The mediatization of medicine and health in the digital age

The article is devoted to the sociological analysis of the peculiarities of the process of mediatization in its electronic and digital form and its impact on such important spheres of social life as medicine and health. The authors note that currently many social processes taking place in society are interpreted mainly through the prism of the media space, represented, in most cases, by new media. Researchers interpret this phenomenon as mediatization, paying special attention to its new modification – digital mediatization.

The range of modern socio-humanitarian studies devoted to social problems brought to life by the process of mediatization is quite wide. An analysis of the works of domestic and foreign researchers shows that the term “mediatization” is widely in demand today not only in journalism and communication studies, but also in sociology, where it has become entrenched as a key term for denoting the process of media influence on various aspects of society.

In the third millennium, new electronic and digital mass media have become not only an integral part of the daily life of an individual and society, but also the main tool influencing both public consciousness and the process of reforming social institutions, among which medicine and healthcare should be especially highlighted.

The mediatization of medicine and healthcare is understood as the transformation of these social institutions caused by the emergence of digital communication tools, as a result of which the masses received free access to medical information, medical knowledge became less sacred, the personality of a particular actor and his communication skills became crucial in interaction.

However, with regard to medicine and health, new media serve not only as a source of medical information and targeted distribution, taking into account a wide variety of audiences and using information requests, including the basics of a healthy lifestyle, diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases, medicines, social and medical care, organization of the health system, etc., but also an understanding of the society of health as the most important life strategy. Thus, all issues related to human and social health, dialogues between a specialist and a patient (consumer) are now in the media, and the mediatization of medicine is becoming a process observed today in any society.

This situation poses serious social problems that require a balanced scientific analysis. The range of such problems is quite wide: This includes the entry into the arena of medical practice of obvious scammers, and advertising, under the guise of alternative medicine, practices destructive to physical and mental health of a person, and aggressive advertising of medicines and much more. In this regard, it is of paramount importance to highlight the most acute, key problems that clearly entail destructive social consequences not only for individuals, but also for the whole society. These include the authors: popularization of medicine through electronic and digital media, the expansion of medical knowledge beyond professional boundaries; the transfer of medical practices to an online format in which bloggers are becoming increasingly popular; the active inclusion of purely medical problems in the current agenda and the organization of medical discourse in the general media, which are disclosed in detail both through theoretical analysis and through the results of empirical research.

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