Vaccine Opposition at the Age of the Web 2.0: A Study on Virtual Communities, On-line Participation and the Cultural Perception of Risk

我的研究重点是Web 2.0背景下的反疫苗传播，结合了更广泛的风险感知和政策制定研究领域。特别是，我想调查在线参与如何影响个人身份的形成，并有助于形成个人风险认知和公共卫生政策。换句话说，我的研究问的是，参与虚拟网络社区是否会导致风险评估偏离科学界通过官方沟通渠道提供的评估，以及这可能带来的社会法律影响。我计划依靠多种理论框架，包括克里斯托弗·凯尔蒂对“递归公众”的分析来表明，互联网为媒介的环境可能允许沟通以最高效率在整个社会中传播，使新的关系网络出现，其主要特征反映了支撑其发展的技术支持。我还将建议，反疫苗主义可以被解释为一种社会制度，其本身的优点，由一套通信组成，其存在不一定取决于相关通信代码的内在有效性。为了理解地理上分散的社区是如何共同发展的，以及我们在社会背景下感知自己身份的方式，这一点很重要。

My research focuses on anti-vaccine communication in the context of Web 2.0, incorporating the broader area of studies on risk perception and policymaking. In particular, I would like to investigate how on-line participation may influence the making of personal identities and contribute to the shaping of individual risk perceptions and public health policy. Put differently, my research asks whether taking part in a virtual networked community may lead to estimations of risk that stray from those provided by the scientific community through official channels of communication, and what the socio-legal repercussions of this may be.I plan to rely on a diverse theoretical framework, including Christopher Kelty's analysis of 'recursive publics' to suggest that an Internet-mediated environment may allow the spreading of communication throughout society with the utmost efficiency, enabling the emergence of new relationship networks whose key features reflect the technological affordances that underpin their development. I will also suggest that anti-vaccinationism may be interpreted as a social system in its own merit, consisting of a set of communications whose existence does not necessarily depend on the inherent validity of the relevant communication code. This is important in order to understand how geographically diffused communities are co-developing alongside the way we perceive our identities in a social context.