Pro-Ana Communities

This week, our class took Online Collaborations out of our usual context. We explored Pro-Ana communities. These communities were created through the shared identification of many of the authors and viewers. Lili Steffen talked about these communities, what they stand for, how they interact with each other, and what the consequences are like.

Source: theproanalifestyleforever.wordpress.com/

One aspect of the lecture that really stood out to me was that there is a lot of social and political controversy regarding this community, since these bogs/sites can either trigger or alleviate the disease. In other words, people that have recognized their eating disorder as a problem can go online and gain support and catharsis simply by reading comments, looking at pictures, articles by people that have overcome the disease, etc. An important advantage to this is that it's all in the privacy of their own home, where they do not feel judgement or a certain stigma. On the other hand, the sites can have the completely opposite effect. People emphasize that these disorders are a lifestyle, a choice and not a disorder. With this, many post images promoting that physique and those behaviors. Since they see that the Pro-Ana community is huge and has users all over the world, they think that it is acceptable and can lead them to expanding their eating disorders even more. Someone that may have been concerned about their health, may look at the online communities and leave the computer feeling feeling more supportive of their "lifestyle."

Now, with Pro-Ana online communities spreading throughout sites like Tumblr, these online platforms have began to intersect worrisome behaviors. For instance, if a user searches for "suicide" or "anorexia," Tumblr responds with the image shown below prior to showing search results. With these interventions, social networks can serve as a support and impede suicides or health preventive behaviors by looking at people's searches and browsing.

Source: safeandsoundsocial

A concept I kept thinking about during her talk was Communities of Practice. To refresh some memories, those are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an on going basis. Now by definition, this would be more like soccer moms discussing the school board during their children's' soccer game. But in a way, Pro-Ana communities also cultivate COP in the way in which they share their passion through blogs and support each other that way. Most of them may not know each other personally or even what they look like, but as Lili said, that is often better, since they are not worried about their mental disease being disclosed to their friends and families.