In an earlier blog post, I talked about the problem of police oversight and proposed a new technology to help solve it. I argued that the fundamental problem was one of incentive: police have very little incentive to document their own wrongdoing. The idea behind my proposed technology was to empower the people, who do have an incentive to document police wrongdoing. Now on the topic of collaborative technology that seeks to improve government, I am reminded of why I thought it would be such a good idea.

Just to review, I proposed a mobile app called “CopWatch” that citizens could use to document and evaluate their interactions with the police. GPS data would also be recorded so that the interactions could be mapped. Pictures or video could be attached to a report.

CopWatch falls beautifully into Benkler’s theory of the networked public sphere. As a mobile app, it is inherently designed to take advantage of the proliferation of creative capital inherent in the spread of mobile smartphones. The resulting maps would not be the work of a single individual, but the result of thousands of individual people creating content without direct compensation because of a common goal.

It was designed around the idea that data is valuable, especially public data. The argument CopWatch implicitly presents is that communities can use large amounts of user-generated data to achieve the kind of oversight that government consistently fails to accomplish. This data would not only be made publically available, but also mapped (literally) in a way designed to be meaningful to the average person rather than a statistician. This data would empower citizens to create even more information about underlying trends in policing, thus supporting the secondary generation of content as well.

It is also designed around the value of increased autonomy, which Benkler also presents as an important tenant of the networked public sphere. Without this technology, people have very few tools available to them for sharing information about their police encounters with the community. Social media may represent an easily accessible avenue, but anything posted there will likely be buried in a sea of new content within minutes. Fairly privileged citizens with easy access to legal help may have more direct mechanisms available for dealing with police encounters, but traditionally, disadvantaged citizens have had no way to do the same. CopWatch would enhance their autonomy by allowing them to individually decide to address the problem of negligent policing.

But a slight expansion of my original idea would make CopWatch an even more valuable addition to the networked public sphere.

First, a bot could trawl the #copwatch tag on Twitter and Facebook for report information spread through these means. This would make the service even more open by allowing people without the app or even without smartphones to participate, increasing the amount of data and proving those people with the same expanded autonomy.

Second, the CopWatch website could also host a discussion board about policing generally. This would empower individuals to collaboratively analyze the data to draw more meaningful conclusions. This would also turn users into curators, potentially increasing the value of the content.

As expanded, I think CopWatch would be a powerful force in the networked public sphere by creating both primary and secondary content and empowering citizens to make a difference—aspiring app developers take note.

SeeClickFix position themselves as a platform that facilitates communication between government and citizens. Their website states that “SeeClickFix is a communications platform for citizens to report non-emergency issues, and governments to track, manage, and reply–ultimately making communities better through transparency, collaboration, and cooperation.”

Looking at its functionality, the website incorporates elements of gamification by giving points to people for reporting, commenting and voting on issues, and displays point totals next to profile names in the “Neighbors” section. For positive reinforcement it assigns a whimsical “rank” based on point totals, such as “Digital Superhero,” “Municipal Avenger,” and “Civic Crusader.”

Signing up for the website reveals that user accounts are essentially anonymous – they only require an email address and a made up screen name. New users are also prompted for their nearest street intersection, but can click anywhere on a map. While anonymity is an effective method of “bracketing” identities and giving everyone an equal voice, it also makes it harder to regulate abusive behavior that could undermine the civility and effectiveness of the platform. Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas also raises questions about whether bracketing identity is a good thing by arguing for the importance of understanding someone’s lived experience to redress historical imbalances in power and communication flows.

In The Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler describes of how the networked public sphere differs from the public sphere that was made possible by commercial mass media. He states that the qualitative change “is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals in society and the culture of participation they can adopt” (2). To apply this to SeeClickFix we would have to ask whether the platform encourages or allows more people to speak about community issues. On one level the website is essentially no different than calling up your local public works or transportation department. It does not create a new area of citizen/government interaction, it just moves an existing path of communication online.

Because user accounts can be anonymous, perhaps SeeClickFix is indeed a place where more people feel comfortable participating in the public sphere. Using the phone to call a city department may seem outmoded or even intimidating to some people, and caller ID may make anonymous calls impossible. Does this make the website successful in opening up the public sphere? One big constraint is how cities respond to problems. Boston and Cambridge are a good example. Boston appears to monitor the site daily and creates problem tickets in their own computer database for each problem. They report updates on the problem in the comments section. The City of Cambridge appears to occasionally lurk on the site. Occasionally they leave a comment, but it is unclear whether the website is an effective and consistent way to communicate with city employees.

