives

This week’s paper Health Vlogger-Viewer Interaction in Chronic Illness Management, was very interesting and touching.

The authors Liu et al. conducted a qualitative study in order to explore health vlogs and the interaction between vloggers and their viewers and discuss the implications for design.

The authors begin by discussing the trend of blogging as a communication tool for reaching out to others. They refer to the paper of Nardi et al. in 2004 which states that “blogs gave people a place to “shout,” or express themselves by writing to an audience of sometimes total strangers, sometimes their best friends and colleagues and family members” and attributes several roles for blogging including:  autobiographical narratives, commentary, catharsis, muse and community forum. Based on that, Liu et al. discuss how health vlogs related to chronic or terminal diseases share similar elements as blogs. Vlogs serve as a mean for self-representation and self-expression for the vlogger enabling him/her to reach out to an invisible audience.

In order to further explore health vlogs, the authors conducted a qualitative study focusing on three diseases, diabetes, HIV and cancer, examining 72 vlogs. The results indicate four genres of health vlogs:  first one is teaching , health vlogs around diseases such as diabetes focus mainly on sharing knowledge about the disease, self-management and providing lifestyle tips and advice addressed to viewers. The second type is personal journals where vloggers would through the talking head style (featuring the author’s head only) share their experiences, the progression of their disease and meaningful updates in order to build connections with consistent followers. For HIV vloggers it was sharing their personal experience with stigma and embracing HIV with all it brings with it. The third genre is self-documentaries through which vloggers would capture moments from their daily life whether related to their disease such as a doctor appointment or mundane events such as running in a marathon. The fourth type is video compilations, combining videos and messages from several people and sharing them with viewers as a mean to provide support, inspiration and encouragement to those battling with a disease. Other findings that the authors highlighted were related to the aesthetics of the videos. Those included strong non-verbal cues such as instances of crying, pausing and facial expressions, involving other actors such as family members and friends in the video and context filming by filming in specific settings such as one’s bedroom, transitioning between backgrounds and intensifying messages.

The analysis of these findings by the authors revealed that vlogs offer self-therapy since vloggers go through an emotional burst and feel confident to discuss their struggles, pain and intimate details. Also, vlogs are a mean for social support and helping others either by providing information and solutions/tips or simply by sharing his/her own experience, the vlogger would be helping someone battling with the same condition. However, the authors highlighted that as much as vloggers try to engage their viewers either through responding to comments or asking questions, there wasn’t much evidence indicating if anyone among the “invisible audience” is actually benefiting from those vlogs except for instances where viewers chose to directly communicate with the vlogger.

Moreover, authors discuss design implications of health vlogs and propose some recommendations:

• The current systems depend on the vloggers’ own technical knowledge and skills; yet they could be used to inform vloggers on their non-verbal cues and the potential impact of their vlogs on viewers. Also, the Metadata collected by those systems could guide viewers interested in building connections to relevant vlogs.
• Many diseases carry with them some stigma thus the need for systems to have an anonymity feature which YouTube, nevertheless the authors couldn’t find anyone who used it.
• Health vlogs systems should have a side bar where vloggers could add more information and specific timestamps for viewers.
• Health vlogs systems should promote long-term connections and engagement between vloggers and viewers and authors suggested systems such as VideoPal to achieve that.

I personally agree with the authors about the various roles of health vlogs mainly as a medium for social support and self-therapy especially when it comes to chronic diseases. Coming from a public health background, I am aware that social isolation, stigma and low self-esteem usually accompany most diseases and vlogs are key in building a sense of belonging to a specific community. Reading some of the quotes in the paper and watching some of the health vlogs, I really appreciated this medium further and it motivated me to promote that idea among people I personally know who have been struggling with chronic diseases and not coping very well. In addition, I concur with the authors about the limited interaction it entails in the current systems, since unfortunately viewers often do not engage with vloggers and it is really challenging to evaluate a specific health vlog’s effectiveness. My only concern with the paper was that although the authors mentioned few features or systems that could potentially resolve the limitations of the current systems, I felt they didn’t dwell enough on that section and could have elaborated further on the features mentioned.

References

Liu, L. S., Huh, J., Neogi, T., Inkpen, K., & Pratt, W. (2013, April). Health vlogger-viewer interaction in chronic illness management. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 49-58). ACM.

Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 41-46.

The paper I chose for this week is : Ekman, M. (2014). The dark side of online activism: Swedish right-wing extremist video activism on YouTube. MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research, 30(56), 21.

Link : http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediekultur/article/viewFile/8967/15176

The reason I chose that paper is because as the title reflects it , it exposes a civic issue related to a medium such as YouTube which is used for online activism purposes but promoting an ideology considered dangerous by many.