![3
Public Discourses of Risk, Health
and Science
31
This chapter explores in more detail the importance of discourse (in the
sociocultural sense) in the construction of contemporary risk. It con-
tinues the focus, introduced in the previous chapter, on the idea of
public communication, which entails some attention to the role of the
mass media in the representation of risk in general and to the particu-
lar health risks which have been examined in the present research.
Contemporary health risks are the subject of representations in talk
and in writing.1
Such discourse serves to ‘construct’ risks, by providing
the concepts and language for making sense of them.
[Risks] induce systematic and often irreversible harm, generally
remain invisible, are based on causal interpretations, and thus ini-
tially only exist in terms of the (scientific or anti-scientific) knowl-
edge about them. They can thus be changed, magnified, dramatized
or minimized within knowledge, and to that extent they are particu-
larly open to social definition and construction. Hence the mass
media and the scientific and legal professions in charge of defining
risks become key social and political positions. (Beck 1992: 22–3)
Of the many forms of communication which contribute to the con-
struction of health risks – the scientific research, the policy documents,
the newspaper reports, the gossip, and so on – it is the public forms
which are of particular importance, because they provide the resources
for popular understanding of what is at stake.
The chapter begins with a discussion of ‘risk’ as this has been written
about in the social theory of the 1990s, drawing attention to three
themes which are relevant to the present research: the idea of contem-
porary risks as manufactured risks; the considerable uncertainty which
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- 6. Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 7. Also by Kay Richardson NUCLEAR REACTIONS: a Study in Public Issue Television (with John Corner and Natalie Fenton) RESEARCHING LANGUAGE: Issues of Power and Method (with Deborah Cameron, Elizabeth Frazer, Penelope Harvey and Ben Rampton) TEXT, DISCOURSE AND CONTEXT: Representations of Poverty in Britain (edited with Ulrike H. Meinhof) WORLDS IN COMMON? Television Discourses in a Changing Europe (with Ulrike H. Meinhof)
- 8. Internet Discourse and Health Debates Kay Richardson School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool
- 9. © Kay Richardson 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 178 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51192-1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richardson, Kay, 1955– Internet discourse and health debates / Kay Richardson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Internet in medicine. 2. Health risk communication – Data processing. 3. Public health – Computer network resources. 4. Internet – Social aspects. I. Title. R859.7.I58.R536 2004 362.1¢0285 – dc22 2004054898 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 ISBN 978-0-230-51297-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230512979 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-1483-5 ISBN 978-1-349-51192-1
- 10. List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 9 3 Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 31 4 Mobile Phones and Brain Cancer 53 5 SARS 90 6 MMR and Autism 130 7 Constructions of Risk: Change, Conflict and Trust 163 8 The Internet and the Public Interest 195 Notes 210 Appendix: List of Sampled Newsgroups, by Topic 216 References 218 Index 231 Contents v
- 11. 4.1 Literacy practices in two websites 62 4.2 Usenet messages about mobile phones and health, 1993–2002 70 4.3 Distribution of threads by type of newsgroup 71 4.4 Evaluating mobile phone risks in newsgroups 74 4.5 Types of reference in mobile phone threads 84 5.1 Usenet threads about SARS, last two weeks of March 2003 103 5.2 Talking up and talking down of SARS 104 5.3 Types of reference in SARS threads 121 6.1 Usenet threads about MMR and autism, 1995–2003 142 6.2 Distribution of threads on MMR/autism by newsgroup type 143 6.3 Orientation to risk in MMR threads 143 6.4 Type of reference in MMR/autism threads 154 List of Tables vi
- 12. 3.1 Scientific communication 41 4.1 Cellular phone antenna FAQ (Moulder 1996–2004) 63 4.2 Electric Words (Fist 2002a) 64 5.1 WHO SARS section 94 5.2 SARS Watch.org 96 5.3 Wangjianshuo’s blog 97 List of Figures vii
- 13. My major debt in preparing this work is to my research assistant, Marlene Miglbauer, who spent a full year collecting and examining newsgroup materials, to identify their most interesting features. I am very grateful for all the work she put into the project. I am grateful also to the Economic and Social Research Council who, via their E-society programme supervised by Professor Len Waverman at the London Business School, provided the money for the newsgroup part of this project (ESRC grant no RES-335-25-0024). For permission to use screenshots from their websites I am grateful to John Moulder, Tim Bishop, Wang Jian Shuo, the World Health Organi- zation and Stewart Fist. I am also grateful to my academic colleagues in the Communication Studies section of the School of Politics and Communication Studies at Liverpool University – John Corner, Peter Goddard, Julia Hallam, Adrian Quinn, Piers Robinson. By taking on extra responsibilities in the early months of 2004, they made it possible for me to take a semester’s research leave to prepare this book for publication. John Corner also read the whole manuscript in draft form and offered many useful com- ments. I am grateful for this support. I am also grateful to Jill Lake at Palgrave Macmillan. Acknowledgements viii
- 14. 1 Introduction 1 The research presented in this book looks at the internet and asks how people and organizations use it to communicate with one another about health risks. It is particularly concerned with forms of online commu- nication that are public (that is, not formally restricted in any way to particular groups of people). Public communication does not begin and end with the internet. Where the internet goes now, the mass media have gone before, and continue to go. But public communication in the age of the internet is not what it used to be and it is important to set up some lines of enquiry to find out how it has changed and is still changing. The present book offers one such line of enquiry. Public communication about health risks offers a useful point of entry into this territory because health risks are such a universally relevant topic, and the internet, in its public communication mode, is such a universal medium, in principle if not in practice.1 Although health risks in general are universally relevant, particular health risks of course are not. Not everyone is at equal risk from HIV/AIDS, or lung cancer, or of contracting v-CJD from contaminated beef products. The risks exam- ined in the present volume (cellphones and cancer, SARS, MMR vaccine and autism) were not chosen according to any particular principle, although all of them had at different times attracted mass media atten- tion and all involved uncertainty as to whether there was a risk of the proposed kind, and/or what kind of behaviour would entail running that risk.2 Once Americans have internet access, it turns out that finding health information is one of the most common ways in which they use it (Pew 2003a). This is not so surprising in a medicalized world (Lupton 1994; Gwyn 2002).3 Maintaining good health is a universal human priority. The medicalization of health turns over a lot of the responsibility for K. Richardson, Internet Discourse and Health Debates © Kay Richardson 2005
- 15. this to professional structures, dependent upon types and sources of information which are beyond the reach of the non-professional social networks of individuals. Using the net for health information and com- munication is potentially of value to the individual in four ways: • Overcoming the problem of access to professional structures – no medical insurance; can’t get an appointment until a week on Tuesday. • Allowing access to non-mainstream information of which the medical establishment disapproves – such as how to avoid the con- troversial MMR vaccine whilst still immunizing children against measles as well as mumps and rubella. • Expanding face-to-face social networks into cyberspace social net- works, perhaps ‘de-medicalizing’ health knowledge, or mediating it via trusted personal contacts rather than ‘authorities’. • Buying drugs and other health related items – legitimately or otherwise. The public sharing of information about health risks via the net intro- duces other considerations. From a ‘top down’, social policy perspec- tive, public communication in relation to health risk is all about locating some health responsibilities with the individual, on the basis of knowledge about certain kinds of risky behaviour – unprotected sex, bad dietary habits, smoking; and public information campaigns are the usual approach.4 These are unlikely to migrate in full from the tradi- tional mass media to the net because they are less sure of finding their audience in this medium. From the perspective of the individual, tra- ditional information sources may have been issuing confusing and con- tradictory ‘risk’ messages, so that the net is embraced as a way of trying to eliminate or reduce the confusion. Or the traditional sources may have compromised their public trust, making the net an option for seeking out different kinds of voices. The above represents an account of the area which this research is designed to explore. What follows will place the research in the context of ‘new media’ studies and describe how the theoretical and substan- tive chapters which follow contribute to the general project. New media research Research on the new media is no longer novel. The internet itself no longer seems extraordinary: it is becoming integrated into the eco- 2 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 16. nomic, social, political and cultural affairs of individuals, organizations and societies (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002; Liewvrouw 2004).5 It is however not easy to establish an overall picture of just what the ‘new media’ are at this point in time, nor of where and how they are being used, and by whom. There is much discussion of the ‘digital divide’ (Ngini, Furnell et al. 2002; Rainie and Bell 2004) and the fear that in information-rich societies those on the wrong side of the divide will find themselves seriously disempowered. The digital divide operates both locally and globally; it divides different groups within a society from one another and also establishes a hierarchy of societies, with some being much better off for wired resources than others – an issue meriting the attention of the United Nations at a meeting in December 2003. In the present research a particular segment of the international ‘general public’ comes into focus. These people represent an English- speaking elite which not only has internet access, and has become accustomed to using it for international communication with known and unknown others, but which is also sharing with these others such concerns as the safety of international travel (in relation to SARS) and of the latest hi-tech consumer goods (cellphones). The new media are also associated with various kinds of risks for the future. The most publicly prominent risk themes concern the online ‘grooming’ of children to ready them for offline sexual abuse and the circulation of child pornography in cyberspace. Governments worry about the ease with which crime can be organized with the help of new media technologies; individuals and companies worry about the secu- rity of financial transactions conducted online. There has been much practical rethinking of traditional concerns with privacy and intellec- tual property rights, to ensure an appropriate fit between these concerns and the new information and communication technologies. Accordingly, research on new media has become multifaceted and multidisciplinary, with many points of entry. This fragmentation of research is reflected in a collection of papers for a special issue of the journal New Media and Society, entering its sixth year of publication, Feb- ruary 2004. These articles variously examine the new media in relation to politics and political activism; art, culture and design; communica- tion and language; social theory; economic policy and others – all under the unifying theme ‘what’s changed about new media’? The collection shows a sustained focus upon the integration of new media with exist- ing social, political and economic realities, and thus upon the recipro- cal effects of ‘society’ and ‘media’. Only one contribution to this issue is specifically concerned with changes in the nature (and study) of Introduction 3
- 17. computer-mediated communication, often shortened to CMC (Herring 2004). This field, and this term, used to have a more prominent place in new media studies, and it certainly has a long history compared with some other areas – it can be traced back to Hiltz and Turoff (1978), when it came under the designation ‘computer conferencing’, pre-dating the internet. The displacement of the ‘communication’ aspects of new media from a prominent place in the field of study is neither surprising nor regret- table. The displacement is not surprising because, firstly, as Herring observes, the basic forms of CMC are now well-established and have been well-examined in the literature. Newer forms of CMC, belonging to the first decade of the twenty-first century (for example, ‘blogs’; see Chapter 5 below)6 are variations upon more established ones. Secondly, it seems to be in relation to the uses of new media that the growth of research has taken place in recent years (Dahlberg 2004) and upon their impact in specific areas of social life, as well as the spread of net access from restricted groups of users to the mainstream. To study these kinds of developments it is not really necessary to understand in depth the particular communicative characteristics of the medium. Such under- standing as is required is readily available from classic works and from secondary sources. Another reason that the displacement is not surprising is that it took a while to learn the lesson that focusing upon ‘new media’ as some kind of free-standing enterprise, in relative isolation from the wider social context, offered too narrow a perspective on why these media took the forms that they did. Criticism of this tendency has now begun to take hold. Slevin, for example, believes that the study of the internet should be subordinated to the study of the kinds of social change which made the internet possible in the first place: I shall start out from three important developments that have trans- formed modern societies. These are described by Giddens as the intensification of globalization, the detraditionalizing of society and the expansion and intensification of social reflexivity. Taken together, these developments have resulted in the acceleration of manufactured uncertainty in our late modern world. It was not by accident that the internet originated under such conditions. Its emer- gence can only be understood if all these developments are seen to interlock. (Slevin 2000: 5) Slevin’s approach starts from a big picture of late modern society, indebted to the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens – see, for 4 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 18. example, Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990, 1999). There is, of course, room for disagreement about the characteristics of the ‘big picture’ and a danger that time spent debating the merits of the reflexive moder- nity/risk society thesis risks a long deferral of more specific questions about the internet and other new media forms, whilst the alternative, taking that analysis on trust in order to pursue particular enquiries, seems unduly deferential to the theorists.7 Most research, in practice, will have either a theoretical or an empirical bias. In the present research the bias is empirical. Internet research, health risk and the wider social context It is of course possible to examine computer-mediated communication in its wider social context without a priori commitment to any partic- ular theory of the contemporary social order. The present research does this in two ways. Firstly, this study makes use of what is already known about online communication in its various forms, including such characteristics as multimodality, interactivity and absence of social presence;8 secondly, it approaches the internet as a context for public communication. Rather than trying to develop fresh insights into the nature of computer-mediated communication in its particular forms, the research presented below takes existing ideas about communication over the internet, develops and extends these where appropriate, and uses them in an exploration of specific health risk concerns which have arisen over the last decade or so. The ‘social context’ enters the picture via the health risks, which are tied to their particular historical moment. Each of them can, for instance, be characterized as examples of ‘manufac- tured’ risk – side effects of social and technological progress. Progress in communications technology has given us the cellular phone – but maybe we need to be careful about how we use these machines? Long- distance travel is easier than it has ever been, but when we move between countries we now worry about SARS, as well as deep-vein thrombosis and international terrorism. Progress in disease control has produced vaccines which could in principle eliminate death and illness from measles, mumps and rubella (three of nature’s risks) yet mass vac- cination may also have its ‘downside’. The manufactured risks discussed in this book – that excessive cellphone use will cause brain cancer, that international travellers will contract SARS, that the MMR vaccination will induce autism in susceptible children – are also characteristically modern risks because, thanks in part to internet websites and news- groups, they are risks which are now discussed worldwide. Introduction 5