Whether the website is an example of Tim O’Reilly’s “government 2.0” is therefore partly dependent on how specific governments treat the platform. Boston seems to monitor SeeClickFix constantly, so it probably does create an inclusive communication channel  to solve collective problems, especially with their policy of posting service request ID numbers and updating issues when they are resolved. But this doesn’t happen when a city like Cambridge seems to mostly ignore it or occasionally lurk.

But SeeClickFix doesn’t actually change the delivery model of government services. Government isn’t “a convener and an enabler” with this website. Government is not managing a marketplace, or using open standards, or building a simple system, or enabling data mining or experimentation. SeeClickFix takes the simple task of reporting a problem to your city and moves it online. This probably leverages the networked public sphere to create a more transparent and participatory process, but it doesn’t represent a radical rethinking of government, as O’Reilly urges us to do.

Some people used SeeClickFix to ask the community for help digging cars out of the snow. They generally got responses and people posted updates when the the problem was fixed. This type of ad hoc community help isn’t a use case the website designers probably planned for, but it does demonstrate the potential upside of creating a website for people who are interested enough in their community to report problems, and seems to be a real world instance of the “digital superheros” the site wants us to aspire to be.

One of the flaws that we are having in Mexico is the lack of public information, not just open data, but also whist-blower information. Form the open data side there has been a movement from the civil society they started with Codeando México and Datamx.io, the platform gain attention from different governments and eventually the federal government launched a dedicated site for open data.

But on the side of investigative journalism and government accountability there hasn’t been to much in Mexico, the IFAI (Institute for Information Access and Data Protection) is the the government agency responsible for the Government transparency, but even with some regulations the access to public information is restricted some times even for non critical information such as public transportation or infrastructure contracts. Also with the violence and the “war on drugs” that is going on in the country to share information has become -in some matters- quite dangerous.

With that in mind some NGO’s and news websites launch MexicoLeaks, a platform for whistleblowing, where people could go online and anonymously send information to one or various NGO’s or websites, then the journalists and the people working with the NGO’s could publish the information. The goal of the platform as they describe it is: “that the impact of the disclosures is maximised, in a media level as well as in a civil an legal one”.

The use of technology in this kind of projects could help to get more citizens to participate with anonymous information, not just information about government, but also for some other issues like private companies. At the end its about making public information that could help the citizens to get a better place.

In a networked public sphere having the possibility to access information could help to get the citizens more engaged in public debates that other wise wouldn’t exist. Bringing new technologies to empower and at the same time protect the citizens is part of the construction of an active society that engages in public matters.

A common complaint about the U.S. government is that lawmakers, cooped up in their offices in Washington, D.C., are ignorant of many of the most pressing issues facing the American people. They spend hours debating bills that don’t address fundamental problems, and there is no way for citizens to collectively inform them that they are off track.

As more and more people began to draw attention to the potential of the Internet to connect citizens and lawmakers and rectify this problem, the federal government decided to take action. The White House created a system called We the People that allows citizens to submit petitions that they want lawmakers to acknowledge and act upon. If a petition receives enough signatures (100,000 now, formerly 25,000 and 5,000), the White House promises to at the very least write a response to it, and where possible take further action.

We the People certainly has some good qualities. It has a nice user interface that surfaces petitions that have recently cleared 150 signatures – the minimum required for them to be publicly visible – enabling such new petitions to gain further traction; allows users to search over the text of petitions or filter them by popularity or issue; facilitates easy creation of new petitions; and supports easy sharing of petitions on Twitter or Facebook. In fact, the source code of the website is on GitHub and users can submit suggested changes to the code. From the perspective of Benkler’s “Networked Public Sphere,” the system successfully takes advantage of the Web to unite people from across the country behind common issues. My only criticism on this front is that it doesn’t have facilities for users to comment on and discuss the texts of petitions so that they can be improved, which would make the interactions among participants richer than they are now, since interactions now mostly involve agreement by signing.

