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

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.