- 19. The other characteristic of the present research which locates it in a wider social context comes from the fact that it makes every effort to understand communication in terms of an epistemologically more important differentiation between public communication and restricted communication. Instead of setting ‘the internet’ against ‘the mass media’, the ‘new’ against the ‘old’, this differentiation recognizes the similarities between some kinds of internet communication and the traditional mass media. Public CMC comprises those forms which, in principle if not in practice (since governments such as that of the People’s Republic of China can impose restrictions) are on open access, requiring no passwords or account numbers and involving no vetting procedures. The net of course is not just a forum for public com- munication in this sense. It can also carry more restricted forms of com- munication such as email. The most significant forms of public CMC are World Wide Websites and Usenet newsgroups. If you can get online, you can use these forms of CMC, as a reader and, with a bit more trouble, as a writer. The chapters The chapters below are arranged as follows. Chapters 2 and 3 together serve to frame the research. Chapter 2 reviews the CMC literature to identify the most important characteristics of public CMC, in relation both to the web and to newsgroups. Chapter 3 frames the research in relation to work on the social construction/representation of health and health risk, with particular reference to discourses of health and risk in the mass media. The following three chapters each take one case study – mobile phones and cancer, SARS, MMR and autism – and conduct an in-depth study of particular online materials relevant to the topic. Each case study comprises one section which discusses resources on the World Wide Web and one section which examines discussions in Usenet news- groups. Chapter 7 looks at all three of the case studies together, drawing out some similarities as well as differences. The book finishes with a final short chapter which offers some conclusions based on the pre- ceding research. The two forms of net-based communication which the research exam- ines are World Wide Websites and Usenet newsgroups. Different con- siderations apply in respect of each of these, since websites are predominantly monologic in character where Usenet newsgroup threads (collections of messages linked to one another like the utter- 6 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 20. ances in a conversation) are dialogic or ‘polylogic’ (Marcoccia 2004). Websites go much further than newsgroup threads in the direction of multimodality, that is, using more than one semiotic mode of commu- nication simultaneously, principally combining the visual mode of communication with the verbal. The difference between websites and newsgroups can also be expressed in this way: that whereas websites are ‘for the public’, in the same way as a TV news broadcast or documen- tary would be, newsgroups are ‘by the public’. A note on terminology The present research is heavily influenced by the linguistic study of dis- course, but with a light touch. From a linguistic point of view the impor- tant thing is to employ the term ‘discourse’ in such a way as to keep it distinct from other terms used in the literature, including medium, reg- ister, style, dialect, channel, genre, speech event, text and literacy practice. ‘Texts’ for the purposes of the present research are spoken or written material objects, though their meanings are non-material, since meaning calls for interpretation and is thus located in the subjective domain. Textual meaning can be discussed by analysts on the basis of assumptions about intersubjective convergence between groups of people sharing the same linguistic repertoires and communicative com- petence. Crystal (2001), in the most linguistic of all the recent treat- ments of CMC, uses ‘medium’ to distinguish writing from speech, and introduces ‘Netspeak’ as a new, third, medium alongside these two. This is the broadest possible use of the term, but the present research requires a narrower one. In this book, ‘medium’ is used with the sense that it has in the expression ‘mass media’, in which print is one medium, audiovisual broadcasting (television) is another and sound broadcasting (radio) is a third. For the internet, this means that newsgroups are one medium (any particular group is a forum) and the web is another. I have also referred to use of the web and use of newsgroups as distinct liter- acy practices, in recognition of the type of work which is required in the construction of texts for these media. The notion of genre captures the difference between a web page in the form of a blog (see Chapter 5) and one in the form of an FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions doc- ument – a question-and-answer format (see Chapter 4). I have used the term ‘discourse’ where Crystal prefers the term ‘style’. Style, for Crystal, includes ‘discourse features’ alongside graphic features, orthographic fea- tures, grammatical features and lexical features. ‘Discourse features’ are defined thus: Introduction 7
- 21. The structural organization of a text, defined in terms of such factors as coherence, relevance, paragraph structure and the logical pro- gression of ideas; for example, a journal paper within scientific English typically consists of a fixed sequence of sections including the abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion. (Crystal 2001: 9) In multimodal texts such as web pages, where the structural organiza- tion is as much visual as it is verbal, it does not seem helpful to assign structure to discourse without elevating the status of ‘discourse’ to a higher level. The theoretical ramifications of these terminological dis- tinctions are beyond the scope of the present work. There is also a degree of tension between the linguistic concept – after Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) – and a broader sociocultural concept of discourse – after Fou- cault (1972, 1977) – but the waters have been muddied because of the amount of research which strives to keep a foot in both camps (Fair- clough 1992). Although both senses of the word are employed in the present research, the context will determine which meaning is most relevant. In speaking about discourse in relation to the ‘social con- struction of risk’, for example (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 8), it is the sociocultural perspective which prevails, since this perspective is as much concerned with content as it is with form: with what can (legiti- mately, authoritatively, sensibly) be said about a given topic. It is also concerned with the institutional arrangements underpinning speech and writing – discourses and institutions are mutually defining (Kress, 1989). 8 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 22. 2 Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 9 This chapter provides a context for the subsequent case study chapters by discussing the study of computer-mediated communication. Pioneers in this field include Howard Rheingold (1993), Susan Herring (1994) and Sherry Turkle (1995). The more linguistic/semiotic aspects of this research have covered such topics as: • ‘Turntaking’ and coherence in online interaction (Herring 1999; Beacco, Claudel et al. 2002; Marcoccia 2004). • Topic development in newsgroup threads (Osborne 1998). • Generic characteristics of online interaction, especially its relations with writing and with speech (Ferrara 1991; Hawisher 1993; Collot and Belmore 1996; Lee 1996; Yates 1996; Herring 1996a; Davis and Brewer 1997; Baron 1998, 2003; Osborne 1998; Gruber 2000; Harri- son 2000; Crystal 2001). • Gender relations in online textual environments (Dibbell 1993; Herring 1994, 1996/1999, 1996b, 2000, 2001; Turkle 1995; Bruckman 1996; Cherny and Weise 1996). • Normative constraints on online interaction (McLaughlin, Osborne et al. 1995; MacKinnnon 1997; Burnett and Bonnici 2003). • Web page genres (Crowston and Williams 1996; Kress 1997; Chandler 1998; Benoit and Benoit 2000; Cheung 2000; Lewis 2003). • Cyberplay (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Danet 2001). • Multilingualism online (Paolillo 2001; Danet and Herring 2003; Warschauer 2000; Warschauer and El Said 2002). • Hypertextual discourse structure (Kaplan 1995; Mitra and Cohen 1999; Engebretsen 2000; Tosca 2000; Foot, Schneider et al. 2003; Schneider and Foot 2004). • The semiotics of screen icons (Honeywill 1999). K. Richardson, Internet Discourse and Health Debates © Kay Richardson 2005
- 23. However, the study of computer-mediated communication is not a field where disciplinary divisions run deep: experimental psychologists, information scientists, linguists and sociolinguists, as well as discourse analysts in sociology, linguistics and psychology, overlap with one another in the topics they examine and in the references they draw upon. The following discussion reflects that inter- and trans- disciplinarity and tries to do it justice, as well as emphasizing the themes which are most relevant for the present research. The state of the art February 2004 saw the publication of the first issue in volume 6 of New Media and Society (NMS), an international journal devoted specifically to the study of the new forms of media from the internet to the WAP mobile telephone. (WAP, Wireless Application Protocol, is a format to proride limited internet content to mobile devices.) This issue attempted to take stock of the field after the journal’s first five years of publica- tion. A common theme across many of the contributions was that of the ‘mainstreaming’ of new media, as the World Wide Web, email, wire- less communication and so on ceased to be restricted to particular kinds of users and uses, and started to become ubiquitous in many developed countries in work, education, leisure, culture and politics (see Wellman and Haythornthwaite (2002) for more discussion along these lines; and Dahlberg (2004) for an overview of social science approaches to inter- net studies). Among the writers in NMS volume 6 who developed this ‘main- streaming’ theme, Herring (2004) talks about the development of newer forms of CMC (ICQ – ‘I Seek You’, IM – Instant Messaging, SMS – Short Message Service, blogs, streaming audio/video) alongside those which are now more established (the web, email, bulletin boards/newsgroups, chatrooms) while pointing out that ‘the web’ has a dominance now that it lacked previously, since so many CMC protocols, which used to be independent (including Usenet which is in essence a Unix-based pro- tocol) can now be accessed by the user via a web browser interface. Herring also observes that the ‘newness’ of the recent innovations is a matter of modification: ‘all involve text messages that are composed and read via a digital interface’ (Herring 2004: 31). Electronic voice-based and image-based two-way communication have seen development too but they have yet to displace or even achieve parity with (written) text- based forms. Her prediction for the future is: 10 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 24. Increasing technological integration, combined with the assimilation of day-to-day uses and the corresponding need to ensure the trust- worthiness of one’s interlocutors, will contrive to make the internet a simpler, safer and – for better or for worse – less fascinating com- munication environment. (Herring 2004: 34) It is not remarkable to find that health risks are a subject of communi- cation on the internet. Where online communication resources have become ordinary, even banal, the fact that they are used to communi- cate about any particular topic is not, in itself, interesting. Nor is it at all noteworthy that many different voices will want to have their online say – commercial voices, state voices, charity voices, individual voices, scientific voices, and so on – or that some will want to go public with their text/talk/image and others to target their discourse at more spe- cific recipients. It may not be interesting that this happens, but it remains interesting to explore how it happens, and to reflect upon why it happens in the particular forms that it does. In relation to health risks and society, the big questions are why we (the public) worry about par- ticular harms. Are we right to worry about such things? Are we indif- ferent to things that we should worry about more? Only some of these will ever be questions about the internet itself – for example, the issue of harm from internet pornography. In most cases the internet only comes into the picture as a provider of resources which contribute, for good or ill, to the social construction/representation of health risks. In this context the particular uses of CMC which are most worthy of atten- tion are those which are publicly accessible on the widest scale. Subject to the reservations regarding economic, social, linguistic and political restrictions on internet access, the most public resources are those of the World Wide Web for one-way communication, newsgroups (Usenet) for asynchronous two-way communication, and chatrooms (IRC, Inter- net Relay Chat, the original and formerly best-known protocol for online ‘chat’, or synchronous computer-mediated communication) for synchronous two-way communication. Other online protocols and forums exist but they are deliberately restricted in particular ways. For example, websites involving commercial transactions have to be restricted to ensure security. Email is restricted (though less than many people would like to imagine) because the communication is intended to be ‘private’, between individuals. Listserv communication is restricted because it is conducted within self-defining communities of interest and some kind of subscription is required. Access to online textual resources Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 11
- 25. in commodity form (for example, journals and their archives) is also restricted by subscription. Communication about health risks occurs in these restricted contexts too, but they are beyond the scope and concern of the present research. By circumscribing the enquiry in this particular way, the point is to play down the connection between the web/Usenet and email, listservs and subscription products, and instead to play up the connection between the web and ‘traditional’ or ‘old media’ forms – specifically, broadcast and print mass media. There is a degree of convergence here between the old and the new. The traditional news media have used their news- gathering infrastructure as the basis of new web-based formats along- side their established outlets, some of them (the New York Times, the BBC) with considerable success. Before the coming of the internet it was these mass media which ruled the roost in respect of public discourse. They were the interface between other public forums (for example, par- liament) and the wider audience. They still serve this function, but now it is easier for the ‘wider audience’ to access directly some of the source materials that the journalists themselves use as resources for their stories. In relation to health risk topics for example, it is the documents produced by such organizations as the WHO and the CDC which are offered via the web on ‘direct access’ not just to journalists (Trumbo 2001) but also to the browsing public, without national restrictions. This online presence is worthy of examination in its own right. It is also worthy of examination at second-hand, via an exploration of whether or not such resources are actually used by people with internet access. It is an easy matter for organizations to monitor on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annual basis, how many visitors their websites receive, what pages they access during their visits, what items they download, what domains they themselves are visiting from. The technical, ‘behind the scenes’ management of who goes where on the web, along with the politics and ethics of such management, is itself the subject of research activity (Rogers 2000). For organizations to know whether their visitors then go on to recommend the site to others and what they think of it, is not so easy. But other kinds of online materials can make a contri- bution here. Usenet is also a location for public discourse on all sorts of topics. Those parts of the wired population who participate in Usenet can and do employ it to tell one another which websites to visit and which ones to avoid. Herring’s observations about the changing contexts and forms of CMC are relevant to the present research in another way also. They have implications in respect of the question ‘When was your research con- 12 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 26. ducted?’ This question is a more complicated one than may at first appear. My dual focus upon websites on the one hand and Usenet discussion on the other is made more interesting by the fact that in the case of websites, I was only able to look at the most recent versions of those sites at the time of writing, whilst in the case of Usenet, I was able to take the study back in time to the earliest mentions of particular topics, using normal keyword search procedures. Notwithstanding extensive archiving on particular sites, the web is a notoriously unstable realm, textually speaking. Since editing is so easy, a webmaster might make an addition one day and remove it the next, leaving no traces.1 Before the web era, such editing stopped at the point of publication. Thus, my dis- cussions in the case study chapters below of particular websites are intended as ‘synchronic’ accounts, snapshots, circa February 2004, of what was available at that time. In contrast, my accounts of Usenet dis- cussion are both synchronic and diachronic. The materials have been assessed as a synchronic body of texts principally because of the exten- sive thematic continuity in what people had to say about cellphones, and about MMR, across the 8–10 years that these topics have been available in public discourse. There is thematic continuity in the discussion of SARS also, though this is less surprising in a corpus which spans only three-and-a-half months. Diachronically speaking, the issue is how Usenet discussions responded to the developments in the narratives of cellphones, SARS and MMR, and this is discussed in Chapter 7 below. The forms of public online discourse: websites and Usenet The principal differences between the two forms of communicative practice examined in this book, from a CMC perspective, are firstly that websites are predominantly monologic in character where Usenet threads are interactive (Rafaeli and Sudweeks 1997), and secondly that websites are further along the continuum between monomodal and multimodal textual form. To put that another way, websites seem to be ‘designed’, Usenet messages, like emails, are simply ‘written’. Neither of these distinctions are absolute ones. Websites do not have to be monologic. They can refer to, summarize, quote from other texts in the usual ‘intertextual’ ways. But webmasters generally want to control the terms on which voices other than their own appear on the site. It is a rare website to which someone other than the webmaster can make changes directly. SARS Watch, discussed in Chapter 5 below, Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 13
