Abstract
Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement. Against this backdrop, this article attends to how citizens confirm, debate and resist governmental framings of health information online. By drawing upon STS and affect theory, it centers on the digital mediation of feelings on a Facebook engagement site for HPV vaccination. While the public authorities framed HPV vaccination as a matter of love and fear, a wide register of positive and negative feelings were mediated on the site. The article proposes the notion of ‘digitalised literary devices’ to analyse how mundane literary habits, such as the use of punctuation, online have been transformed to digital devices that, for instance, mediate public feelings. By conceptualizing public engagement as ‘civic intensities’, it shows how digital devices, such as digitalised literary devices, mediate and intensify public feelings of engagement.
Highlights
Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement (Lupton, 2014)
It discusses how human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination communication was framed by public authorities as a question of love and fear, and how lay citizens used the Facebook platform to affectively support, debate and resist this framing of the public concerns involved
It is offered free of charge to girls in grade 5 or 6. This is similar to many other European countries, who implemented HPV vaccination for girls as part of national vaccination programs around the same time
Summary
Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement (Lupton, 2014). By combining a device perspective with Papacharissi’s (2014) focus on social media as an arena for public feelings of engagement, it is possible to analyse how digital devices invite citizens to affectively attune to public issues like HPV vaccination.
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