Illness online Popular, tagged, and ranked bodies

The dissertation employs digital methods to examine how people use social media to speak about their illnesses, the types of stories they tell, and what telling these stories affords them. The results are three types of social media illness stories. The first type, the stories of popular bodies, are the stories of patients who vlog on YouTube and practice micro-celebrity. Vlogging affords them a sense of agency over their life stories and becomes a lifeline to the world. Simultaneously, the public nature of the communication makes vloggers subject to scrutiny by viewers who question the value and sincerity of their online activities. Responding to these accusations and managing a concerned public are, too, part of vlogging while sick. The second type, the stories of tagged bodies, are stories about people who suffer from disenfranchised conditions and use Instagram to share (and tag) their personal experiences. The goals of this public storytelling are to fight stigmas and create communities. The last type is the stories of ranked bodies. These are the stories of sick people in financial distress who use crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe to raise funds to pay for medical treatment. GoFundMe offers one-sided advice to market personal illness stories as cure-oriented and in a language evocative of survivorship, thus excluding conditions that fall outside this spectrum. Overall, the dissertation argues that social media visibility and the socio-technical conditions of popularity, tagging, and being ranked both enhance but also diminish the political potential of illness storytelling.