A social constructionist approach to the study of information use as discursive action
ISIC '96 Proceedings of an international conference on Information seeking in context
Information encountering: a conceptual framework for accidental information discovery
ISIC '96 Proceedings of an international conference on Information seeking in context
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Small worlds: normative behavior in virtual communities and feminist bookselling
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology - Part I: Information seeking research
Mobile Social Networking: An Information Grounds Perspective
HICSS '08 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Context in information behavior research
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
As individuals' access to the Internet has grown, so has the diversity of lifestyles and interests represented on the web. On the Internet, members of any subculture can communicate and share information anonymously and directly on a variety of platforms. Although researchers from many disciplinary backgrounds have devoted considerable attention to the nature of information practices in online communities, there has been little investigation into the information practices of adherents to lifestyles that could be considered perilous or harmful. The members of such a group, referred to as Pro-Anorexia, or Pro-Ana, characterize themselves as believing that Anorexia is not a disease, but a lifestyle choice. This paper presents findings from a textual analysis of posts and comments on three Pro-Anorexia (Pro-Ana) weblogs. Using a Grounded Theory approach, we found that both bloggers and commenters share a diverse array of types of information in a variety of formats. Because much of the information sought and shared on Pro-Ana blogs would be considered dangerous in another venue, Pro-Ana blogs present an interesting forum for considering how the context in which information is solicited, encountered, or presented actively shapes both the information itself and the information practices of community members.