The main criticisms of We the People revolve around the responsiveness of the government to petitions that have cleared the signature threshold. In most cases the White House provides a few words affirming its general commitment to the principles outlined in the petition, without any concrete details or plans of action. For example, one petition requested that during his visit to India President Obama ask Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi why the Indian constitution does not recognize Sikhs. It received a response that praised Obama for “underscoring that India’s success depended on the nation not being splintered along the lines of religious faith” and made no mention of Sikhs. It seems to me that these frequent non-responses have only led to more and more extreme petitions (e.g. “begin a Justice Department investigation of Congressman Boehner for illegal activities under the Logan Act”), creating an growing divide between the requests in the petitions and what the government is willing to do.

One other criticism of the system is that since Web literacy is not yet universal in America, the petitions reflect the needs and interests of a subset of the American people. In particular, niche issues that are relevant to those in the tech community are far more likely to clear the signature threshold than, say, issues relevant to poor youth. For example, one petition requested the government to fire Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. District Attorney who prosecuted hacktivist Aaron Swartz for his downloading of large volumes of copyrighted content on MIT’s network and who some say caused his subsequent suicide. It received over 60,000 signatures and got a response from the government, even though Aaron Swartz was known primarily among those in the tech community. The only major success story stemming from a We the People petition – the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, which legalized cell phone unlocking – is also fittingly in the realm of technology.

On the whole, I have mixed opinions about We the People but think it is at least a step in the right direction in terms of greater government engagement with the American people through the Web.

Blog response to “Find and describe an example of a “collaborative technology” designed to improve a flaw in government…, or, is “collaborative” always be the solution?

After I received the topic, I found that it is really hard to find a “collaborative” solution to address a governmental law. Surely there are tons of citizen data project came out from numerous hackathons here and there, and the Kenyan platform Ushahidi has really made many achievements in filling the blank left over by the government in disaster relief domain; but are they really solving the problems? And how much is collaboration contributing in solving the problem?

In hackathons, data citizens gathered is mostly helpful for city planners; in the Ushahidi platform, it is the disaster relief supporting organizations (NGOs) really utilizing the generated data and delivering help. They are far from the networked public sphere ideal in which citizens collaboratively filter information and set priorities.

Another good example is the “I Paid a Bribe” website in India. citizens can report where or when they paid a bribe to an official, in hope of reducing corruption in India. It has comprehensive visualizations of corruption status, and you can also report “I did not pay a bribe” or “I saw an honest officer”. I’m not sure how much they are moving out of “generating awareness” comfort zone now, but when similar websites appeared in China, the first who jumps out to stop them is the anti-corruption bureau – it said these websites alerted those corrupted officials and ruined the effort of covert agents collecting evidence for corruption. After all, you need evidence (not blog posts) in the court to take down corrupted officials.

(Screenshot: India’s corruption monitor)

I am not saying the effort of these projects is meaningless, but I argue that we should not value these projects solely in terms of values such as “generatively, openness, the importance of data, and individual liberty”. These values are valued much in western world, and they do exist in some successful projects; but it does not mean that citizen data projects that are not generative, open, and promoting individual liberty cannot make an impact. On the contrary, it is entirely OK if the data is owned by somebody else other than citizens, no matter it is government, NGO, or specialist group. Back to the examples, city planning data help city planners covering their blind points; disaster information in Ushahidi helps NGOs a lot in distributing relief resources. If president Modi or some other groups in India want to track down corruption, what harm could it be if data in “I paid a bribe” is not open to everybody? Being absorbed in “openness” itself is a closed mind.

However, I totally agree with Benkler that “different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform”. I will give another Chinese example. The Pollution Map is an app designed by a environmental organization, it shows which company is polluting more then allowed by the law, and when did they promise to address their problems. What happens if they don’t change? Well, the app as another function – it display the brands having green supply chains. Consumers can refuse to buy the products who do not guarantee they are made with greenness in mind. After it is reported by independence investigative report (Chai Jing), the downloads surges and their servers soon experienced an overload. In this example, users of the man cannot contribute any information, but they can act according to the data neatly presented by the user interface – the data itself is not democratic, but the civil action is.

(Screenshot: the pollution map)

At last, open data is a solution, but not everything needs to be open. A white dog is adorable, but it is not necessary to have white paws, white nails, white eyeballs, and a white bark.

