Charles Joseph Max*, University of Luxembourg - Center for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), Luxembourg, Luxembourg Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Health information on the web: Supply and Demand Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2012-09-16

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Since the social media “revolution”, news discourse is co-constructed by what Jenkins (2006) calls “participatory culture”. Conventional broadcast media monologues have shifted into social media dialogues through web 2.0 technology which is expanding opportunities of collaborative authoring and peer exchange within communities (Jenkins 2006; Bruns, 2008; Rheingold 2008). Platforms such as Twitter or YouTube, stimulate new forms of communication and shift the audience from traditional consumers to producers of creatively elaborated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
The access to these digital resources is facilitated through a new generation of handheld devices that merge various digital media platforms such as mobile computing, game technologies, smart telephony, video/audio recording or pod casting. The different convergences, i.e. technological, economic, aesthetic, organic, and global, are redefining our media environment (Jenkins, 2006). Interactive new media (Manovich, 2003) are co-constructing different social-cultural realities, drawing from various knowledge sources, perceptions and understandings. They are stimulating radical new learning opportunities for the ‘(inter)net generation’ (Tapscott, 1998; Crook, 2008) or the ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001, 2009; Benett et al., 2008).
Research calls for a better understanding of the information ecology of new publications practices via web 2.0 platforms, especially the quality of information, its usefulness, trustworthiness and reliability (Dwyer et al., 2007; Finnin et al., 2008). In a social media ecosystem formed by the assemblage of different people, groups, organizations, web-based communication systems and mobile technologies, movement of content is one of the most critical affordances (Potts & Jones, 2011).
Our investigation focuses on interactions around and through “www.babyreporter.eu“, a website which targets care-givers of young children in order to promote scientific findings on children’s health, parenting and other aspects dealing with the development of children. The multilingual site (Russian and English) isn’t acting as an authored blog. Rather it refers to and summarizes from refereed sources: research magazines, scientific journals or online sites for instance.
From an initial website, “www.babyreporter.eu“ has developed into a collaborative space for presenting, discovering, commenting on scientific results. The project has created a babyreporter-fan group on the social networking platform “Facebook”, where links for new articles are posted daily and readers can comment on them. Interviews with people from the FB fan group are available as well. Contributors have to agree with their comment being presented as related to a given article. First results show that the orientation towards a collaboratively engaged audience matters: commentators reformulate their (initial) comments in wording or in providing additional content.
A systematic analysis of the practices is currently developed as PhD research. Interviews with users will further contribute to understand how users-producers of content assess the trustworthiness of information (formal aspects, authorship etc.). Using interaction analysis, activity theory and virtual ethnography, the research investigates and theorises the socio-cultural dynamics of trust and distrust (Markova & Gillespie, 2008) in relation to the creation of expert / lay knowledge within cultural, historical and interactional contexts. The research will generate also recommendations how to create trust about a credible (trustworthy) Internet-platform, which combines both scientific news and user-generated content.