Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Tahereh Khazaei

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

Abstract

The expansion of the virtual world has made widespread changes to the Iranian society by providing a sphere for the construction of personalized narratives of the social lifeworld. Physicians are a social class with a dubious presence in the virtual world, especially in X as an elite media. The genealogy of medicine is known with professionality entwined with ambiguity, authority and authenticity. This is while, the modern world is characterized with deconsecrating and demystification. The current research is a netnography of the physicians’ twits in the X social media in 2023. The four dominant conceptual patterns extracted in our thematic analysis include: the emergence of the patient subject and the impeachment of the doctor, the emergence of a traditional discourse that de-monopolizes health, the physician’s constructs from mafia to the martyr of health, and the unactualized self/self-alienation of the physician. The findings show that with the expansion of virtual social media, the sacred, ambiguous aura around the physician is cleared. Also, as a result of the physicians’ disempowerment and demystification, the Iranian physician faces a call to the center and self-narration as part of a reflexive procedure in which she narrates herself and her lifeworld as a physician.

Keywords

• "reflexivity"
• "physician’s lifeworld"
• "physician"
• "Netnography"
• " X (Twitter)"
• "Iranian society"

Main Subjects

• Sociology