- 27. is such a site. People other than the webmaster can change the site. But they can only add material in certain defined places, where its author- ship is also made clear, and they cannot edit the material of other con- tributors, including that of the webmaster. Conversely, Usenet messages do not have absolutely to lack charac- teristics of ‘design’. The language itself is designed for its purpose: that’s what writing is, whatever the context (New London Group 1996). But ‘design’ in this context more usually refers to visual properties. Usenet contributions struggle against various obstacles to do anything ‘visual’. They can try to employ alphanumeric characters for non-alphanumeric purposes (ASCII art – see Danet 2001; ASCII is the name of the original character set for keyboard/screen communication, limited to 128 char- acters and the English version of the Roman alphabet). They can also try to control layout. The latter is vulnerable to overlay by preference features and screen settings at the receiver’s end of the communication, ‘lost in translation’. Google, in archiving threads, overlays its own design forms for header section material upon those of any other soft- ware used to send and receive messages. Although email and newsgroup messages can now be constructed and delivered in HTML rather than text format styles (Hypertext Markup Language is the code used for pre- senting and interpreting web pages in a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, with consistent instructions to display regular text, headings, images and so on), and a range of different char- acter sets for other languages have become available, senders who employ character sets other than the basic ones risk having some forms converted ‘back’ into unintended keyboard characters on the screens of readers with more basic software. Public online discourse part one: the World Wide Web Is the World Wide Web all things to all people? No, not really. Most users will probably experience the web primarily in terms of the com- mercial voice in the first instance – selling, advertising, promoting, sponsoring. Information sources are plentiful despite this, although the problem of finding a needle in a haystack is real and search engines have become indispensable. Google is the most widely respected for the moment. The operators/owners of these engines well understand the commercial value of such widely-used resources. Finding relevant sites and finding worthwhile sites are different kinds of work. The quantity of material on the web raises the problem of judgement. Search engine algorithms and protocols can only do so much to ensure that the sites they point to are good ones. Sites may benefit from having brand names that people think they can trust – 14 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 28. BBC, WHO, CDC. These particular brand names were acquired outwith the net – in contrast to Yahoo and Google, which are internet brands. These considerations are all external ones – the internal questions have to do with what kind of texts websites are, and what they could be, what kind of genres and literacy practice(s) they represent. Although the range of possibilities is very large, two characteristics stand out as especially important. One is the multimodality of web design, variously mixing written linguistic form with spoken language, music and song as well as still and moving images, both figurative and non-figurative, some automatic and some activated by actions on the part of the receiver, all within a context where concern for overall graphic design has played a part, to a greater or lesser degree. The other key features of web materials concern their hypertextual capabilities: ‘clickability’ from place to place within a page, from one page to another within a site, from one site to another site. History of the World Wide Web The important moments in the pre-history of the web include the pub- lication of an article in 1945 (Bush 1945) which described an imaginary new device to be called a ‘memex’, a kind of library of all sorts of mat- erials, accessible on a screen through various techniques which antici- pate those we have become accustomed to using in accessing resources on the web. The invention of the word ‘hypertext’ is credited to Ted Nelson in the 1960s, while the person who first attempted to develop the programming that would make these ideas a reality was Tim Berners- Lee in the 1980s, who also coined the name World Wide Web. Actual use of the web began in the early 1990s and its subsequent develop- ment was a crucial element in (re)constructing the internet as a dom- estic as well as a workplace technology. Its role in the commercialization of the internet, that is, its use by commercial organizations for adver- tising and promoting themselves, and selling their wares, whilst bearing much of the cost for the development of the system is likewise extremely important. Books about the history of the web include Berners-Lee (1999) and Gillies and Cailliau (2000), although there are also various useful sources online, including archived materials on the websites of ISOC (Internet Society) at www.isoc.org and of W3C (the World Wide Web consortium) at www.w3c.org. Research on the World Wide Web There are many practical books on how to design a website, for example, Lynch and Horton (1999); there is also plenty of advice online, for example, Pagetutor (no date) and criteria for judging sites good or bad Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 15
- 29. (Flanders and Willis 1998). On the more academic side, writers such as Benoit and Benoit (2000) assess US political campaign sites according to criteria of identification, navigation, readability, irritability, informa- tion accessibility, interest level, interactivity and adaptation to audi- ence. Schneider and Foot (2004) criticize approaches such as this because what they attend to is web content, overlooking the equally important structuring elements of a web page or site. Further, these approaches are not, say Schneider and Foot, very good at making sense of hypertext intertextuality. Their own approach – ‘web sphere analy- sis’ – is useful for exploring the situatedness of particular sites within the larger web. Texts are no longer primary, in this perspective – con- nections are, reversing the traditional bias. Web sphere analysis runs the risk that other levels of meaning, including site structure as well as the interplay of visual, verbal and other modalities of communicative form, are lost from sight. To bring these other levels back into focus it is useful to take seriously Schneider and Foot’s point that content and form must be analysed together, while ensuring that the ‘form’ which is consid- ered is understood broadly, and goes beyond hypertextual linkage. Wakeford (2000) offers a useful overview of methods for analysing the web. The web page analyses in the case study chapters below draw from the literature on electronic/screen literacy (Snyder 1997, 2002; Hawisher and Selfe 2000) and from earlier studies of the semiotics of web page design (Crowston and Willliams 1996; Kress 1997; Chandler 1998; Cheung 2000; Lewis 2003) as well as studies of the history and forms of writing which take the story into the digital era (Baron, N.S. 2000; Baron, D. 2000) and those which discuss visual as well as narrowly glottic properties of writing (Harris, R. 1995, 2000). See also Goodman (1996), Kress and van Leeuwen (1996). The question of hypertext and ‘linkage’ connects with another recur- rent theme in discussions of electronic literacies: the radically unstable nature of the web and the implications of this for ‘classic’ concepts of text and author. These concepts were under attack in literary theory before the global spread of the World Wide Web (Fish 1980; Barthes 1977). Landow (1997) draws out some aspects of the connections between literary theory and new electronic textual practices, although he does not write directly about the World Wide Web. Bringing theory and practice together, an online electronic ‘text’ by Nancy Kaplan (1995), presents some of the arguments: Hypertexts: multiple structurations within a textual domain. Imagine a story, as Michael Joyce has, that changes each time one 16 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 30. reads it. Such documents consist of chunks of textual material (words, video clips, sound segments or the like), and sets of connec- tions leading from one chunk or node to other chunks. The result- ing structures offer readers multiple trajectories through the textual domain (just as I have tried to do in this essay). Each choice of direc- tion a reader makes in her encounter with the emerging text, in effect, produces that text. The existing examples of this form, espe- cially the fictions, are so densely linked, offer so many permutations of the text, that the ‘authors’ cannot know in advance or control with any degree of certainty what ‘version’ of the story a reader will construct as she proceeds. Add to this the instability which arises from the inclusion of external links, leading away from the original site, and the opportunities for textual construction by readers are without limit. Time has passed since the original version of Kaplan’s ‘textual domain’ in 1995, and any predictions that Kaplan’s style of ‘authorship’ were poised to displace the older styles now seem forlorn. The tendency to confine external links to a ‘page’ separate from the ‘internal’, authored materials is one sign of this (Gauntlett 2000). Another is the preservation of very ‘traditional’ layout structures in pdf files (journal articles are an important species of this for academic web users) where the concept of authorship (and copyright) remains as important as it ever was. ‘Conservative’ practices can be preserved against the poten- tials of new technological forms where there are good social and eco- nomic reasons to expend money and effort in such preservation. Public online discourse part two: Usenet Usenet newsgroups are, for the purposes of this research, both an object of study and a resource. They are able to serve this function because, while they exist on the internet as a form of CMC, they also mention and discuss other aspects of the internet such as websites, so they can be used as a resource for establishing what people think about the web and the information it offers. As an object of study, newsgroups differ from websites firstly in the much reduced level of multimodality involved in the exchange of messages and secondly in the much enhanced level of interactivity that they demonstrate.2 ‘Newsgroup’ here principally signifies publicly available asynchro- nous group-based online communication forums available via Usenet, although for some purposes, these forums can be discussed alongside other, less public, types of asynchronous group-based communication, Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 17
- 31. such as bulletin boards, lists and conferences. Some of the published research which generalizes about asynchronous CMC as a whole is in fact based upon empirical research from only one of these contexts. The description of newsgroups as asynchronous and as group-based is important in establishing how this form of discourse differs from chat and from email: all three are based upon the graphical representation of language (that is, writing) rather than upon its phonetic representa- tion (speaking). ‘Chat’ is synchronous: the message exchange takes place in real-time (though not keystroke-by-keystroke: this is a more recent development and not as yet a widespread one). Newsgroups are asynchronous because, as with email, there is no expectation of an ‘immediate’ response to a message. Asynchronous electronic commu- nication can be differentiated into the one-to-one form (email) and the one-to-many forms (newsgroups, bulletin boards, conferences and lists). Messages are sent to the whole group and/or to a central filestore depending upon the nature of the resource; in all cases, anyone access- ing the resource may, but need not, respond to any given message there (or may indeed reply privately, via email, to the address of the person who sent the message). Responses by default retain the same subject line as the original. All collected messages which share the same subject line constitute a ‘thread’. The fact that Usenet newsgroups are in the public domain is impor- tant for the present research. Much asynchronous discourse on the internet is not fully public. The BBC website for example has, as of April 2004, over 400 ‘message boards’. The use of these requires registration, which involves acceptance of the BBC’s terms and conditions. Regis- tration in these cases may be a formality, in the sense that no one apply- ing to join is ever rejected, but is useful to the BBC as part of the attempt to regulate online behaviour. For other groups, registration may be less of a formality: it may require the presentation of credentials or even payment, and the establishment of membership lists. Public newsgroups are indeterminate in ‘membership’, so that posting to a newsgroup is like broadcasting, except with a vastly smaller actual audience. The largest system of public groups is the Usenet hierarchy, with names like alt.culture.singapore, sci.physics.electromag and so on. An enormous archive of Usenet materials, going back to 1981, has been assembled and put on line by Google at google.groups.com. This archive includes, by arrangement, a few smaller collections from groups that were origi- nally restricted rather than open. All of the materials consulted for the newsgroup sections of the following case study chapters are drawn from this archive. 18 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 32. History of newsgroups Usenet newsgroups have existed since before the internet, that is, when communication between computers was managed via more localized computer networks and a range of different protocols. Usenet (in 1981) took over from the earlier ‘bulletin boards’. Describing the history of Usenet up to the early 1990s, Howard Rheingold writes: The growth of Usenet was biological – slow at first, and then expo- nential. In 1979, there were 3 sites, passing around approximately 2 articles per day; in 1980, there were 15 sites and 10 articles per day; in 1981 there were 150 sites and 20 articles per day. By 1987 there were 5,000 sites, and the daily postings weighed in at 2.5 million bytes. By 1988, it grew to 11,000 sites and the daily mailbag was more than 4 million bytes. By 1992, Usenet was distributed to more than 2.5 million people and the daily News was up to 35 million bytes – thirty or forty times the number of words in this book. (Rheingold 1993, ch. 4: online at http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/4.html) There was further expansion throughout the 1990s but informed opinion (see Herring 2004) is that it is now on the decline, since, despite Google, it is less congenial to users who have become ‘wired’ during the era of the web browser as the principal interface with online resources. Because electronic asynchronous group communication does go back to the earliest days of computer-mediated communication, it also pre- dates the graphical user interface (GUI), that is, it pre-dates the inno- vations with mouse and screen of the Apple company, and Microsoft’s Windows. The earliest forms of Usenet communication, like the earli- est forms of email and of bulletin boards, were strictly text only, limited to ASCII keyboard characters, entered at a command-line prompt: c:>. This history is important because although the limitations of the medium have been overcome in many respects, there is a continuing ‘drag’ in this particular realm of CMC towards text format. Anything ‘visual’ is a compromise with the medium, not one of its affordances, and may become lost in translation, through transitions of platform, hardware and software. Research on newsgroups For research on asynchronous group-based computer-mediated com- munication, Hiltz and Turoff’s (1978) The Network Nation is the landmark publication: it extolled many of the virtues of online communication which we now take for granted. In their introduction Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 19
- 33. to the new edition (1993) they say that wired communication did not come about as quickly as they had envisaged, but of course there has been another huge wave of expansion in connectivity since 1993. The 1978 book talked not of ‘newsgroups’ but of ‘computer conferencing’. At the time of publication there were not many ‘users’ who could be studied; the excitement was in the potential, not the actual use of tech- nology for communication. The bias was towards restricted group formats, for example within particular companies. Unrestricted groups would not come into the picture until later. Gauntlett (2000) estimates that the expansion of the internet beyond the academic community fol- lowed ten years after the rolling out of the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol – the standard protocol underlying commu- nication between computers linked to the internet) nationwide in the USA in 1983. By this time of course, a graphical interface was nothing remarkable. In the early years of research on group communication (not neces- sarily restricted to the asynchronous public kind), three themes emerged as being of particular interest, and these themes continue to be the subject of research: online community, online identity and inter- personal relations: • The idea of CMC communication taking place within ‘communi- ties’ has Rheingold (1993) as the pioneering text3 (see also Jones 1995). More recent work on online ‘togetherness’ includes that of Bakardjieva (2003) whose ethnographic study offers a basis for dis- tinguishing between different types of online involvement, serving different needs, with only a few living up to the value-laden name of ‘community’, and drawing upon different types of communicative resource both public and restricted, synchronous and asynchronous. • The question of online identity, including its plasticity from forum to forum, and the visibility of the person behind the words, is where the work of Sherry Turkle (1995) gave early impetus to discussion. Ideas about the irrelevance of offline identities almost immediately came in for feminist critique, with particular reference not just to the different behaviours of males and females online (Herring 1994) but also to the effects of power on the interactional relations between the sexes (Camp 1996; Herring 1996/1999). Identity, like community, continues to attract the attention of researchers. Crawford (2002) offers a recent contribution in this area, challenging the idea of the ‘unmarked’ net speaker. Talking of a particular, hypothetical online participant, Crawford writes: 20 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 34. Certainly her interlocutors will not be able to see her cultural background, markers of class carried in her clothing or the way she carries herself, her level of education, her gender, but does this mean that her speech will magically be freed of these extralinguistic facts of her everyday life when she goes online? On the contrary: Online speech is marked by a highly readable system of differences encoded in grammar and syntax, vocabulary, allusions, regionalisms, dialect and all the other ways in which we signify our cultural and class positions via language. (Crawford 2002: 98) Though Crawford is right that we can hardly abandon all of the determinants upon our own linguistic stylings when we go online, there are some difficulties with this line of argument. One is this: that the codes which unlock the meanings of specific aspects of such stylings are not equally available to all who would participate in such discourse. If I use a particular word because I’m from Durham, who but someone else from Durham and its environs is going to know that, and allocate me to my correct place in sociolinguistic space? Another problem is the balance to be achieved by any particular online performer, between – in Goffman’s (1979) terms – signs ‘given’ and signs ‘given off’, where the former are the ones under some sort of control for the purposes of impression management. • The question of interpersonal relations online, with particular refer- ence to the apparently greater incidence of ‘flaming’ – interchanges which take an abusive and insulting form – is discussed by Thompsen (1996), who reviews the history of online flaming as a topic of research and traces the earliest use of this word (albeit with a rather different meaning – some lexical drift having occurred in the mean- time) back to Steele, Woods et al. (1983) (see also Kayany 1998; O’Sullivan and Flanagan 2003; Alonzo and Aiken 2004). This topic is closely connected with the previous one, since one of the popular explanations for the apparently greater extent of flaming in online communication has to do with the reduced social presence of inter- locutors to one another, leading to misinterpretation of commu- nicative intentions, to which the knowledge that ‘so-and-so is not like that’ cannot be a corrective (Kiesler, Siegel et al. 1984; Kiesler 1997). The question of gender difference in respect of flaming has also been addressed by researchers (Herring 1994). Other disciplines which have contributed to research on newsgroups include information science (see Bar-Ilan 1997; Snyder 1996; Sallis 1998; Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 21
