In the Sociology of Fear and Risk course I'm taking this semester, I'm learning about how the discourses of power, fear, risk and hope are played out in the Western world. It has gotten me thinking a lot about these subtexts and how they're often applied to the examination and discourses around information technology generally and the Internet in particular.
One of the things I'm puzzling through is how or why the media choose to cover the negative or undesirable side effects of living with and through the Internet. Stories like this one about "cyberchrondia" (their term!) are examples of this decidely negative slant. The overall submessage seems to be that we need to fear the content we find online and fear our own desire to turn to the Internet as a source of information.
While I'm not so Marxist as to boldly claim that it is actually a message of containment, in which "They" want to keep us dependant on actual board-certified physicians and want us to stay disempowered, I can't help but wonder what the purpose of publishing such stories is. True, it is partly just market economics - negativity sells. But my studies this semester are starting to suggest other agendas as well.
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