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Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community
During the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, credentialed experts—scientists, doctors, public health experts, and policymakers—as well as members of the public and patients faced radical uncertainty. Knowledge about how Covid-19 was spread, how best to diagnose the disease, and how to treat i...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8564268/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34744215 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09492-1 |
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author | Au, Larry Eyal, Gil |
author_facet | Au, Larry Eyal, Gil |
author_sort | Au, Larry |
collection | PubMed |
description | During the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, credentialed experts—scientists, doctors, public health experts, and policymakers—as well as members of the public and patients faced radical uncertainty. Knowledge about how Covid-19 was spread, how best to diagnose the disease, and how to treat infected patients was scant and contested. Despite this radical uncertainty, however, certain users of Covid-19 Together, a large online community for those who have contracted Covid-19, were able to dispense advice to one another that was seen as credible and trustworthy. Relying on Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of social interaction, we highlight the performative dimension of claims to lay expertise to show how credibility is accrued under conditions of radical uncertainty. Drawing on four months of data from the forum, we show how credible performances of lay expertise necessitated the entangling of expert discourse with illness experience, creating a hybrid interlanguage. A credible performance of lay expertise in this setting was characterized by users' ability to switch freely between personal and scientific registers, finding and creating resonances between the two. To become a credible lay expert on this online community, users had to learn to ask questions and demonstrate a willingness to engage with biomedical knowledge while carefully generalizing their personal experience. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8564268 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85642682021-11-03 Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community Au, Larry Eyal, Gil Qual Sociol Article During the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, credentialed experts—scientists, doctors, public health experts, and policymakers—as well as members of the public and patients faced radical uncertainty. Knowledge about how Covid-19 was spread, how best to diagnose the disease, and how to treat infected patients was scant and contested. Despite this radical uncertainty, however, certain users of Covid-19 Together, a large online community for those who have contracted Covid-19, were able to dispense advice to one another that was seen as credible and trustworthy. Relying on Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of social interaction, we highlight the performative dimension of claims to lay expertise to show how credibility is accrued under conditions of radical uncertainty. Drawing on four months of data from the forum, we show how credible performances of lay expertise necessitated the entangling of expert discourse with illness experience, creating a hybrid interlanguage. A credible performance of lay expertise in this setting was characterized by users' ability to switch freely between personal and scientific registers, finding and creating resonances between the two. To become a credible lay expert on this online community, users had to learn to ask questions and demonstrate a willingness to engage with biomedical knowledge while carefully generalizing their personal experience. Springer US 2021-11-03 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC8564268/ /pubmed/34744215 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09492-1 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Au, Larry Eyal, Gil Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title | Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title_full | Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title_fullStr | Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title_full_unstemmed | Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title_short | Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community |
title_sort | whose advice is credible? claiming lay expertise in a covid-19 online community |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8564268/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34744215 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09492-1 |
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