- 35. Savolainen 1999, 2001; Kot 2003), and psychology (see Granic 2000; Joinson 2001, 2002). There have also been some ‘case study’ enquiries into the power of newsgroup discourse to influence the ‘offline’ world (see Hearit 1999; Lewenstein 1995b). Research on CMC generally has also expanded since the early 1990s and is more conscious of the social/political/economic/cultural context of CMC (see Slevin 2000). But a discussion of research on newsgroups must begin from a consid- eration of their character as a form of discourse and speech event. In previous research on newsgroups and health risks (Richardson 2001) I characterized newsgroup discourse in terms of the ‘four I’s’: newsgroup conversations are Interactive, International, Intertextual and Interested. In a further article (Richardson 2003) I added a fifth – Inter- personal – in recognition of the fact that, overwhelmingly, messages sent to newsgroups are sent by, and on behalf of, individuals not insti- tutions. Individuals write in their personal capacity, not as representa- tives of the organizations which they may work for, or the political parties to which they may belong. This is partly a legacy of the old ‘elec- tronic frontier’ days in cyberspace when the corporate voice was treated with suspicion (Ludlow 1993). It is also one of the factors which can give rise to mistrust and even flaming in the threads. Other participants do not respond well to contributions which seem to promote the agenda of some group or organization. The corporate or party line ‘voice’ can be detected, even when a message is delivered by an individual, and such voices are still not welcome on Usenet. Many contributors use their sig (signature) files to make explicit that what they say in their messages represents their own opinions and not those of the company which employs them. This is particularly important for people using their workplace accounts to access groups: 22 Internet Discourse and Health Debates As for the original four ‘I’s’, the Interactive characteristic does not need further elaboration; it is adequately covered by the previous dis- cussion. The International aspect of newsgroup discourse recognizes that contributions can come from any part of the wired world. In the English-language materials I examined, to the extent that it was pos- sible to judge, most contributors appeared to be based in North America xxx xxx, Nottingham, UK Speaking for myself, not my Employer Cellphone materials (2000) writer using a workplace email account
- 36. (USA and Canada), but the UK was also well represented, especially in relation to MMR, while anglophones in the Far East had a significant presence in relation to SARS. The extent to which participants explic- itly reveal their country of origin varies. In some groups with a regional identity (for example, those beginning ‘uk’; for instance ‘uk.telecom. mobile’) there may be a default assumption that all contributors are based in the UK, but regional newsgroups are also a way for diaspora populations to maintain a relationship with ‘home’ (Mitra 1997). Email addresses can be a guide to country of origin: my own email address ends with ‘uk’ for example. But this does not apply when people are using web-based accounts such as Hotmail. The Intertextuality of newsgroup discourse in some ways is no dif- ferent from intertextuality in other forms of discourse: all text draws from others (Meinhof and Smith 2000; Orr 2003). The distinctive forms of intertextuality in newsgroups include the reproduction of ‘earlier’ messages within ‘later’ ones, so that sometimes entire threads can be contained within a single message, marked to show how far ‘back’ par- ticular elements go. Another is the extensive reproduction of full-text articles from other online sources, especially news sources. This kind of practice often results in single message threads. Such contributions, without any trace of the contributor’s own voice, only that of the journal article being distributed in this way, seem to offer little for other participants to engage with. If such messages are cross-posted then they can constitute ‘spam’ and result in objections via the news.admin.net- abuse.usenet newsgroup. Yet the practice continues and does, often enough, result in further message exchange. The extensive referencing of other on- and offline sources and the varying attribution of trust to those sources is also of significance and has been explored in more detail in each of the case study chapters. Messages on Usenet are Interested in that (in contrast to news dis- course in the mass media), there is no attempt to construct an impar- tial speaking position. Participants are expected to write from their experience and their beliefs. The limits of this are tested by the general resistance to collective belief structures, the party or corporate line. For authenticity, the beliefs and experience should be genuinely personal, informed by experience (including experiences as a doctor, farmer, electrical engineer and so on). Speech of this kind shows little interest in the opportunity for online anonymity which has been proposed as an important characteristic of CMC – though less so in relation to asynchronous communication than to synchronous forms (Herring 2001). Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 23
- 37. The expansion of the agenda for research on newsgroups has involved some criticism of the early approaches and their findings. From the perspective of social theory, Slevin (2000: 107) argues that the classic accounts of ‘virtual community’ consistently cordon these off from the real world, while in his discussion of online identity, he brings to the fore other aspects of contemporary society which are having their effects upon the ‘project of the self’ (chapter 6), using arguments derived from Giddens (1991) and Bauman (1995). Taking a perspective from within CMC studies, Thompsen (1996) criticizes much of the research on flaming on the grounds that the early empirical studies were based upon unsatisfactory theoretical foundations, using variants of explanations based upon ‘reduced social cues’. Thompsen also observes, as have others, that the early research (for example, Sproull and Kiesler 1986) relied too much upon experimental methods which are unsatisfactory for understanding this phenomenon as it occurs in actual online con- texts; much of this research, furthermore, presumed that the inter- action would take place within particular organizations rather than across cyberspace. As Thompsen observes, these explanations have ignored the influence of time, have displayed a bias towards face-to-face communication, have assumed that ‘flames’ can be objectively identi- fied when the reality is that they are subject to interpretation, just as other aspects of communication are, online or offline, and have tended towards an unwarranted technological determinism. O’Sullivan and Flanagan (2003) share some of Thompsen’s reservations, and they seek to rethink flaming to take account of the fact that senders, receivers and eavesdroppers may either converge or diverge in the normative per- spectives they bring to bear in the interpretation of messages. Theirs is the first account to take this approach, and it is an improvement on previous work. However, their analysis is flawed because, in attempting to account for flaming in a way that is generalizable, that is, which will work for online as well as offline behaviour, they neglect the important public/private (or ‘restricted’) distinction. If newsgroups are a form of public discourse, like broadcasting, then there are no real eavesdroppers: messages are designed for them just as much as for their second-person direct addressees. These criticisms of research on community, identity and interpersonal relations have been taken to heart in the present research, but it is nev- ertheless important to discuss how the present research relates to these themes. The idea of online ‘communities’ is still an important and inter- esting one. Much of the research on this subject, including that of Rheingold himself, relates not to public newsgroups but to more 24 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 38. restricted forms of online interaction. This does make some sense, inas- much as in a restricted forum there is more chance of the members becoming known to one another and more basis for the possibility of constructing boundaries between the in-group and the out-group – see Gaines (1997) and Harrison (2000). As for Usenet, there is evidence, especially from the work of Nancy Baym (Baym 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1996, 1997, 1998) that participants in some newsgroups do indeed construct relations with one another sufficiently strong as to merit the description ‘community’: see also Phillips (1996) on ingroup–outgroup tensions in a gay and lesbian newsgroup. Yet this is not the whole story. The primary basis of unity for any newsgroup is a shared interest in discussing a particular topic, hence the large number of groups with particular hobbies as a focus, or the ‘fan’ newsgroups. Others, such as many of the ‘sci’ newsgroups, have professional inter- ests as their central focus. This is not a narrow or a utilitarian focus cen- tring upon job opportunities in the field, conference announcements, calls for papers, announcements of new publications, and so on – restricted forums (lists) are better at serving this function than news- groups are. It seems likely that some Usenet newsgroups are more tightly unified than others as regards their group cohesiveness. The kind of research presented here is not well designed to determine which of the groups are unified and which have much looser social bonds. The enquiry focuses upon particular topics, not particular groups and it was of significance here that, for example, SARS was a subject that golfers wanted to talk about in March 2003 just as much as jewellery makers. Communities based upon shared interests alone are unlikely to provide for very intense forms of solidarity, particularly on groups where the ‘stick to the topic’ rule is enforced. Wellman’s (1997) ‘social network’ approach provides a more useful theoretical foundation for rethinking this issue. It may well be the case that, in some periods and/or for some groups it is the case that they are all acquainted with one another offline as well as online. But it is not possible to approach the interaction itself on the assumption that such acquaintance exists. It would not exist for a newcomer reading messages in a thread composed mainly by regulars. If the newcomer and the regulars interpret the same set of words dif- ferently, the interpretation of the regulars cannot be regarded as the ‘true’ interpretation with that of the newcomer somehow less valid. Such a position might be tenable in relation to communication in restricted groups but not in relation to unrestricted ones, which are indiscriminately open to regulars and newcomers. There are difficulties here which are compounded by reading threads in the context of an Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 25
- 39. archive, many years after their original composition and without refer- ence to concurrent threads on the same groups. Similar considerations apply in respect of the construction of identity in newsgroups. In each of the three case study newsgroups there is a significant subgroup of participants who post under obvious pseudo- nyms, like ‘elfchild’, though most posting is done by people who offer a conventional name as their identity. What is important online for these topics is the extent to which someone can put aspects of their identity to work in the job of articulating, for their groups, reasons why their information should be trusted. Richardson (2003) addresses this in relation to newsgroup discourse about mobile phone health risks. In this context, the important factor is not that personal identities are unknown and therefore endlessly flexible online as between one area of cyberspace and another. It is more that, in these encounters, profes- sional identities are masked: in principle, participants come naked into the discussion, except for whatever online reputation they have built up in the group itself – for flaming, for spamming, for pontificating, for being flippant, for going off-topic and so on. And even that reputation only holds for ‘regulars’ – while those involved in the thread as lurkers or as more active participants may include newcomers as well. To ensure that a professional background as a paediatrician counts for something on line, it is first necessary to inform the group that you have such a background. Then, like the rest of the discourse, this construct is up for negotiation as to its meaning, truth and value. One message in my col- lection passes on some ‘information’, and ends: ‘You can trust me. I do work for the government.’ There is enough indeterminacy in this speech act for a whole thesis. Expert status confers no privileges here because the task of discriminating the ‘experts’ from the rest is so uncertain. ‘Flaming’ can be considered as one of the distinctive characteristics of ‘Netspeak’ (Crystal 2001).4 Flaming has been associated with chat as well as with newsgroups, but most of the empirical research has focused upon asynchronous forums. In the early research there is a strong sense that the amount of flaming encountered online comes as a surprise. It seemed wrong, shocking, certainly noteworthy, that there should be so much of it. By 1998 however, it is at least possible that the lesson has been learned. Newsgroups are for flaming. Could it be that in news- groups characterized by much flaming there is a mutual agreement, in what has been, with exceptions, a male-dominated environment (Anderson 1996; Herring 1996b, 2001), to allow it here, to suspend any face-protection devices which might otherwise operate? Certainly there is some evidence of newsgroup participants who value the opportunity 26 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 40. which newsgroups give them for expressing their feelings in a forceful way (see Phillips 1996). The internet and health risks The next chapter has more to say about communication and health risks, bringing in, among other things, insights and concerns from the literature on the public understanding of science. The purpose of the present chapter is more restricted: it outlines some current research which draws together the study of the internet and the study of health and risk. The internet/health interface can be approached in many ways, including from a managerial or a policy perspective. With the focus more specifically upon health risk, research is drawn towards the study of particular online resources – advice, information, support, treatment options – and how these might contribute to individuals’ attempts to understand their own circumstances and arrive at personal decisions. According to Pew Internet (Pew 2003a), 80 per cent of adult internet users in the USA have searched for at least one of 16 health topics online. This includes immunization/vaccination, specific diseases and environmental health hazards, thus covering all of the areas relevant to the present research. What about Americans who do not search for health information on the internet? Is it because they do not trust this as a source of information? Only 12 per cent feel at all strongly that the net is untrustworthy in this respect (Pew 2003a: 33). Current research at the University of Northumbria by Pamela Briggs and her colleagues (Briggs 2003) is especially interested in understand- ing the use that people make of online health resources. This research, funded, like the present research, by the ESRC’s E-society programme, uses fieldwork methods involving diary protocols, interviews and observation in internet cafés with volunteers and questionnaires. The Northumbria research pays attention to the factors which influence trust for particular websites: such as source credibility and expertise; the degree to which the advice is personalized, the extent to which the process feels familiar or predictable and the consistency of advice across different sources. There is, in this respect, some convergence between the Northumbria research and the research reported here. There are also important dif- ferences. Two in particular should be mentioned. In the first place, my research is more heavily influenced by the literature on computer- mediated communication and by particular areas of language and lit- eracy research. This creates a different approach to the study of websites themselves. In the Northumbria research, analysis of key websites Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 27
- 41. requires procedures of content analysis; in the present research, there is less content analysis and more analysis of textual form (visual, verbal and hypertextual) as this contributes to the construction of meaning. The CMC approach adopted here also creates a difference in the way that ‘the audience’ for web resources is constructed. In the Northum- bria research, participants are recruited for the purposes of the study from the (for want of a better word) ‘real world’. In the present study, there is no attempt to go beyond the world of cyberspace itself. In my study of Usenet discourse about health risks, I have constructed this material both as an object of enquiry, just as the websites are, and also as a resource. It is a resource for exploring issues of trust on health topics, with particular reference in each of the case studies to trust of mass media sources and trust of websites. Despite the self-selected and small sample size the value of this approach lies in the possibility of exploring expressions of trust and mistrust as these are formulated spon- taneously and interactively, in one particular communicative medium with its own distinctive characteristics. The medium/mode/genre of online expression is, to a degree, ignored in all forms of content analy- sis, and sometimes there is justification for this neglect. Some parts of my own analysis should be regarded as content-analytic, for example, the attempt to specify how many messages ‘talk up’ particular risks, as compared with the numbers who ‘talk down’ the same risk. As a result of these differences, there is in the present study less tightness of fit between the websites mentioned by the readers and those subjected to analysis in their own right than in the Northumbria research. The research In each of the case study chapters below I have chosen one or more websites as well as numerous newsgroup threads for detailed attention. In selecting websites, my purpose is somewhat different in each chapter. In the mobile phone chapter I sought to contrast two websites provided by two different individuals, one representing the mainstream view on mobile phone risk and one representing a minority view. In the SARS chapter the point is to examine how an ‘official’ website (actually that of the World Health Organization) compared with two contemporary blogs when dealing with the same topic. Finally, in the MMR chapter, the focus is upon a website which represents the extreme fringe view of modern medicine and its implementation. These accounts in each case present a textual analysis with particular reference to the structure of the site, to the graphic display of materials and to the types and forms 28 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 42. of hyperlinks as they appear on the site in general, and especially upon the front page of the site or section. In the case of the newsgroup materials, the object was to establish a corpus of 1000+ messages, organized by thread, for each topic, from the earliest mention of the topic in Usenet until the end of June 2003 which was the cut-off point. This produced a somewhat different number of threads in each case and a very different temporal distribution. The story of SARS only began in March 2003, while that of mobile phones and cancer began in 1993 and that of MMR began (slowly) in 1995 and intensified from 1998. The collections consist entirely of messages from English-language newsgroups which dominate the archive, although it is not an exclusively English-language resource. Each of the case study chapters (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) go into a little more detail about the pro- cedures for the collection and the analysis of the textual materials, as well as the extent to which the analysed materials are representative of the full range of Usenet discussion on these topics during the relevant time periods. Confidentiality In this research I have quoted extensively from messages posted in Usenet from 1993 to 2003. Yet this is the tiniest fragment of Google’s Usenet archive, and well within ‘fair dealing’ limits for copyright pur- poses. It is not the copyright issue which matters so far as this degree of citation is concerned, but the issue of confidentiality among Usenet contributors who may not appreciate that that their words are, thanks to Google, very much in the public domain. Google itself currently provides mechanisms for the deletion of particular messages from the archive. It is important for this research to quote from actual messages rather than reporting, summarizing and quantifying them, because of the value of examining how health risk issues are debated in people’s own words, within the limits and affordances of a particular medium. I have taken advantage of the public domain status of these materials. But I do have some concerns about confidentiality and I have taken some minor measures out of respect for the original participants. In the first place it is important to note that some participants, on all three topics, took steps to protect their own online confidentiality by posting to Usenet under a pseudonym, like ‘elfchild’ (not an actual example). It is likely too that email addresses operative when some of the earliest messages were posted are so no longer, as people move their internet accounts between different ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Computer-Mediated Communication and Language 29