Change.org was launched in February of 2007. Since then it has taken great care to balance delicately its existence as a for-profit organization and its role as a platform for collective action. The flaw in government that it seeks to correct is that of responsiveness and consumer representation. Its way of doing this is simple. Individuals or users start their own petitions on the website; their target is contacted through email to notify them that such a petition has been created. Collecting signatures is a matter of convincing those on social media networks to fulfill an act of slacktivism in its purest form: clicking a button to indicate that they’ve signed the petition, and if they feel particularly moved by the cause, having them write a short comment about why. So far this method has proved remarkably successful through a matter of sheer numbers. Perhaps the most famous example is the petition that was started by a lawyer representing the parents of Tayvon Martin calling for the prosecution of his killer, George Zimmerman. Created just as the story was gaining coverage by national sources of traditional media, it eventually collected over 2 million signatures, many of which were added after the goal – the prosecution of George Zimmerman in a court of law – had been reached. Other successes have to do with consumers appealing corporations to change certain practices; the threat of mass boycott or public ire offered by hundreds of thousands of signatures is often enough to have companies considering other options.

But as effective as Change.org is as a tool for applying pressure to those in power, it rests uneasily with Benkler’s idea of the networked public sphere. The freedom from commercial interests he alludes to isn’t entirely present. Although it costs nothing for individual users to create petitions on the site, the company subsists on revenue from charging for the promotion of petitions and the hosting of petitions for non-profit organizations. The latter makes its business model more akin to those of companies that exchange user data for money; the tacit understanding is that while signing the petitions paid for by one of these non-profits, you will enter your email and therefore be added to the organization’s mailing list. And though the model under which it operates certainly relies on a massive number of users to generate excitement, momentum, and support for its petitions, it is with a process that can hardly be considered collaborative. Most users rarely participate outside of supplying signatures and possibly sharing links on social networks – movements related to the petition and any follow-up actions are coordinated and conducted almost entirely by those who organized the petition in the first place. This low investment of resources requested of the average participant is arguable what makes Change.org efficient – it unites a vast number of minor indications of support into something formidable. It, however, comes at the cost of true, meaningful interaction with public issues. There is nothing very introspective about clicking a button or sharing a link on a cause with which you are already aligned. Change.org might be a valuable tool to direct collective action, but it must not be mistaken for a public sphere or a platform engendering true, substantial participation.

[idea in progress]

How can we do a strong online public sphere? How can we create a space to citizens discuss with others and to influence the police making process, both parliamentary and governmental? This is a really important and hard question. Probably there is no an effective prescription for all contexts. Actually, since the first steps of the internet, scholars and activists are trying to figure out how to use this technology to enhance the democratic experience.

On the web landscape, citizens, civil organizations, companies and governments have invested resources in projects to strengthen the public sphere. It’s true that each actor has a specific understanding about the concept of public sphere, its problems and possible solutions. However, I am going to draw a model to try to explain the functions of civic media in the public sphere.

First of all, I am going to describe how, after read Junger Habermas and Nancy Fraser, I understand these three elements: society, public sphere and state. Society is basically composed of all citizens, its activities and interests. The members of society – citizens – shape the public sphere when they are engaged in public discussions. So, the public sphere is different from society because its purposes and moment-space, but it is composed with people who live inside the society. Finally, the state is basically composted by government, legislative and the legal system. I know that these three elements are really complex and it is not as simple as showed in the picture, but it is just an exercise to help us think about the function of civic media in the public sphere.

As you can see in the picture, I think it is possible to identify at least three types of civic media functions in the public sphere landscape. First, the red vector indicates the relationship between society and public sphere. Citizens can create civic media to strengthen the public sphere and, vice versa, the public sphere – actually, citizens organized as public sphere – can work to motivate others to engage in the public sphere. In my opinion, the purpose of the both red vectors (society-public sphere or public sphere-society) are the same: support the citizenship participation in the public sphere.

In fact, there is a lot of software and platform to support citizens interact with others about public issues. These can be appropriated by users to public debate (like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube) or it can be drawn already to host the public debate (DemocracyOS, Participa.br [Brazil]). In common, the goal is to facilitate the communication flow between citizens. These type of civic media wants improve the variety of information available inside the public sphere and support public discussion. The democratic relevance of these projects comes from the capacity to support a rational, open and equalitarian discussion between citizens.

