Towards an Info‐communication Categorization of Expertise in Online Health Communities

In this chapter, the authors describe the crises that expertise is going through, particularly in the context of online health communities by questioning their relationship with the medical authorities. They establish the need for an info‐communicational definition, in tension between three modes of legitimation that seem to them to be decisive in qualifying the experts who express themselves in these spaces. By recalling the issues and tensions related to the development and recognition of online expertise on health issues, the authors highlight the challenges of an infocommunicational understanding of it, particularly within online health communities. Research on online health communities can be enriched by a particular field that allows to observe the logic of knowledge mediation that bypasses the health system's argument of authority. The authors describe the legitimation process and detail what distinguishes the several modes of legitimation, and then what unites them.