- 43. In the second place, I have not published the names of contributors, even when they are pseudonyms, alongside any of the citations, and I have substituted names within messages with placeholder characters. In the third place I have refrained from advertising the name of the specific newsgroup where the original message was first posted. Instead I have identified messages according to the type of newsgroup on which it occurred. This level of identification is important to the research to the extent that different types of expression may be characteristic of dif- ferent groups. The Appendix lists all the newsgroups which were con- sulted for this research. Finally, to discourage easy recovery of particular messages from the archive, I have corrected obvious misspellings and typos and incorrect punctuation within messages. This does some damage to the authen- ticity of the data, but not much and not of a kind which compromises the analysis. ‘Authenticity’ is a difficult concept in relation to this data. In respect of formatting, for example, there is no single authentic form. The look of a text on a sender’s computer screen is different from the look of that ‘same’ text on the screen of the receiver, and different receivers will also see different layouts from one another according to screen size, software, available fonts, display preferences and so on. The fact that Google has ‘homogenized’ all of these variations to its own formatting is a further complication. Typos and misspellings can dis- tract from the textual features which are important for the analysis, and run the risk of creating inappropriate impressions of the writers. These corrections also make material harder to trace back to the originals in the archive. Overall, I have tried to ensure that this research is faithful to the spirit of the guidelines recommended by the Association of Inter- net Researchers (AoIR 2002) and those of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL 1994).5 30 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 44. 3 Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 31 This chapter explores in more detail the importance of discourse (in the sociocultural sense) in the construction of contemporary risk. It con- tinues the focus, introduced in the previous chapter, on the idea of public communication, which entails some attention to the role of the mass media in the representation of risk in general and to the particu- lar health risks which have been examined in the present research. Contemporary health risks are the subject of representations in talk and in writing.1 Such discourse serves to ‘construct’ risks, by providing the concepts and language for making sense of them. [Risks] induce systematic and often irreversible harm, generally remain invisible, are based on causal interpretations, and thus ini- tially only exist in terms of the (scientific or anti-scientific) knowl- edge about them. They can thus be changed, magnified, dramatized or minimized within knowledge, and to that extent they are particu- larly open to social definition and construction. Hence the mass media and the scientific and legal professions in charge of defining risks become key social and political positions. (Beck 1992: 22–3) Of the many forms of communication which contribute to the con- struction of health risks – the scientific research, the policy documents, the newspaper reports, the gossip, and so on – it is the public forms which are of particular importance, because they provide the resources for popular understanding of what is at stake. The chapter begins with a discussion of ‘risk’ as this has been written about in the social theory of the 1990s, drawing attention to three themes which are relevant to the present research: the idea of contem- porary risks as manufactured risks; the considerable uncertainty which K. Richardson, Internet Discourse and Health Debates © Kay Richardson 2005
- 45. surrounds the possible outcomes of ‘risky’ behaviour; and the role of experts and expertise, foregrounding the problem of trust within this set of concerns. The bulk of the chapter is concerned specifically with ‘risk’ in the context of communication and representation, so there is some discus- sion of the relevant channels of communication (including the inter- net) within the matrix of relationships which define public health issues: from channels of communication there is a shift to themes of communication in the discourse(s) of health risk and from these to the crucial ‘meta-themes’ of scientific expertise and of trust. Risk and social theory Beck (1992) and Giddens (1999), the theorists of reflexive moderniza- tion, say that the risks of today are manufactured risks, stemming from the created environment itself; that they have a potentially global sphere of impact, are interconnected across economic, political and social as well as geographic boundaries, are wrapped up within institu- tional frameworks, subject to widespread publicization and extend beyond what any particular knowledge system is capable of represent- ing. They cannot be converted into certainties by any system of exper- tise such as religion. This is the ‘downside’ of risk, as opposed to ‘risk’ within an entrepreneurial frame, or a gambling frame, where ‘he who dares, wins’. For the purposes of argument, human health risks can be divided between the risks of accident on the one hand and the risks of disease/illness on the other; according to Gwyn (2002), ‘disease’ is the preferred term in expert discourse and ‘illness’ its lay equivalent. This distinction is an important one in the mobile phone debate where the risk of a car accident caused by people trying to use a phone and drive at the same time is constantly being traded off against the possible risk of cancer. ‘Disease/illness’ seems, symbolically speaking, to concern the body within, while ‘accident’ appears principally about the external body. Risks of either kind can produce health effects from the trivial to the fatal, but of the two it seems to be disease rather than accident which has the greater potency in our collective imaginings of risk and bodily harm. All three of the case studies in this volume relate to the symbolic territory of human disease. The mobile phone study relates to cancer, which along with HIV/AIDS (although for a lot longer) is the most cul- turally salient of all diseases. The SARS case study relates to infectious 32 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 46. diseases. These were, for a brief moment in the mid-twentieth century, thought to be under control or potentially so, thanks to the develop- ment of antibiotics and vaccines, but now seem to be extremely threat- ening once again, with the evolution of resistant strains of bacteria and new disease pathogens, while vaccination programmes prove hard to implement (Garrett 1994). The MMR study likewise relates to the area of infectious diseases, since the vaccine is designed to prevent three of them. But it also introduces an additional concern: the risk of autism (or an ‘autistic spectrum disorder’, which accommodates a range of con- ditions known under other names, including Attention Deficit Hyper- active Disorder or ADHD). Autism and brain cancer have in common the fact that they both implicate the brain. Threats to the brain have a special character inasmuch as the brain is the locus of the mental faculties as well as identity and personality. In addition, the three risks fall within the sphere of public health, that is to say, where the public authorities at local, national and international levels share responsibility with individuals and other organizations. Public health authorities are involved here in various ways. They manage vaccination programmes, use standards legislation to regulate industries, invest public money in the science designed to explore causal theories, and respond to pressures from industry, the mass media, public opinion and so on, just as they do in other areas of public policy. In the public health context, health risk issues such as the ones examined in this book are underpinned by connections between dif- ferent participants in a public health matrix. One participant comprises individuals as actual or potential casualties of risk. Another comprises the industries and institutions distributing suspect product or manag- ing suspect environments – airlines, mobile phone manufacturers, vaccine manufacturers, medical practices and so on. Then there are the authorities which regulate these industries and formulate policies in what they represent as the ‘best interest’; and finally, research scientists conducting their varied enquiries so that policy and practice can be, or can claim to be, based on sound knowledge. The problem with the ‘risks’ which are discussed in this research, particularly with the mobile phone and MMR debates, is that they do not allow us to use the word ‘risk’ with a stable meaning. If ‘risk’ in its negative guise is about doing something now, and possibly, but not certainly, suffering bad consequences afterwards, then the problem in these cases is about the extent of the uncertainty in respect of those bad outcomes. Variously, and on an ascending reality scale, the possibilities are: Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 33
- 47. • That there are no bad outcomes of the proposed kind • That the potential risk under discussion is ‘theoretical’ • That the bad outcomes depend on unknown factors deserving further research • That the bad outcomes depend on knowable ‘risk factors’ concern- ing the individual prior to the risky behaviour • That research and circumstantial evidence suggests a probability of bad outcomes • That particular case histories demonstrate the reality of harm in the past, and thus confirm the possibility of harm for others in the future and with a further possibility which goes beyond this scale: • That one of the above is accurate but there is no present way of knowing which one. To establish that this scale is not just a construct but represents the true range of opinion about these risks, I can offer illustrative quotations from the newsgroup materials: 34 Internet Discourse and Health Debates >Are there any health risks with cellular phones? If so, what are >they? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I know that the fanatics are going to love this! There are no health risks. No bad outcomes Example no. 1 (1998) – cellphones If no-one can give you a 100% guarantee that your child won’t get the fatal brain-wasting disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) from the human albumin, a blood product, in the MMR vaccine how can you say it is a safe vaccine? Because the risk is described as theoretical and hypothetical doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Theoretical risk of bad outcomes Example no. 2 (1998) – MMR
- 48. Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 35 I do believe that injections are a good thing but a lot more research needs to be done into the risks, but of course there’s no time to carry out research without a big gap in the inoculations, it just seems a no win situation to me. Further research needed Example no. 3 (2002) – MMR If your family has depressed folks, Alcoholics, ADD, ADHD or dyslexia of any kind, DON’T let the next generation get all the shots at once. Wouldn’t it be better to err on the side of caution rather than create even more kids with autism??? Susceptibility Example no. 4 (2001) – MMR There has been a sudden explosion of Autism in America. McKinney School district, 26 new students, Plano ISD, 60+ this year. Data backed by 5 more scientific studies soon to be published points to the MMR vaccine as the cause. Cumulative evidence Example no. 5 (1998) – MMR We do not have informed consent because regardless of what ever literature is given to you the attitude of the doctors is VACCI- NATE. It’s a matter of risk vs. benefit – for the greater good of the majority a vaccine was given to all kids even though it was known a certain number of them would suffer dire consequences. Not a big deal unless your kid is one of the small percentage . . . I believe my daughter was. I am observing all of this with great interest. Case history evidence Example no. 6 (1998) – MMR
- 49. Given this play of uncertainty, indeterminacy and ignorance, the use of the word ‘risk’ seems much too vague, though tending to point higher up the scale than ‘theoretical’. The uncertainty of contemporary risk, and the consequences of this, is one of the themes in the risk society literature (compare Beck 1992: 71–2), although the explanations in this literature are at too ‘macro’ a level to account for the extent of the variations and the use to which they are put in actually occurring discourse about risks (Horlick-Jones 2003). Risk communication in the public health matrix The connections between these participants are relationships which depend upon the exchange of information, and information comes in the form of representations and constructions which are different for different parts of the matrix. The texts which realize these representa- tions and constructions are ‘public’ to varying degrees. Intellectual property rights and commercial considerations keep some material out of the public domain, national security concerns may do the same for other material, but the matrix does require a public discourse, and by tradition this is where the mass media enter the picture. The mass media may enter from a number of different gateways, reporting variously upon public policy initiatives, new technological developments, unexpected scientific findings, public opinion surveys, changes in the economic fortunes of particular industries, or just unexpected ‘health events’ like the outbreak of SARS in March 2003. The journalistic forms of mass media representations include not only news, current affairs, features and op-ed materials but also various kinds of fictional and dramatic representations, all contributing to the cul- tural framing of risk. With the coming of the internet there has been some expansion of public discourse beyond these familiar forms. Not only has the internet given the traditional mass media an additional channel of communication for their usual wares, it has also allowed for enhanced public access to hitherto more restricted materials such as par- liamentary debates, standards legislation and other official documenta- tion. Furthermore, the interactive capabilities of the internet have provided greater opportunities for public discussion of topics such as these. In speaking of ‘public discourse’ there is an ambiguity which needs to be addressed. Does ‘public discourse’ refer to discourse which is addressed to the public, or does it refer to discourse in which the public actively contribute? In theory it could mean both of these, but in prac- 36 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 50. tice the participatory forms of public discourse are very restricted and lacking in power. Certainly people do form their own representations of health risk issues, and use these within their social networks, but the opportunities for these representations to mean something, to have consequences, depend upon people’s involvements in activist and lobby groups, participation in opinion polls and direct communicative efforts, whether one-to-one (for example, the letter to the MP) or one-to-many (for example, the letter to the local newspaper). The internet, and espe- cially the newsgroup arenas within the net, allow more scope for the views of ordinary people to enter the public domain, although in a way which still leaves this discourse isolated from the main arteries of public communication proper. The widest definition of public discourse for the purposes of this study is ‘discourse which is in the public domain’. This definition encom- passes journalistic reporting, which is clearly ‘for’ the public, but it also takes in the kind of newsgroup threads analysed in this research – discourse by the public. The messages on these threads, are, like the journalism, ‘on show’ to unspecified, uncounted, uncountable others beyond the immediate participants who have composed the messages. One of the important differences between the two forms of public dis- course, for-the-public and by-the-public, is that although both kinds are multivocal, in the first kind, this multivocality is organized and pat- terned according to generic conventions. Different voices, for the most part, are clearly identified – the government spokesman, the opposition spokesman, the expert, the ordinary person, the industry representative, the trades unionist and so on. In the second, by-the-people kind, such external organization and patterning falls by the wayside, and identity, like everything else, becomes relevant only to the extent that the par- ticipants make it so. To make it relevant it has to be spoken: partici- pants are free to say, or to conceal, what they do for a living, who employs them, how long they have been doing it, where they learned to do it, and other characteristics of this sort, and they have to have these credentials accepted as valid and relevant in this context. They may also reveal aspects of their identities in less deliberate ways through the forms of language they choose (Crawford 2002; Herring 2001). Not all participants will go to the trouble of articulating their identity explic- itly. Plenty can be said and argued over, without reference to identity. Participants, including ‘lurkers’, are self-selecting and presumably do not ‘join’ newsgroups where they have no interest in the declared topic focus. This creates some unity and coherence within groups. But the coherence is managed internally by the participants themselves, not Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 37
