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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 donation project” at Northumbria University works. 

 For starters, the project will draw on a methodology of observation of public discourses about the broad subject of organ donation. I became familiarised with this methodology when I first taught the subject of “communication observatories” (or observatorios de la comunicación) at the Jesuit University of Guadalajara (Mexico) at the Department of Sociocultural Studies (DESO). The approach was developed in fronts such as local communities, NGOs, journalists, and academia advocating for human rights and freedom of speech in Latin America. The approach mirrored similar ones followed by groups and associations in more mature capitalist economies advocating for religious and consumer-oriented activities. 

 The element in common involved the systematic analysis of media content about the subject of interest to a particular observatorio, in the assumption that keeping record of content published about the subject of interest would enable understanding of its reality. This of course is problematic, since we know that published content reflects on the point of view and/or interests of a publisher, a matter that is even more complex in the age of what Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis describe as the affective politics of digital media. 

But digital media and the character of public communication today come with possibilities that render the observation of public discourse about organ transplantation as a valuable tool for its study. Such an approach can help shed light on, for example, the role that communication media have in helping to tackle the challenges of organ shortages by, arguably, incentivising a culture of organ donation. More modestly, the approach is useful to visualise the characteristics of the notions and ideas (“the discourses”) that circulate in societies about the subject, potentially shaping individual and collective attitudes towards it.
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