Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

 
The expansion of the virtual space and communication networks has changed Iranian society by providing a sphere for constructing personalized narratives of the social lifeworld. Physicians are a social class with a dubious presence in the virtual space, especially on X. The genealogy of medicine is known as an institution professionally entwined with ambiguity, authority, and authenticity. On the other hand, the modern world is characterized by deconsecrating and demystification. The current research is a netnography that relies on verstehen to understand the physicians’ twits on the X social medium in 2023. The four dominant conceptual patterns extracted in our thematic analysis include the emergence of the patient subject and the interpellation of the doctor, fearfulness about the emergence of traditional medicine that de-monopolizes health, the physician’s constructs from mafia to the martyr of health, and the unactualized alienation of the physician. Overall, the expansion of virtual social media has accelerated the physicians’ disempowerment and demystification as a result of which the sacred, ambiguous aura around the physician has encountered a call to the center, providing the reflexive narration of the physician, his lifeworld, and his problems.
Keywords: Reflexivity, Virtual Space, Physician’s Lifeworld, X (Twitter), Iranian Society.
 
 
Introduction
Today, social media and the virtual space compete with the physical world as one of the main spheres of modern life. Providing people with shared interests to gather around each other via the possibility of visual and written dialogue, the virtual space has introduced new experiences of constructing and narrating the self. Despite their widespread filtering, Telegram, Instagram, and X are among the most popular social media in Iran. Among other social classes in Iran, physicians have a distinct presence in X as an elite social medium.
As an expert institution, medicine is of high status, authenticity, authority, and income. In cosmologic worldviews, disease and medicine are connected to mythical and metaphysical beliefs as well as concepts such as destiny, magic, and enchantment, while in the theological worldview, they pertain to God’s wrath and atonement of sins, and in popular culture, they are connected to healing and miracle (Salehi, Zokai & Ekhlasi, 2019; Adam, Herzlich, 2006; Masoudnia, 2010; Svenaeus, 2021). In Islamic beliefs, the physician is revered as God’s hand that heals (Mohaghegh Damad, 2016; Sadr, 2011; Kiyani, 2012). With such a genealogy that rivals bordering professions such as Traditional medicine, medicine finds mysterious, latent characteristics that distinguish it from the non-physician others while even the emergence of modern medicine has not removed the sacred, metaphysical, mysterious aura that it is traditionally endowed with. Following widespread social changes, medicine and physicians have faced a call to the center and to self-narration in the communicative sphere that social media provides. Though the process is global in scope, it pertains to specific Iranian particularities that go back to the simultaneous paradoxical claim of traditional medicine to scientific and Islamic originality and the duality of the science/medicine vis-à-vis culture and politics in the Iranian polemic society.
Research Question(s)
In this research, we answer two questions: what is the physicians’ narrative of medicine and their lifeworld in the X (Twitter) social media? How is this narrative framed and in what conceptual pattern is it interpreted?
Literature Review
Following the deinstitutionalization and detraditionalization of all traditional and premodern institutions, and the limiting and threatening of the validity and authority of meaning and images constructed by them (Martuccelli, 2002; Martuccelli and de Singly, 2012), the physician and medicine as the legacy of both tradition and modernity that carry an aura of ambiguity, magic, and sanctity are no exempt from rethinking and reconstructing their images and narratives. The process of disempowering medicine found momentum with the initial attempts at understanding it as a science with material, earthly, and learned skills around the body (Salehi, 2019) that in the late 20th century faced uncertainties about the novel medicalization methods (Starr, 1982), critics of the pathogenicity of modern medicine (Illich, 1976 and 1975) and the capability of modern medicine in healing in contemporary society. With medicine’s authority under challenge, the subject of medicine was interpellated in the sense that the physician was summoned to give an account of himself as an opportunity open to the once impossible experience of realizing the individual self as the reflexive self (Martuccelli de Singly, 2012). With the physician called to the center to self-narrate, social media turned into a major context for the narration of the physician’s social lifeworld.
Materials and Methods
The theoretical approach of this research is verstehen, the field and object of the research are chosen using netnography (Kozinets, 2006), and classic thematic analysis is used for the analysis of findings. The field includes the twits of 50 Iranian general practitioners and professional doctors (male and female) in 2023 in the X social media that center on narrating their experiences and analyses relevant to medicine in Iran.
Results
The emergence of the patient and the interpellation of the physician (the increased medical knowledge of the patient, state’s intervention in providing cheap medical services, insurance agents and the evaluation of the physicians’ merits), fearfulness of the emergence of traditional discourse and the demonopolization of medicine (criticizing the university for legitimating traditional medicine, criticizing the state for defining policies in favor of Islamic medicine, delegitimizing the outdated methods of traditional medicine as the instance of fraud), the construction of the physician’s image in the two extremes of mafia and health martyr (the profit-making nature of medicine and its desanctifiication, self-interested medicine as against the historical and cultural genealogy) and the physician’s unactualized self (the experience of medicine in the cleavage between reality and the constructed image, boredom in the experience of medicine, the lack of context for practicing the learnt knowledge and the resulting alienation in the personal experience of physicians) are the dominant meaning patterns in the analysis of twits. 
Information Table of Doctors and their Pages in X Communication Network