- 51. externally by professional organizations and individuals trained to produce texts in accordance with established and codified conventions. Risk discourse for-the-people Risk discourse by-the-people is amply covered elsewhere in this book, extensively in the case study chapters when they deal specifically with newsgroup materials. The present chapter offers an opportunity, by way of context, to expand a little more on risk discourse for-the-people, that is, on mass media and risk. Although the research in this book is not centrally about the mass media it is impossible to write about health risks intelligently without reference to the media. Mass media provide the archetypal for-the-public discourse about risks, with the internet now performing the function of an additional conduit for media mat- erials. In by-the-public discourse there is constant reference to mass media sources: many newsgroup threads originate because some piece of reportage has introduced a new angle or new findings, and there is an important strand of media criticism within this material too. News values in the mass media, especially at the popular end, mean that health-related risk issues are certain to attract news coverage, since they have the potential to bring together some key ingredients of a good popular news story. Health risk stories offer the possibility of direct effects, as readers and viewers are invited to contemplate whether and how the problem might come to them and their families. They offer human interest, as audiences consider the fate of particular ‘victims’. They offer opportunities for contemplation of responsibility – con- structions of ‘blame’ in relation to particular public and private insti- tutions and their duties towards citizens and consumers. Sometimes there are dramatic narrative values, for example the possibility of finding a particular hero-scientist, resisting the pressure to conform to majority opinions and becoming the champion for a challenge to ortho- dox views. Discourses of health and risk in the mass media have been the subject of academic research in their own right. Two recent contributions are worth mentioning because both attend to a full range of media forms and genres, and discuss fictional as well as non-fictional formats. Allan (2002) writes about the ways in which science fiction from H.G. Wells to Star Trek and the X-files has provided pleasurable and worthwhile frameworks for engaging with scientific issues, and also reviews more factual treatments of science and scientists in the mass media. Gwyn (2002) devotes one chapter to media and health. He too examines fictional/dramatic representations of health issues, including an analysis 38 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 52. of the ‘plague’ theme in the Hollywood film Outbreak as well as journal- istic treatments of particular topics such as British newspaper coverage of an outbreak of a microbial infection called ‘necrotizing fasciitis’ in 1994. Both Allan and Gwyn are interested in the power of mass media rep- resentations of science, health and risk within popular understandings of these topics, but for ‘audience research’ proper, the most relevant studies come from the stable of the Glasgow University Media Group. From this stable there are studies of audience reception in relation to the AIDS crisis (see Kitzinger 1993, 1998a, 1998b), as well as on food scares (Reilly 1999) and on mental illness (Philo 1999). Other relevant audience studies, without the Glasgow connection, include Corner, Richardson et al. (1990) on audience reception of TV and video repre- sentations of nuclear power, and Rogers (1999) on AIDS and on global warming. Audience research of this kind is necessary because the mean- ings of media texts are not ‘given’ and objectively available to an analyst, but have to be negotiated in the act of reading, viewing and lis- tening: audiences bring to bear their own frameworks of value and of knowledge, and the interpretative result is never guaranteed. The Allan and Gwyn studies of media and health offer accounts of media texts which owe much to the cultural studies tradition in media research, with their shared interest in fiction, myth and metaphor. There is another more social-scientific route into this territory, which connects with a ‘public understanding of science’ perspective. This perspective is drawn more towards the factual/journalistic forms of mass media cov- erage, and to concerns about the extent of the accuracy and fairness in media reports of health and science issues. Recent work out of Cardiff university (Hargreaves and Ferguson 2000; Hargreaves, Lewis et al. 2003; Lewis and Spears 2003) represents this trend, which also has an audi- ence reception element. There is considerable overlap between the cultural studies and the social science branches of the enterprise of studying science and risk in the mass media. In coming at questions of science/health/risk from a ‘public under- standing of science’ perspective, recent work seeks to identify and to distance itself from a simplistic ‘deficit model’ of public understanding (see Hilgartner 1990). In a deficit model, popular views of science are simply wrong – ignorant, factually inaccurate and/or scientifically illiterate. The mass media, which could be contributing to a better understanding, are seen as part of the problem. The deficit model is unsatisfactory for many reasons. It eliminates all of the problems of understanding reality which originate within science itself – the dis- Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 39
- 53. agreements, the uncertainties and indeterminacies, the ignorance, the amount of specialism insulating branches of science from one another. It ignores the ways that media representations and public understand- ing both seek a more contextualized view of science, placing it in rela- tion to government and industrial interests. It ignores the importance of ethical frameworks in shaping science news – frameworks which the scientific community often tries to keep at arm’s length. It does not give due attention to the nature and function of journalism which, without any particular hostility to science, necessarily privileges some aspects of science stories over others. It does not recognize that scientific author- ity has come into question: that knowledge presented in the voice of ‘science’ does not automatically command trust. ‘The public’ is viewed in an undifferentiated way, when the truth is that people are consti- tuted differently by their experiences and their social backgrounds, so that the young parents of an autistic child may know all sorts of things that the elderly bachelor does not know when reading stories about MMR vaccine, just as the long-time amateur radio hobbyist knows things that the teenage mobile phone user does not know. There is no justification for the belief that the world would be a better place if science was reported always and everywhere on scientists’ own terms, and if educational systems were more successful in training us to under- stand and accept the authority of those terms. The range of problems with the deficit model point towards a need for a better model, and also for more empirical research on what people do understand and believe about science in general and about particu- lar topics with a scientific component. The Lewenstein (1995a) model of science communication is one which is not restricted to the ‘public’ layers of communication, separated from other channels and forms of discourse (Figure 3.1). The inclusiveness of this model is important to Lewenstein because, along with some others, he wants a model in which the for-the-public part of science communication is not a one-way street but can also lead back into the science itself. The ‘messiness’ of this model is precisely the point of it. Hargreaves and Ferguson (2000) describe it as ‘a kalei- doscopic storm of competing and interacting lines of communication’, predicting, correctly in their view, ‘informational instability’, at least in the early days of a new scientific project which is of public interest. Lewenstein’s model is meant to account for science communication as it exists at this point in history, putting pressure upon more traditional relations between participants in communication processes. It is based not upon studies of the health/risk sciences, but on narrative accounts 40 Internet Discourse and Health Debates
- 54. of ‘cold fusion’ experiments and discoveries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some research into media coverage of health risks takes a more lin- guistic approach. A well-cited example of this is Fowler (1991). This is a critical linguistic analysis of press reports throughout the ‘salmonella in eggs’ affair in Britain, in the winter of 1988–89. This was an episode of public anxiety about the risk of food poisoning from eggs infected with the bacterium salmonella enteritidis. Fowler’s interest is in the char- acter of the episode as a kind of media event, and in the specifically lin- guistic characteristics of ‘hysterical style’, involving: • Terms denoting negative emotional reactions, from the ‘fear’ seman- tic field • An abundance of difficult technical and medical terms • Agency imputed to the ‘germs’ and ‘bugs’ carrying the infection • Metaphors of war against the bugs • Intertextual allusions to horror and science fiction themes • Heavy reliance on quantification, some of it involving very large numbers, as well as words like ‘increase’, ‘rise’, ‘grow’, ‘spread’, indi- cating growth in numbers Whenever media/communication research turns its attention to health risk, the topic of HIV/AIDS provides one of the points of reference. Besides Allan, Gwyn and the Glasgow University Media Group, other Public Discourses of Risk, Health and Science 41 Policy reports Textbooks Technical news Email Meetings Preprints Journals Grant proposals Talks Lab Mass media Source: Based on Lewenstein (1995a: 426). Figure 3.1: Scientific communication
- 55. Random documents with unrelated content Scribd suggests to you:
- 56. I was going to call and beg him not to leave me, a stranger in the land, alone in the lurch like that, when I was reminded of the something which had fallen among the bushes, and which had first made me conscious of his presence, by kicking against something which felt soft and yielding, and which was lying on the ground. I stooped down to see what it was. "Sakes alive! It's a woman!" It was; a young woman--and she was dead. No wonder he had stared at me as if he had been staring at a ghost. No wonder, as he saw me looking at him from among the bushes, that he had thought that the victim of his handiwork had risen from the dead to look again upon his face. No wonder he had torn for his life across the grass, feeling that she was at his heels. I seemed to be in for a pretty thing. I have looked upon dead folk many a time; yes, and upon not a few who have come to their death by "accident." I have lived in parts of the world in which life is not held so sacred as it is in England; where not such a fuss is made every time the doctor is forestalled--where the doctor is not the only individual who is licensed to kill; where men shoot now and then at sight, and, when they are pushed to it, women too. I know a girl-- and liked her--who shot a man who had insulted her in New Orleans, and left him on the sidewalk. Nobody said a word. She is married now to a rich man, and to a good man, as good men go, and she has a family, and she is highly esteemed. In England that seems odd, but I suppose the fact is that when one is in Rome one does as the Romans do, and that is all about it. And at that moment I happened to be in England, and I made up my mind there and then that, if I could help it, I would have no finger in the pie. I had no desire to go into the witness-box--I would almost as soon have gone into the dock. Cross-examining counsel have a knack of making mincemeat of a witness. Things come out--
- 57. the things which one would much rather did not come out. I had not returned to England, a widow, with my big pile, with the intention of coming such a cropper at the outset. Rather than be mixed up in such a mess, I would almost sooner take my passage in the first steamer back to the States, and count the ties out West again. Please the fates, I had done with scandals--fresh ones, anyhow-- for the rest of my days. The woman was dead. She was beyond my help. Let whoever found her hang the man who laid her there. The house in which I lived was too transparent for me to indulge in the luxury of throwing stones. I gathered myself together. The most miraculous part of the business was that my clothing seemed to have escaped uninjured; falling backwards had been my salvation. I peeped at my face in my handglass. I seemed to be all right--right enough, at any rate, to pass muster at night and in a crowd. I went up the bank to the line. From that altitude I had a good view of the surrounding country. Straight along the line to the left, not so very far away, lights were glimmering. I made up my mind to chance it, to keep along the line and to make for them. They proved to be the lights of a station. The station was Three Bridges Junction. I managed to enter it to the best of my knowledge and belief, entirely unobserved. I thanked my stars when I felt the platform beneath my feet. From the mirror in the waiting-room I learned that my handglass had not deceived me. I could pass muster. A woman in the room addressed me--she and I had it to ourselves. "Excuse me, miss, but do you know your back's all covered with weeds?" As she brushed them off I thanked her, murmuring something about my having been sitting on the grass.
- 58. Going out on to the platform I all but came into collision with the man who had stood staring at me from the other side of the railing. The sight of him fairly took my breath away. He was going from me or he could scarcely have failed to notice the singularity of my demeanour. It was he--there could be no mistake about that. But, lest I might be in error, I resolved to have another glimpse at him. Before I could put my resolution into force he had vanished, into what I discovered to be, as I strolled slowly past it, a refreshment- room. I should not wonder if he did stand in need of refreshment! There did not appear to be a seat in the place. English people talk about the discomfort of the American depôts but my experience is that, from the discomfort point of view, the average English station runs the American depôt hard. I sat on one of those square trollies which the porters use for baggage. There I watched and waited for my gentleman to emerge, refreshed. The trolley was close to the refreshment-room. I could see him at the bar. He was not content with one drink. He disposed of two. Probably he needed them! Presently he came out. He had had his back towards me while he had been drinking. As he came out of the buffet, turning, he walked in the direction of the trolley on which I was sitting. He moved right past, so close to me that by putting out my foot, I could have tripped him up. It was he. My first impression had not been wrong. That he had got cured of his fright was plain--certainly he showed no signs of it. He seemed quite at his ease. His hands were in the pockets of his overcoat, an umbrella was under his arm, a cigarette was between his teeth. There might not have been such a thing as a ghost--or the shadow of the shade of a ghost--in all the world.
- 59. Back he came. He sailed up to a porter. I heard him asking him when there was a train to town. As the man, having given the information, was making off, I cut in. I put to my gentleman the question which he had put to the porter. "Can you tell me when the next train starts for London?" He told me what I asked, adding a word or two on his own account, as I had expected and desired. I responded. He seemed disposed for sociability. Why should I object? We began to talk. The end of it was that we travelled in the same compartment up to town. It was so funny! He was that most remarkable product--an English gentleman. Given the real article--and there is no mistaking it when once encountered--there is nothing in the world which can be compared to it. I speak who know. He was tall. He was perfectly dressed. He was handsome--I never saw a more handsome man. And he had that air of infinite, yet unconscious, condescension which the English gentleman, alone of all the creatures of the world, is born with, and which, willy-nilly, he carries with him from the cradle to the grave. They tell you in the different countries of the world that the Englishman is awkward, shy, ungraceful, seldom at his ease. May be; but not the English gentleman. He is the only man I have known who is always at his ease in every possible situation. But he is not to be found on every bush. Even in his own country he is the rarest of rare birds. Being born a peer, even though he can trace his tree to Noah, does not make a man a gentleman--you bet that it does not. I believe that an English gentleman is a caprice, an accident. He is not to be accounted for by natural laws. And though, for all I know, he may be trusted by his fellows, he is not to be trusted by a woman. He has one code of honour for his own sex and another for ours. That is so, though it may not be according to the copybooks.
- 60. My friend the gentleman was a real smart man. As he lolled back in his seat, enjoying his tobacco, it did you good to see him smile. His voice was typical of his kind, it fell like music on your ears. As you looked at him and listened, you could have sworn that he had not a care upon his mind. He was at peace with himself, and all the world. And it was all so natural; he was to the manner born. I found him quite delightful. I could see what he was doing--he was reckoning me up. And he was puzzled where to place me. I took him into my real confidence, for reasons of my own, and that puzzled him still more. I told him nothing but the truth. How I had gone out to America, and met poor dear Daniel, and married him. And how he had died and left me a widow, and his pile to comfort me. And how I had come back to England childless and forlorn and all alone. I laid stress upon my loneliness. I think that touched him. When a woman tells a man that she is lonely he takes it that she means that there is not a man anywhere in sight, and that the coast is clear for him, and that does touch him. His manner became quite sympathetic. He was as nice as could be--allusive, as a real smart man can be, with a delicate, intangible directness almost equal to a woman's. We were almost like old friends by the time that we reached town. He put me into a hansom at Victoria station. I asked him to come and see me, to have consideration for my loneliness. He promised that he would. All the way home, as the cab bore me through the streets, I kept thinking of Mr. Reginald Townsend--that was the name which he had given me--and of the woman he had left, lying by the line, amidst that clump of bushes. I believe I have written that I like a man to be thorough. It seemed probable that Mr. Townsend was that.
