On how the observation of public discourse in the digital age could help address the crisis of organ shortages for transplants
(Gabriel Moreno) - In this post I discuss a line of inquiry I have been following with a colleague that focuses on the public communication of organ transplantation. What is public communication will be contentious in the age of post-truth politics, but the meaning of organ transplantation is unequivocal and therefore easier to identify in terms of its public discussion. Organ transplantation, simply put, involves the replacement of a vital internal component in a person’s body, due to a malfunction of the organ involved that is life-threatening. Even this rather basic definition can be problematic since the notion of replacing a body component can trigger ideas about the existence of a market for body organs that feeds misconceptions about how the systems of allocation for organs function in health systems. We will keep it for now so for operative purposes, no pun intended, in order to explain how my plan to investigate the “public communication of organ transplantation and organ don