Towards Conviviality in Navigating Health Information on Social Media

Title of the Paper

Towards Conviviality in Navigating Health Information on Social Media

Paper Information

• Research Domain: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Health Information Dissemination, Misinformation on Social Media
• Keywords: Social Media, Health Information, Rumors, Misleading Information, Information Quality, India, Pandemic, Pluralistic Medical Systems, Digital Media Literacy

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Identified Problem: The spread of health information on social media has led to the proliferation of misinformation and false information, which affects public health decision-making. Additionally, the use of social media varies across different regions, cultures, and political contexts, and these specific contexts have not been sufficiently studied.
• Significance: The quality of health information directly impacts public health and social welfare, especially during public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Misinformation can lead to a loss of trust and exacerbate social inequalities and biases.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: This study aims to explore how urban and rural residents in southern India navigate health information within pluralistic health systems and complex social media ecosystems. Previous related work has often focused on Global North contexts or open social media platforms, with limited understanding of closed social media platforms like WhatsApp.

Proposed Solution

• Methodology: The authors employed a qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews to collect data on how urban and rural residents in southern India process health-related information on social media.
• Innovations:
  • Utilized Ivan Illich's theory of "convivial tools" as an analytical framework to uncover tensions between individual goals and values imposed by tools.
  • Examined how local health knowledge intersects with the social and political culture of social media.
  • Highlighted the role of health information in enhancing community health awareness and public health guidance, particularly in low-resource settings.
• Implementation Steps and Techniques:
  • Conducted in-depth interviews with 28 participants, including residents and community health workers.
  • Analyzed social media content shared by participants (e.g., WhatsApp forwarded messages, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos).
  • Applied inductive interpretative methods for open coding of data and thematic synthesis.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • Health information primarily originates from individual users, organizations, and traditional medical practitioners (e.g., Ayurveda). This information is utilized for personal and family care, challenging the absolute reliance on formal medical institutions.
  • Identified how misinformation undermines public trust through content and dissemination patterns, such as promoting unverified home remedies or inciting religious and racial biases.
  • Demonstrated the potential of social media as a platform for community health interactions, fostering mutual support among villagers through health information dissemination.
• Advantages:
  • Supplemented global health information research with insights into the complexities of specific cultural and social contexts from a localized perspective.
  • Provided a comprehensive approach to understanding information dissemination—encompassing both individual evaluation of information and its flow and impact within communities.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Most participants actively used social media information to support family care but expressed concerns and resistance toward misinformation.
  • Closed social media platforms like WhatsApp played a significant role in information dissemination, though the spread of misleading information was more covert.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Limitations: Data was primarily collected from two locations in southern India, and all participants were Hindu, which limits the representation of experiences from religious minority groups. The lack of caste information from participants may restrict deeper analysis of social inequalities.
  • Future Directions:
    • Expand understanding of health information dissemination across multilingual and multi-religious contexts.
    • Explore the design of more convivial digital media tools to reduce misinformation spread.
    • Support community-level digital health media literacy education.

Through this study, the authors conducted an in-depth analysis of the flow and use of health information in specific contexts and proposed new critical perspectives on information quality control and social media design.