- 62. CHAPTER XXII.
- 63. LOUISE O'DONNEL'S FATHER. Next day Jack Haines came to see me. Mr. Haines promised to be a nuisance. Jack Haines and Daniel J. Carruth had been partners. I might have married either of them, for the matter of that. I might have married any one in Strikehigh City. Of two evils I chose what seemed to me to be the lesser, which was Daniel. For one thing, he was the boss partner and had the larger share, and for another, he was the older man. I could have twisted either of them round my finger, but it occurred to me that I might manage best with Daniel. So I became Mrs. Daniel J. Carruth, and poor dear Daniel lived just long enough to capitalize his share--he made a better thing of it than we had either of us expected--and then he died. Hardly was he buried than the chief mourner at his funeral, Mr. Haines, wanted me to marry him. He hinted that it would be just as well to keep the partnership alive, which struck me as absurd. Anyhow, I did not seem to see it. I came straight away to England, instead of marrying him, with the intention of getting as much fun out of Daniel's dollars as I possibly could. What I had not bargained for was his coming after me. The folks in Strikehigh City had all lived queer lives, but I rather guess that, in some ways, Jack Haines had lived one of the queerest. He had told me about it over and over again, and, whatever I might think of him, I knew that he had told me the truth. He had been married. He and his wife had lived like cat and dog. She had died. She had left a daughter. He had brought the daughter
- 64. up--trying to rule her with a heavy hand. There came a time when she objected. There was a disturbance--she left him. That was just before he came to Strikehigh City--in fact, her going sent him there, and he had never seen her since. I could see plainly that he had been more in the wrong than she had. In his way, he loved her. His conscience pricked him all the time. When Daniel died, it began to prick him worse than ever. Finding that I would not have him, he set himself to look for her. This I learned from his own lips when I met him again in London. It seemed that, when she had left him the girl had gone on to the stage--attaching herself to a variety show. From that she had passed to a burlesque troupe. The burlesque troupe had gone to England-- she went with it. The burlesque troupe returned--she had stayed behind. No doubt for reasons of her own. Jack Haines wanted very much to know what those reasons were, because, no sooner had the troupe gone, and left her, than she vanished. No one seemed to have the faintest notion what had become of her. She had simply disappeared--gone clean out of sight. The old man had come over to see if he could not succeed where others had failed; if he could not light on the clue which others had missed. The desire to find the girl had become with him a regular mania. It was like a bee in his bonnet. It occupied his thoughts, to the exclusion of all else, both by night and day. As I have said, the man was becoming a nuisance. I did not want to quarrel with him, but I saw that, without a quarrel, I never should be rid of him. He insisted on making me his confidant. And, although I took care never to give him a chance to say a word outright, I knew that, as soon as he had found the girl, he would renew that hint about the desirability of keeping the partnership alive.
- 65. On the day after that little trip to Brighton, he turned up in my drawing-room. I had run over to Kensington High Street for something. When I came back, there he was--and I was not by any means best pleased to see him there. I should have disliked him for one thing if I had disliked him for nothing else--he was so deadly serious. I do not think I ever saw him smile. Indeed, I doubt if he had a smile left in him. He had no sense of humour, and, to him, a joke was as meaningless as double Dutch. He was bald at the top of his head, his face was as long as one's arm, his eyes generally had an expressionless, fishlike sort of stare, and, since he had assumed the garb of respectability, he was always attired in funeral black. He seemed to be under the impression that that was the only hue in which respectability could appear. As for his temper, it varied from doubtful to bad, and from bad to worse, and when he was in a rage, which he quickly was, he was by no means an agreeable person to have to deal with. He and Daniel were always falling out, and, until I came upon the scene, he used to ride over poor dear Daniel roughshod. But, when I did I let him understand that whoever fell out with Daniel fell out with me. For my part, I did not wonder so much at his daughter's having run away as at her having lived with him as long as she did. His hat was on one chair, his umbrella on another, he himself sat, with his hands clasped in front of him, on a little centre table, in an attitude which suggested that he was about to offer prayer. He did not rise as I entered--respectability has not yet worked such havoc with him as that. He stared at me as I went in, solemnly speechless, as if he wondered how I could venture to interrupt the meeting. "Well, Mr. Haines, any news?" I did not care if there was any news, but I did object to his sitting and staring at me like that. "She is dead."
- 66. "Dead!--You don't mean it!--How do you know?" "It was told me last night in a dream." Among the rest of his little peculiarities, he was one of the most superstitious creatures breathing. In religion, I believe, he called himself a spiritualist. Anyhow, he was always seeing things, and hearing things, and having things revealed to him. Talking to him in some of his moods reminded one of that scene in Richard II. where the poor dear king wants to sit upon a gravestone and talk of epitaphs. "Is that the only reason why you know that she is dead--because it was told you in a dream?" "Do not mock at me. The voice which speaks to me in visions does not lie. I saw a coffin lying in an open grave, and 'Louise O'Donnel' was on the coffin-lid." "You did not happen to see in which particular graveyard that grave might be located." "I did not. But I know that she is dead. My daughter, oh, my daughter!" I had to turn aside to smile. I grant that it was not a subject for laughter--but he was so funny! "And as I looked the coffin-lid was lifted. And, on her breast, there was an open wound." He rose slowly, painfully, inch by inch. He pointed with his right hand towards the floor. "Woman, my daughter has been slain."
- 67. "Really, Mr. Haines, you are always seeing the most dreadful things in dreams. If I were you I should take less supper." "It's not the supper. It's the spirit." "Well, in that case, I should take less of that." He frowned. "You know very well what I mean. I am not speaking of the spirit of alcohol, but of the spirit of the soul. Now one task is ended. Another is begun. I will be the avenger of blood. Mine will it be to execute judgment on him who has destroyed my daughter's body, having first of all destroyed her soul." "Jack Haines, what nonsense you do talk." "What do you mean, woman?" "My good man, do you think that you awe me by your persistence in calling me woman? I am a woman; but let me tell you in confidence that you strike me as only being part of a man!" "You jeer at me. You are always jeering. You know not what you say." "That is good--from you. Your style of conversation may have been suited to Strikehigh City, where they all were lunatics. But in London it is out of place." "London!--bah!" He threw out his arms, as if to put the idea of London clean behind him. "Precisely. Then if it's London!--bah! Why don't you return to Strikehigh City?"
- 68. "I will finish the work which I came to do. Then I will return." I had sat down on an easy-chair. I had crossed my legs, and was swinging my foot in the air. Old Haines stood glowering down at me, clenching his fists to hold his temper in. I looked him up and down. After all he was, every inch of him, a narrow-minded, cross-grained, hidebound New Englander. "You are more likely to see the inside of a prison if you don't take care. You know, they manage things differently upon this side. Jack Haines, let me speak to you a word in season--a candid word. It may do you good. You killed your wife; I do not mean legally, but you killed her all the same. A prolonged course of you would be sufficient to kill any wife." "Woman!" "You drove your daughter from you. So unwilling was she to have it known that she was connected with you, that she took her mother's name. She called herself Louise O'Donnel. Under that name she came to England. Conscious that, even underneath her mother's name, you might trace her out in England, she has changed her name again. Under that new name she is deliberately hiding herself away from you." "It is false." "It may be. It is but a surmise. But, as such, it is at least as much likely to be correct as yours." "She is dead." "You have not one jot or tittle of proof that she is anything of the kind." "I will have proof." He brought down his fist upon my pretty, fragile table with a crash. "I will have proof."
- 69. "Don't destroy the furniture." "Furniture!" He glared at the inoffensive table as if he would have liked to have chopped it into firewood. "You should not anger me. I say that I will have proof. And I will have proof of who it is has murdered her. And I will find him, though he hides himself in the uttermost corners of the earth. And when I have found him I will have a quittance." "What do you mean by that?" "Do you not know what I mean? Have you known me so short a time that you should need to ask?" "Do you mean that, if there is anything in these wild dreams of yours, you will kill the man who has killed your girl?" He raised his hands above his head in a sort of paroxysm. "Like a dog." "Then let me tell you that you are treading the road which leads to the gallows. They manage things in their own way upon this side. Killing's murder here. And the more excuse you think you have the tighter you're likely to fit the rope about your neck." "The hemp has not been sown which shall hang me on an English gallows. Do you think I am afraid?" He gave me the creeps. Although it surpassed my powers to adequately explain the thing, I knew that he had a trick of seeing things which had taken place before they became known to other people. I had had unpleasant experience of it more than once. One might begin by laughing at what he called his dreams and his visions, but, in the end, the laugh was apt to be upon the other side.
- 70. It was quite possible that his girl was dead. Young, pretty, simple, innocent, alone in a foreign land--what more possible? It was even possible that she had been done to death. Some one might think that no one would miss her. In that case, that some one might as well at once place himself in the hangman's hands as wait to interview Jack Haines. I was glad to be rid of him. He was not a cheerful companion at the best of times. But since he had got this bee in his bonnet he was more than I could stand. In the afternoon I went to see Kate Levett. Kate and I had been together in Pfeinmann's "King of the Castle Operatic Combination." We were friends all through. I fancy it was a case of "a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind"--after a fashion we were girls of a feather. When the Combination came to eternal grief at Strikehigh City, we went different ways. I stayed where I was, Kate went East. It was at Boston she married Ferdinand Levett. He was touring at that time through the States as acting manager for a famous English comedy company. It was a case of marriage at first sight as it were. It proved to be the best thing Kate had ever done in her life. Levett turned out a regular trump, and they hit it off together to a T. Now they were settled in England, and, although Kate had kept off the boards, they were doing uncommonly well in a modest sort of a way. When I turned up at their flat on the Thames Embankment, at the back of the Strand, Kate wanted me to stay and dine. So I stayed. After dinner we went to a theatre. Levett was at business--managing the Colosseum, so we went there. To finish up, we went back to supper at the flat. I had gone originally to Kate with the idea of gleaning a little information. Before I left I had got all that I wanted, and, perhaps, a little more. What I wished to find out was whether Kate knew anything about a Mr. Reginald Townsend. She and her husband knew something about all sorts and conditions of men, and it struck
- 71. me that my friend, the gentleman, was just the sort of man of whom one or the other of them might have heard. I did not want to seem too anxious. So I just slipped my question in casually, as if I was indifferent whether I received an answer to it or not. I kept it till after supper. Kate was at the piano strumming through all the latest things in comic songs. I was lolling in a rocker, joining in the chorus whenever there was a chorus. Ferdinand was taking his ease upon a couch. We were all as snug as we could be. Kate had been saying she knew somebody or other, I don't know who, when I struck in. "Between you, you two seem to know pretty nearly every one." "Those whom we don't know are not worth knowing." "Quite right, my dear!"--this from Ferdinand, on the couch. "Have you ever heard of a Mr. Townsend?" "What!--Reggie Townsend?" She spun round on the piano-stool like a catherine-wheel. "Reginald Townsend--that's it." She and her husband looked at each other--in that meaning sort of way. "Fred, have we ever heard of Reginald Townsend?" Ferdinand laughed. She held out her hands in front of her. "Why, my dear, there have been times and seasons when we've heard of little else but Reginald Townsend." "Perhaps your man is not my man. My man's tall."
- 72. "So's our man!" "And dark." "You couldn't paint our man blacker than he is." "And very--very swagger, don't you know." "Our man's the swaggerest man in town. It's impossible that there could be two Reginald Townsends. What do you know of him?" "Oh, I only met him once. But he rather struck me." "Take care that he doesn't strike you too much. He's not only the swaggerest, he's also the wickedest man in town. I could tell you tales of him which would shock your innocent ears. He's a terror, isn't he, Fred?" "He has rather liberal ideas on the subject of the whole duty of man." "I should rather think he has." And Kate went off at score. I could see from what she said that my friend the gentleman was all my fancy painted him. When she gave me an opening, I slipped another word in edgeways. "Is he received in respectable society?" "That depends, my dearest child, upon what you call respectable society. He's the boon companion of dukes, marquises, and earls, and that kind of thing. He visits the best houses and the best people. But I was raised at Salem, Mass., and our ideas of respectable society were perhaps our own. I haven't found that they obtain to any considerable extent round here." It was scandalously late when I left for home.
- 73. The same thing occupied my thoughts in the cab as on the night before--my friend the gentleman. Whatever could have made him do the thing which he had done? That is, if Kate's Reginald Townsend was mine--of which, by the way, I had no doubt. A man may be all that's bad; he may be worse than a murderer, but he takes particularly good care not, if he can help it, to be the thing itself. What could it be which, in the judgment of a man in his position, had compelled him to place himself within the shadow of the gallows? The problem occupied my mind. The man had been placed by nature in such a fortunate position. It appeared that he had so much to lose--and he had lost it all! What for? I wondered. What was it which had constrained him to choose between the devil and the deep sea--and then to choose the devil? As I thought of it, and how handsome he was, and how well bred, and how there was everything to please a woman's taste, and to gratify her eye, a wild notion germinated in my brain--which was watered by circumstances, and grew. I dismissed the cab at the end of my road. The night, though dark, was fine. The horse was tired. I had no objection to saving the creature's legs by walking the rest of the way. I did not suppose that, at that hour of the night, or, rather, of the morning, there would be any one about. In supposing that, however, I was wrong. The street was a pretty long one. When I got about half way along it I perceived that a cab was stopping at a house in front of me. As I reached the cab a man got out of it in a fashion which, to say the least of it, was rather sudden. He plunged on to the pavement, rather than stepped on to it. As his feet touched solid ground, he turned towards me. It was Tommy Tennant!
- 74. For a moment I was frightened half out of my wits. It was such an hour, he was without a hat, he looked wild and dishevelled, his appearance at such a place--within a stone's throw of my own house--at such a moment was so wholly unexpected, that it fairly took my breath away. But if his appearance startled me, my appearance seemed to have an even more startling effect upon him. He gave one glance at me and tumbled in a heap on to the pavement. The driver of the hansom leaned down towards me from his perch. "It's all right, miss; he's only been enjoying of hisself. The cold stones will cool 'is head." I said nothing; I hurried on.
- 75. CHAPTER XXIII.