Second, the green vector indicates the relationship between public sphere and state, specifically the civic media created by citizens to push the government toward citizen’s interests. This relationship is a big challenge, because public sphere and the state agencies are circumstantially away. In modern democracies, citizens can chose the most important officials inside the state, but there is few opportunities to address questions. As described by Habermas, the public sphere challenge is to mediate citizenship interests and state agencies.

To support the public sphere in its pressure job the agencies and officials inside the state, a large number of civic media has been created. As an example, we can cite Avaaz.org, but also some cases of citizen journalism and online activism that want attention and action from state agencies. At the same time, there is some initiatives created by govern to receive inputs from citizens (like We the People, Regulations.org). The democratic value of these initiatives comes from the impact in the public policies. I don’t mean that all demands from public sphere have to become policies, but that should exist channel and mechanisms to hearing (and to rationalize) what people think about public issues. This connection recognize the public sphere importance, namely to produce the public opinion and address to administrative power.

Third, the blue vector indicates the communicative flow from state to public sphere, namely initiatives created by state to inform citizens. Specially, in the last years, there is a lot of initiatives to keep citizens better informed about public resources and what the government are doing. Someone says that this a good way to improve citizen control over government (accountability, transparency) and, thus, increase the public confidence, but this is a controversial topic as we saw in the third week of this class. As an example, we can cite initiatives to open data (Data.gov).

***

Finally, I recognize that this first model is not enough accurate. It is mandatory to think, from the perspective of the real practice, how we can refine the understanding of relations between civic media and public sphere.

Ahh the irony. Conversations about how Habermas’ notion of ‘The Public Sphere’ comes into play in the digital age… on a digital platform where communities can come together to discuss issues like whether or not digital platforms contribute to the notion of ‘The Public Sphere’.

Quora, although mentioned already in a previous blog post, seems to me like a great choice for a digital public sphere that does a good job in the categories of openness, rational discussion, civility, and equality. Where it seems to be lacking though is representativeness and, by extension, impact.

Quora, for those who may not be aware, is a simple question and answer platform launched in 2010. While not the first of its kind in platform, it seems to me that it is a first of its kind in community on top of such a platform. Quora is one of the few digital communities that I have been on that has almost always impressed me with the quality of discussion (to be fair, I have not actively participated in many digital communities). The average responses I have seen are essay-length and are usually deeply considered and rationally discussed. I have also yet to see a flame war, which is surprisingly impressive. The community also allows anyone who has a Facebook or Google account to answer, causing it to score highly in the openness category.

Yet, the reasons why Quora scores so highly in the above categories are also the reasons I think it will continue to score poorly in the representativeness category. Part of Quora’s initial success stems from incredibly high quality responses from well-known and well-respected people and the tone that those responses set within the initial community. Active initial users of the platform include Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Fred Wilson, Jimmy Wales and Ashton Kutcher. What made Quora different from Yahoo Answers were the people who were doing the answering and the quality of answers that stems from having those people as users.

Yet, if we take a step back and look at the primary communities represented on Quora, they in no way reflect the primary communities in the world. As shown in the map below, almost 70% of Quora’s user base stems from the United States and India, with little representation in large parts of the world. Outside of geography, the primary users of Quora extended out of the initial user base – Silicon Valley. Therefore, most users tend to be techies by the result of network effects. And, while the tech community seems to value equality in theory, in practice it is one of the least representative communities out there. Techies (at least in the US) are overwhelmingly White and Asian males from similar backgrounds and education levels [1] and Quora’s user base seems to extend from that.

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quora.com

Could representation on Quora change? Of course it could, but it may be unlikely and if it did happen it would likely change important aspects of the community. For example, the long-form intellectual style of Quora seems like it creates a selection bias on the education level of Quora’s user base. If Quora made an effort to branch out beyond the well-educated it would likely lose its primary distinguishing factor from other question and answer sites: high-quality intellectual content written by experts. It seems that what has made Quora successful is actually the same thing as what prevents it from being representative.

