Digital Health Discourse

Digital Health Discourse examines how health and illness are discussed across digital platforms. Combining linguistic and multimodal perspectives, it explores online support groups, social media, and health apps to reveal how digital technologies shape health knowledge, expertise, and care in the digital age.

Digital Health Discourse offers a comprehensive overview of how health and illness are talked about, represented, and negotiated across contemporary digital platforms. Bringing together linguistic, discourse-analytical, and multimodal perspectives, it explores a wide range of digital contexts—including health query interfaces, online support groups, websites, social media, mobile health apps, and patient feedback systems—to reveal how digital technologies shape notions of health knowledge, expertise, responsibility, and care in the digital age. The textbook foregrounds the role of platform affordances, participation, and design in structuring interaction, while attending closely to broader social forces such as medicalization, commercialization, neoliberalism, and inequality. By combining theoretical discussion with rich, detailed examples from existing research, it equips readers with the conceptual tools needed to critically analyze digital health communication and understand how everyday online interactions not only reflect but continually shape and reshape contemporary health practices. Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how to conduct discourse analyses of interactions that use language and other visual resources, involving both health experts and non-professionals, including those with lived experience. Readers are invited to complete practical tasks designed to inspire their own research into the ever-expanding domains of digital health communication. Essential for researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and health, health communication, and discourse analysis.