Communicating health

Talking about organ donation with one's loved ones has become a key component of public discourse as a feature of health systems' attempts to tackle organ shortages.  Communicating verbally with relatives about one's wish to become a donor in the case of death is presented as a condition for presumed consent laws to be effective in their aim to increase the pool of organs available for transplants.  A strong example of this discursive approach in a country like the UK is found in this NHS Organ Donation video , in which artist Adaya Henry encourages ' more people to have the conversation about organ donation .' The video was prepared to coincide with Valentine's Day, a date in the calendar that is associated with heart symbols — traditional signifiers of love. The resulting equation of organ donation as an act of love also provides an ideal channel for news coverage. For example, a BBC News article published on 14 February  told the story of Michelle Crawford, a...

I am considering the relevance of Serge Moscovici's theory of social representations to think about public discourses about organ donation online. This would have been simpler before the internet, when the 'social objects' put in movement by the press around such a complex subject were likely to be in alignment with those from expert systems in the fields of medicine, education, and government agencies. These days, when one looks at public discourses on the internet, such alignment is  still seemingly in place  but one only needs to dig slightly beneath the surface to find this is far from being the case.  Consider the Mail Online's coverage of an article which linked the first implantation of a genetically modified pig's heart into a man with UK-based reporting. Using a range of sources,  the headline speculated  that such procedures would take place on  a routine basis in the UK within ten years.  A Mail Online article published on 12 January 202...