Xenotransplantation is animal abuse - using Moscovici's 'social objects' concept to address the move away from expert information

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 2022

Speculation aside, the outlet's article was correct in terms of xenotransplantation's historical significance in the context of organ shortages. One might argue, however, that the piece was destined to prime responses among readers that reflect misconceptions, to put it mildly, on the subject.

The 'best rated' of such comments, for example, came from user "Lily 1992", who said: 'I'm getting beyond sick of seeing animals abused for humans.'  This line alone was up-voted 181 times and down-voted 82 times, triggering dozens of replies which themselves triggered more interactions around the initial comment. 

The "best rated" comment in response to the Mail Online article

The notion that using animal organs is morally questionable

As far as Moscovici's theory goes, it is clear that the main social object put in circulation by the user involved the notion that the life of animals is as valuable as that of humans and that, as such, a procedure that involves scientific manipulation and experimentation with animals for the benefit of human beings is morally questionable. 

As a consequence, forms of collective feeling around the subject of organ donation and transplantation emerge or are reinforced, gravitating around public understandings outside the systems of expertise in which actual organ donation and transplantation is enacted. 

What matters in this case is to explain the mechanism by which users of social media contribute to reinforce collectively shared ideas that are in tension with understandings needed for social consensus, which is arguably needed for societies to pull in directions where the use of material resources and energies might support the common good (however deluded this notion is today).

Beyond agenda setting, framing, and encoding/decoding

In conclusion, social representations theory supports an approach to contemporary dynamics of digital communication at a relational level. Such an approach is a move away from the temptation of trying to explain communication media dynamics around organ donation in a simplistic way, for example, relying on theories such as agenda setting and/or framing theory.

For example, it would be easier to simply say that the Mail Online acts to reinforce insidious public notions through frames (in this case about organ donation and transplants) in a way that is intended to prime the responses of particular sets of readers characterised by their political inclinations.

Even Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding model, which would find users comments on news sites as proof of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings, would leave us making inferences about users' class backgrounds, a category that falls short these days to clarify processes of meaning-making in the age of post-truth communication. 

Thus, social representations theory, remains most useful to engage media research, as suggested by Birgitta Hoijer  in a paper published in 2011.