The internet as non-biomedical milieu: Production of alternative health techno-social spaces and the persistence of marginalised medical practices.

Abstract

This paper describes how spatial understandings of the internet (i.e. the internet is a 'space') enable the persistence of marginalised medical practices. By tracing different accounts of the internet as space among practitioners and followers of diện chẩn - an emergent Vietnamese unregulated therapeutic method - we show how the logic of space circumscribes an alternative techno-social site for marginalised medical practices, transforms the private experience of being alone with technology into being-in-space, spiritualises the internet as a conduit of healing power, and mediates transnational health mobility among the Vietnamese diaspora. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic participation in Vietnam and the US, we demonstrate how the internet can be understood as non-biomedical milieu - a field of determination that conjoins heterogenous interventions on health-related eventualities outside of structured and institutionalised biomedical practices. This in vivo conceptualisation of the internet as space offers a point of convergence against the bifurcation of information as abstract and technology as concrete. A spatial conceptualisation highlights the embeddedness of health knowledge on the internet and shows how techno-social interrelations produce different spaces of multiplicity, which constitute a favourable milieu for medical practices outside of the biomedical institution to persist.