Medical Verification/ Medical Number


Medical Expertise


Gender


X Account


Number






Followers - content of tweets


Neurosurgeon


Male
 


@kazemo_sarp


1




Followers - content of tweets


Surgeon


Male
 


@pedipayam


2




n.m.: 134915


General Physician
 


Male
 


@RLaripour


3




n.m.: 21194


Neurologist


Male
 


@drbabakzamani


4




n.m.: 22513


Vascular and Trauma Surgeon


Male
 


@MrZafarghandi


5




n.m.: 91913


Oncologist


Male
 


@OmidrezaieDr


6




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@k_md_29


7




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Female


@Drshahrzad80


8




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@drcitalopram


9




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@sheykholtabib


10




Followers - content of tweets


Orthopedist


Male
 


@Mahmouddream1


11




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@khodesheh


12




n.m.: 149053


General Physician
 


Male
 


@smmirkhani


13




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@Azimut1400


14




n.m.: 77415


General Physician
 


Male
 


@SMoattar


15




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Female


@thecatloverrr


16




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@MahdiR86388324


17




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Female


@negarmr96


18




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Male
 


@litt_lebowski


19




Followers - content of tweets


Knee Surgeon


Male
 


@rasulghm


20




Followers - content of tweets


Internist


Male
 


@Dr_reza_safaei


21




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician
 


Female


@faryadbseda


22




n.m.: 104691


Anesthesiologist


Male
 


@e_bastan


23




Followers - content of tweets


General Surgeon


Male
 


@RPORED4/ RPO


24




Followers - content of tweets


Neurologist


Male
 


@Naseh Mohi


25




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@rhamed32


26




Followers - content of tweets


Neurosurgeon


Male
 


@sm_sinuhe


27




Followers - content of tweets


Surgeon


Male
 


@Mahmouddeream1


28




n.m.: 31395


Neurologist


Male
 


@JavadAmeliMD


29




n.m.: 108208


Breast Surgeon


Male
 


@drhamidahmadi


30




Followers - content of tweets


Radiologist


Male
 


@legendoffall_


31




Followers - content of tweets


Cardiologist


Male
 


@rezaaa1986


32




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@NimaValiollah


33




n.m.: 129155


Anesthesiologist


Male
 


@Amirhos10096134


34




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@poetofdoctors


35




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@ehsan7j


36




n.m.: 140597


Internist


Male
 


@dfereydoonzadeh


37




Followers - content of tweets


Internist


Male
 


@cinnora60


38




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@CardiacTabib


39




Followers - content of tweets


Renal Surgeon


Male
 


@father64699029


40




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@abolfazl_hm


41




n.m.: 55904


Renal Surgeon


Male
 


@aliboskabady


42




Followers - content of tweets


Eye Surgeon


Male
 


@mojtaba81305517


43




Followers - content of tweets


Endocrinologist


Female


@Drabandokht


44




Followers - content of tweets


General Physician


Male
 


@sarmadnou


45




n.m.: 129153


Ophthalmologist


Male
 


@abdulrahimami11


46




Followers - content of tweets


Urologist


Male
 


@monsoeursepehr


47




n.m.: 118864


General Physician


Male
 


@mahdiarSaeedian


48




Followers - content of tweets


General Surgeon


Male
 


@usiriss


49




n.m.: 161611


General Physician


Female


@Kamranifaeze1


50




 
Conclusion
With the expansion of the virtual space, the presence of doctors for protecting their authority, constructing meaning, and maintaining change in social intersubjectivity is inevitable. This presence is a shift from a monologue communication, neglecting and not listening, to dialogue with oneself, threatening others, and limiting the power of medicine. In a metaphoric sense, the physicians were, in their cultural and historical genealogy, the inhabitants of impenetrable fortresses whose doors were closed to outsiders. The hegemony of medicine entwined with myth, magic, and metaphysical matter had made the physician needless to speak out himself. With the advent of social changes and the demystification and desanctification of medicine and the physician, however, the foundations of the fortress trembled, and the physician was summoned to the center. He should have come down from his castle to an equal footing with others to narrate his medical lifeworld and himself. The expansion of the virtual space has led to the formation of the network society which is an accessible, non-hierarchical, intimate, and equal space against the traditional society. Talking of himself in the virtual space and criticizing medicine in the intersubjectivity of Iranian society, the physician attempts to preserve his authority while at the same time presenting a more real image of himself to give a diverse, varied image of medicine that dismantles the traditional homogenized image. 
 

Keywords

Main Subjects

 

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استناد به این مقاله: خزائی، طاهره. (1402). هبوط از قلعه سلطانی؛ فهم زیست جهان پزشکی در توئیتر (ایکس)، فصلنامه علوم اجتماعی، 30(101)، 75-123.   DOI: 10.22054/qjss.2024.77941.2748
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