Impatient on the Net: Exploring the Genres of Internet Use for Health

Abstract

The growing appetite of Canadians for health information online has been reported in a series of studies showing that the number of households using the internet for that purpose had grown by 262 per cent between 1998 and 2002 (Earl, 2004; Hirji, 2004; Sanders, 2008). Indeed, according to Statistics Canada (2008), of the estimated 15 million Canadians who used the internet from home in 2005, 58 per cent had, at some point, searched online for health information. Given the prevalence of health as an internet search topic, in this chapter I examine the phenomenon at the level of everyday life, to investigate and classify the diverse situations and motives reflected in the concrete instances in which users make decisions about what kind of health information is important for them and instruct their search engines accordingly.