- 76. MR. TOWNSEND COMES TO TEA. I have not lived in the world so long as I have done, and seen so much of it, without realising how small a world, after all, it really is, and how full it is of coincidence; but I do think that this beats all the coincidences of which I ever heard. To think that I should have pitched on the one street in London which Mr. Thomas Tennant has chosen for a residence! It seems that I have. I lay awake for an hour trying to account for his sudden appearance from that cab. At last I hit on something. I sat up in bed with quite a jump. "Can it be possible that he lives in this street?" Rest was out of the question till I had made sure. I got out of bed--it was nearer five than four--and I tiptoed my way downstairs. I routed out a directory, and I hunted up the street. Sure enough he did. There was his name, as large as life--"Thomas Tennant." He lived at No. 29. My house was blank--it had been empty at the time the directory had gone to press--but I had taken No. 39. "Well, this beats everything! To think that I have spent all this money, and come all this way, to plant myself five doors from Mr. Tennant!" He might be unwilling to have me for a neighbour, but I could assure him that I was equally unwilling to have him. I did not wish the first entry on the fresh leaf which I had turned to be a reminiscence, and especially a reminiscence of that particular friend.
- 77. I thought that was strange enough, but stranger things were yet to follow. What a queer little world this is! Recognising that it was no use addling my brains by puzzling out conundrums at that time of the morning, so soon as, by reading it over and over again in the directory, I had made quite sure that my eyes had not misled me, and that Tommy did reside five doors away, I toddled up to bed again. "There is nothing like leather," says the proverb. I say there is nothing like sleep. Give me plenty of sleep and I am good for anything. As I have always been blessed with a clear conscience--if there is a vacuum where the conscience ought to be it must be clear--and, what is equally to be desired, a good digestion, I have ever found sleep come at my bidding. Once I have my toes well down between the sheets, my head on the pillow, and the blankets well up to my ears, I snooze. I know I did just then. And I never dreamed; none of Jack Haines's lively visions came my way. I looked at my watch when I awoke. It was past eleven. I just turned over. I had a stretch. I believe that, when you wake in the morning, it does you good to have a stretch; it seems to help you to realise that there is a piece of you between your head and your heels. "What should I do?" "I'll have some tea." I had some tea. The girl brought me the letters and the papers. There was nothing in the letters, but in the papers there were ructions! At first I could not make out what it was all about. Directly I opened the Telegraph these were the words, in big, black letters, staring me in the face: "Murder on the Brighton Line." That was my friend, the gentleman! But at first, as I have said, the more I looked at it the more I couldn't make it out.
- 78. A platelayer--whatever that might be in connection with a railway line--going to his work in the morning had seen the body lying among the bushes--in that clump of bushes, I took it, where it had almost fallen on top of me. That was all right. Where I found the puzzle was in what directly followed. The girl had, of course, been murdered in the field, probably within a foot or two of where I had seen Townsend standing. The papers, or the people who inspired the papers, seemed to think that the murder had taken place in a train, and that then the body had been thrown on to the line. What could have made them think such a thing as that? As I read on the whole thing flashed upon me; it was another coincidence! It seemed that when the 8.40 train from Brighton had arrived at Victoria--the 8.40? Why, that was the train in which I had travelled with Tommy! My stars and bars!--it was discovered that the window in one of the carriages was shivered to atoms, that the carriage was marked with blood, and that it bore signs of having been the scene of a recent struggle. Jerusalem! what was coming next? I had to put down the paper and take another drink of tea. Nothing came next except what they called a "presumption," and if ever there was a piece of real presumption it was that same. The presumption, according to the papers, was that the railway carriage had been the scene of a hideous tragedy--of a frightful murder, of one of those recurrent crimes, which force us, from time to time, to recognise the dangers which, in England, at any rate, are associated with railway travelling. The identity of one of the dramatis personæ--as poor, dear Daniel used to say, "I'm a-quoting"--was unfortunately, but too evident. There was the woman who had been found lying among the laurels--I wonder if they were laurels?--with her face turned towards the skies. As a matter of fact, she had lain
- 79. face downwards. It was owing to that I had not seen her face. She was a silent but an eloquent witness--that was touching. The public demanded the prompt production of at least another of the dramatis personæ--"still a-quoting"--of the man--it would not, perhaps, display too much rashness to hazard the prediction that it would prove to be a man--who had hurled her there. If that did not point to Tommy, I should like to know to whom it pointed. I began to wonder. What had Tommy done when I had made my exit? Had he done nothing but twiddle his thumbs and stare? It would be characteristic of him if he had. He never did do the right thing at the right time if there was a wrong thing which could be done. The window might have been smashed by the banging of the door. I dare say that there had been signs of a struggle. I could not make out about the blood, but, perhaps, in the midst of his muddle, Tommy's nose had started bleeding. That was just the sort of thing his nose would do. It was quite conceivable, to one who knew him, that Tommy had toddled home without saying a word to any one about the lady who had tumbled out upon the line. If so---- If so, and I kept in the background, it was equally conceivable that, as a glorious climax to the muddle, because of that woman who had been found upon the line, Tommy might find himself in a very awkward fix. I had to take another drink of tea. I found what might turn out to be the top brick of the building while I was in the very act of drinking. Tommy himself might think that I was dead. I might have died. From a mere consideration of the odds point of view, I ought to have died. The miracle was that I wasn't dead. Tommy knew nothing about the woman who had been thrown on the top of me. He might think--he was capable of thinking
- 80. anything, but in the present instance it was natural that he should think--that the body which had been found was mine. If he did think so? But he had seen me the night before. The fact rather supported my theories than otherwise. He had glared at me as if I had been a ghost. The sight of me had struck him senseless. According to the cabman, he was drunk. Knowing what he knew, or what he thought he knew, he might very well suppose that I was a creature born of his delirium. It appeared to me that my cue, for the present, at any rate, was to keep sitting on the fence. I might still be even with Tommy, and that without having to move a finger of either hand. As for my friend, the gentleman--we should see. Oddly enough, I came across Mr. Reginald Townsend that very afternoon. I had been shopping--shopping was about all there was for me to do; after Strikehigh City I found life pretty dull West Kensington way, but then I had expected it to be dull. As I was strolling homewards, who should I see but Mr. Reginald Townsend. He was a sight for sore eyes--at least, he was a sight for mine. I like to see a man that is a man--handsome, well set up, and dressed as only the thoroughbred man knows how to dress. I am not so particular about a man's morals as about his manners, and his manners were all they ought to be. From his bearing, as he stood there, in front of me, you would have thought I was the very person he had wanted to see and had expected to see. I don't believe that he had supposed that I was within a hundred miles of him. I should not have been surprised to learn that, until my actual presence recalled it to him, he had entirely forgotten my existence. He was the sort of creature one finds amusing. After poor, dear Daniel one liked to feel that one was connected with such a picture of a man. One liked to feel that he was doing
- 81. credit to one's good taste as he was walking by one's side. I asked him to come and have a cup of tea. He was delighted, or he professed to be. When I remembered the occasion on which I had first encountered him it seemed to me that, in his heart of hearts--or whatever it was that passed for his heart of hearts--he must wish that I was at the bottom of the sea. He could not like being reminded of Three Bridges Junction. But one can never tell. From his manner he might have met me first of all in Queen Victoria's drawing-room, and none but pleasant memories might have been connected with the meeting. When we got indoors, who should I find in the drawing-room, sitting in solitary state, but Mr. Haines. The look he gave me! And the look he gave my friend, the gentleman! The old nuisance might have been my husband. Mr. Townsend appeared oblivious of there being anything peculiar in the old worry's demeanour, and, fortunately, the old worry did not stay long, considerably to my surprise. I was afraid that he would make a point of outstaying Mr. Townsend. But it was all the other way. After he had tried to freeze us for about five minutes he disappeared. "It's very odd," said Mr. Townsend, as soon as he was gone, "but I've either seen that gentleman before or somebody very like him. There's something in his face which positively haunts me." I shook my head. "Your imagination plays you a trick; it sometimes is like that. Mr. Haines has only been in England, for the first time in his life, for about a month. He was my late husband's partner. I fancy he is under the impression that I'm a little lonely." "That is a complaint which may easily be cured."
- 82. "The complaint of loneliness?" "You will be able to make as many friends as you desire." "It is not so easy for a woman to make friends as you may, perhaps, suppose--that is, of course, friends who are worth the making. You see, I have ambitions." "Ambitions?" "Yes, ambitions." He looked as if he would have liked to have asked me what I meant, only he was too civil. "In my position I think I am entitled to have ambitions." He still seemed puzzled. It did me good to look at him, to know that he was sitting there, to breathe in, as it were, the aroma of his refinement and his high breeding. I have always hungered for those two things in a man, and I have never had them. I could understand a woman's falling in love with my friend, the gentleman. For the first time in my life the idea of a woman being in love with a man became conceivable. All too soon--for me--he rose to go. "You will come again?" "I shall only be too happy." "Seriously, I mean it, Mr. Townsend." "And equally seriously I mean it too. Our acquaintance was made in an informal fashion, but I trust that, in course of time, I may be able to induce you to allow the informality to stand excused." "It will be your fault if you do not." When he went an appreciable something seemed to have departed with him, and that although his voice, his presence,
- 83. seemed still to linger in the air. I found myself touching the cup from which he had been drinking, even the chair on which he had been sitting, with quite a curious sensation. It was very odd. I believe that if I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and the right sort of man to whom to attach myself, and to become attached to him, I should have been one of the best women in the world. I agree with Becky Sharp, that for a woman five thousand a year is something; but it is nothing, after all, without a man. Love in a cottage is a lunatic absurdity. Love itself may be all stuff. But there is something which, for all I can tell, may be akin to love. If one never knows it, life can never have its fullest savour. Perhaps, after all, for every square peg there may be a square hole somewhere in the world. If, when it meets it--it might; one can conceive that such meetings are--it cannot claim, and obtain possession, it will be hard upon the peg. I had half a mind to tell the girl to put the cup which he had used aside and keep it free from the contamination of anybody else's lips until he came again. It would seem so silly. And yet---- Somebody came striding into the room. I turned. It was Jack Haines come back again. I almost dropped the cup, which I was holding, from my hand in my surprise. He was looking as black as black could be and his manners proved to be in full accord with his looks. "Who is that man?" "What man? What is the matter with you, Mr. Haines? I thought that you had gone." "You know what man I mean--he who has just left your house."
- 84. "I am at a loss to know how it concerns you. That gentleman is a friend of mine." "He is a thing of evil." "Mr. Haines!" "He is a shedder of innocent blood!" Jack Haines was becoming really charming. I had always known he could be pleasant. I was only just beginning to realise how pleasant he could be when he tried. "Mr. Haines, are you stark mad?" "Woman!" "Sit down." He was raging like a wild bull about the room. "Why should I sit down?" He threw up his hands. "I warn you against that man!" "Sit down!" I pointed to a chair. He sat down--I knew he would--and he looked as if he would like to eat me for forcing him to do it. "Now, Mr. Haines, if you feel that you have, to a certain extent, mastered your excitement, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me what is the meaning of your behaviour." "Nelly----" "To you, Mr. Haines, I am Mrs. Carruth." "Nelly, I say!"
- 85. In proof of his saying it, he stretched out towards me his clenched fist. "Even at Strikehigh City, I did not think you capable of insulting an unprotected woman." "I'm not insulting you." "If you think not, then your ideas of what an insult is must be your own." He rubbed his hands slowly up and down his knees. He stared at me hard. He shook his head. "It's very hard; it's very hard. Between you and the girl, I'm suffering. The lines have fallen on me, and they're cutting right into my vital places." He brought his hands down upon his knees with a sudden thwack. "I asked you first, before even Daniel said a word to you; I laid myself at your feet." "Was that my fault?" He looked at me in silence. Then he drew the back of his hand across his brow. "No; it was not your fault. I'm not blaming you. It was to be. Some men are made for women's feet to spurn." He paused. "Mrs. Carruth--since it is to be--I mean you well." "Some people's meaning is very badly expressed." "That's me. That's me all through--yes, right along. I ask you again, Who is that man?" "Are you referring to the gentleman who has just been kind enough to come and see me? That is Mr. Townsend."
- 86. "Then Mr. Townsend is a thing of evil--he is!" He held up his forefinger to me with a warning gesture. I did not interrupt. "When I came near him I knew him for what he was. I saw right through. He is a whited sepulchre. I saw the blood gleaming on his hand. I could not stay where he was. I went outside, and stood on the corner of the street until I saw him go. And when I came back, I found that his presence was still with the house." For my part I was glad that it was--if it was. "This sort of talk, coming from you, is very ridiculous. Has your own life been so pure that you should attempt to blacken another man's character merely because he is my friend?" "Pure? No; no man's life is pure. We are born to evil like the sparks fly upwards. But there's a difference." "Pray, in what does the difference consist? I presume you have not forgotten that at least a portion of your record is known to me?" He shook his head with dogged insistence. "There is a difference. You know there is a difference. There's bad ones and there's bad ones; and Mr. Townsend's the sort of creature that no woman ought to have any truck with. He'll bite you if you do." I got up from my chair. "I am sorry this should have happened, Mr. Haines. I fear I shall have to ask you to come and see me more seldom than you have been in the habit of doing. I hope Mr. Townsend will be a frequent visitor. It would be pleasant neither for you nor for me for you to have to meet him, in my house, when you hold the opinions of him which you say you do." He pressed his lips. He looked, if anything, sourer than ever.
- 87. "So Mr. Townsend is going to be a frequent visitor, is he? And how about Daniel?--and about me?" I laughed. "About you, Mr. Haines? I hope, Mr. Haines, that you will have a cup of tea." He had one. And did penance in having it. For he hated tea. And it was cold.
- 88. CHAPTER XXIV.
- 89. WHAT MRS. CARRUTH SAW. All sorts of things have happened--past all belief. Tommy Tennant has been arrested for murder--for the murder of me! Those wise police! And Reginald Townsend is coming to dine. But let us proceed in order. Each thing in its place, and one at a time. To take two or three things to begin with. The muddle they have made about what happened at Three Bridges is, really, in its way, quite marvellous. And it all pans out so clean--or seems to--to those who are looking on. No one is talking of anything else, and some of them talk of it to me. It only wants Mr. Townsend to favour me with a few remarks, and Tommy to add a postscript, to make me begin to think that I must be dreaming. They have found the porter who saw me into the train at Brighton, and he has declared that the corpse is me! What a sweet creature that porter man must be! And they have found the porter who saw Tommy get out of the empty, blood-stained carriage at Victoria. But how they have found Tommy himself I don't, as yet, altogether understand. I know they have not found me. I have had another sight of Tommy since the one on that first night--or, rather, so early in the morning. And, again, the manner of it was curious. I have been in rather a predicament since I realised that Tommy and I were neighbours. There has been a certain delicacy about the situation. I might tell tales of him--he is married! I have seen his
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