Because Quora is more of a niche community than a representative one, it scores poorly in the impact category as well. I chose to evaluate Quora’s impact on the public sphere in terms of the social capital it creates. Through such a lens, it is apparent that Quora is great at creating bonding social capital between experts in different fields but it fails miserably in creating bridging social capital. Yet bridging social capital, in my mind at least, is perhaps the most impactful thing that a digital community could create. The digital age is so unique because we have the technology to communicate with anyone from any background at any time so long as they have some access to a network. Digital platforms that take advantage of this are truly unlike anything we have seen before in civilization. Yet, those that don’t seem to resemble digital versions of the social groups and clubs that have existed in society long before the internet. While this doesn’t make platforms like Quora bad, it certainly reduces their impact.

In short, Quora is a great community of experts who civilly and rationally discuss intellectually engaging topics. But, the feature that enables Quora to have such positive traits also creates a relatively homogeneous community with respect to the greater society, weakening the impact of Quora as a platform.

References:

As an anxious person with a thrill for hypochondria, I sometimes use the internet as a way of diagnosing myself with various ailments. But I’m not alone. According to the latest Pew Research Center Health Fact Sheet, 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year (this was in 2012) and 35% of U.S. adults say that at one time or another they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have.

Within the 35% of people who use the internet to diagnose themselves, this group tends to use it more:

• women
• younger people
• white adults
• those who live in a household incomes earning $75,000 or more
• college degree or advanced degree

I fit the demographic almost perfectly. I usually start diagnosing myself by searching google.

But then this happens. As you see, 86,800,000 results pop up in .48 seconds (side note, as I’m writing this, all of a sudden my head seems to hurt). More than 87 million explanations. So how do you decide which sites to trust? I’m probably not alone in clicking the first few websites. But not so much because I trust them as much as it’s convenient. One website that always pops up in the first few searches is WebMD, a website specializing in health information.

According to the WebMD website, the organization “fulfills the promise of health information on the Internet. We provide credible information, supportive communities, and in-depth reference material about health subjects that matter to you. We are a source for original and timely health information as well as material from well known content providers.” Which include:

WebMD provides a lot of information but I’m going to focus on diagnosing symptoms by exploring WebMD’s Symptom Checker. But first, a disclosure. I don’t really use WebMD to check symptoms. It’s more a habit of irrational anxiety. However, more than half of the people who use the internet to look up health information talk to their doctor about what they find.

Symptom Checker:

I start by entering my gender and age. What’s important to note is that age and gender do play a part in the likelihood of certain diseases. It’s also a great way for WebMD to gain valuable analytics about the people who are using their website. What I  immediately notice on this page is the advertisement for Tufts Medical Center. I’m pretty sure I see Tufts because WebMD somehow knows my location. It’s a good strategy for both WebMD and Tufts. First for WebMD, Tufts provides some credibility and trust to the site. If Tufts is advertising, the site must be legit! And for Tufts, it’s about as targeted an advertisement strategy as you can have. People who are looking for medical symptoms are seeing your advertismenet. This bridges both the public sphere of internet knowledge with the private sphere of hospitals.

In the symptom checker you must chose a part of the body that is bothering you. I clicked the scalp region. In the drop down menu of symptoms, I clicked on anxiety.

Quite a few possible conditions populated. If you click on the question mark you can see that WebMD provides a caveat that the symptom checker should not replace a medical professional. However the question mark is a small button. How many people are they hoping click on it?

The possible conditions for a headache relating to anxiety are ranked based on probability The most common conditions show up on top. This is very important. The list would have a different effect if there was no ranking or order.  Organizing information is power.

The most common list is:

Least common

The problem with anxiety is that you are not usually being rational. Thyroid storm sounds a lot more scary and therefore attractive than excessive caffeine use. Mad cow disease doesn’t sound plausible unless you had a hamburger the night before. The fact is, that WebMD may not solve the issue of hypochondriac anxiety, but it can make it better by providing ranking systems, more explanation, and encourage talking to a health care provider.

Before the internet, most people relied on their doctor or social network like friends and family for health related information and support. And to this day, even with the internet, for major medical issues, people still rely on their doctor and social networks. This means that the private health sphere is still dominant. However, the medical profession is not the same. Doctors don’t have as much control over their patients. And patients are informing themselves.

A place like WebMD is where the public and private sphere coexist. The public look for answers, and some medical professionals participate with their expertise. At this point, the symptom checker can’t replace doctors, but what impact tools like this will have in the future, still needs to be seen.