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© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Benoit Cordelier and Olivier Galibert to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934249
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ISBN 978-1-78630-468-1
Preface
Info-communication Perspectives on Digital Health Communication
As we finalize this collective work, we cannot disregard the health context that is highlighted by the very content of the book. We are confined for public health reasons. Each of us on one side of the Atlantic, like half of the world’s population on this day in April 2020, must face the health, social and emotional consequences of the pandemic caused by Covid-19.
We feel the fear of the dangers of disease and the necessary protection of ourselves and our people. We are subjected to a flood of information on the spread of the epidemic in traditional media, as well as on social media, that worries us and sometimes freezes us in fear. We keep in touch with our loved ones via digital tools hardly used by most until now, but which immediately become indispensable to maintain family, friendly and professional links, and at the same time, we are obliged to ensure pedagogical continuity for our students from a distance via digital tools. As actors of these new knowledge mediations, we do so twice over because we must also support our children as they attend their distance courses and evaluations that continue as best as possible during this period.
As you will have understood by reading these lines, the unprecedented health crisis we are experiencing today makes the general issue of the work you are holding in your hands (or reading on a screen) even more topical: how does digital technology contribute to changes in health information and communication? In other words, what are the contemporary challenges of digital communication in health?
Box P.1. Digital communication in terms of health or digital health communication?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health in 1946 as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” [OMS 46].
The adjective health refers to activities and facilities related to health and hygiene. It takes on a more operational connotation and thus evokes the challenges of public health protection.
In France, a distinction is even made between the social and medico-social sectors – defined by Laws 75-534 for the disabled and 75-535 for social and medico-social institutions, then replaced respectively by Laws 2005-102 and 2002-2 – and the health sector – with Laws 2002-303 on patients’ rights and the quality of the health system and 2004-806 for public health policy.
In Quebec, the purpose of Chapter s-2.2 of the Public Health Act is to protect the health of the population and to establish conditions favorable to the maintenance and improvement of the state of health and well-being of the population in general. It is this text that gives the government the authority to declare a state of health emergency, as is the case for the Covid-19 pandemic.
The adjective “sanitaire” in French (literally meaning “sanitary” but translated as “health” used adjectivally in English) therefore has a hygienic and operational connotation that may seem more restrictive than the notion of “health”. The tensions surrounding this notion are not new: Guillotin and La Rochefoucault-Liancourt were already fighting in 1790 over the absorption of a begging committee by the health committee [EVI 02]. It may be difficult to distinguish between them and we can see that they are part of a continuum between abstraction and concrete practices. For this reason, and without precluding us from continuing our reflections and conceptualization efforts, we use expressions using these words interchangeably here.
Covid-19, caused by a coronavirus that has resulted in a global epidemic and an unprecedented wave of hospitalizations for patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), is acting as a revealing, even accelerating, force for info-communication issues in the healthcare sector. Plunged into the heart of this health crisis, the world’s population is bombarded with journalistic information, as well as strategically targeted communications. In Quebec, during the daily press briefing at 1:00 p.m., François Legault (Premier of Quebec), along with the charismatic Dr. Horacio Arruda (National Director of Public Health) and other members of his cabinet, take stock and give directions for future actions. In France, during the 8 p.m. news, the usual media doctors appear with a myriad of hospital caregivers or epidemiologists who come to testify to the difficulty of coping with the influx of seriously ill patients, the need to remain confined to avoid the spread of an already highly volatile and contagious virus, or the shortage of intensive care beds and protective equipment available to caregivers.
The scientific and institutional expert voice is being solicited as never before, and is relayed or even instrumentalized by political actors in the battle of public opinion being played out in the background. The economic players of the digital society are becoming the universal mediators of a social link that circulates via WhatsApp or TikTok groups. Electronic socialization, which has been completely interwoven into our daily relationships since the massification of global multimedia mobility in the decade 2000–2010, initiated by Steve Jobs and his iPhone in 2008, hegemonically dominates all forms of relationships and information. In this sunny spring, we have resigned ourselves to exchanging and sharing information at a distance, often with humor, about the virus and how to protect ourselves from it: How can we get surgical masks by making them? How can we apply the distancing gestures that protect us from infection? What is the status of tests of promising treatments based on chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine? Are we taking a risk by continuing treatment with cortisone and other anti-inflammatory drugs?
Of course, emotions circulate just as much. Online communities can be formed in a matter of hours, not only within a family or a group of friends, but also within a neighborhood, a street or a building. Just as they serve as a digital foundation or for knowledge sharing between peers, so these communities are inseparable from the gregarious need that drives us: the need to keep in touch with our “local” or “distant” loved ones. Videoconferencing digital platforms are exploding in popularity as we try to maintain our professional activities or reinvent our relationships with family and friends from a distance. Between social, emotional and informational support, digital tools, just like the media of yesteryear, allow us today to create society.
In this spring of 2020, digital communication is everywhere, omnipresent, to the point of obscuring all other channels of mediation. Health issues are central, whether in exchanges on a daily life that reinvented its banality, or on the subject of socio-sanitary issues that were rarely confronted. However, the tensions linked to this massively health-related digital communication have not been swept away – quite the contrary. It would be tempting to give in to a technophilia that was already overwhelming in the past, yet that would be to quickly forget the darker side of the massive use of digital technology.
If we want to return, for example, to the circulation of health information on spaces dedicated to peer-to-peer communication, as all the major generalist social networks are