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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 683

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

‘Genetics Just Got Personal’: Personal Genomics as Social Interaction

Authors: Jones, Rodney Hale
Submitted by: Jones, Rodney Hale (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China))

The recent decline in the cost of genetic analysis has resulted in a proliferation of companies which provide personal genetic screening directly to consumers and supply them with information about things like genetic ancestry and their relative risk for developing diseases and conditions like colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Along with genetic analysis, these companies also provide online platforms for customers to share their genetic information with one another, join ‘communities’, and participate in research. Giving people knowledge of their genetic code, advocates of such services argue, helps them make better decisions about lifestyle, health, and medical care. At the same time, these services and the social networks they make available also create possibilities for new kinds of social formations and new forms of social interaction.

This paper analyzes the interaction among customers of one such service on a public forum for discussing the relationship between genetic information and disease risk. Through the close analysis of various linguistic features of the interaction, including modality and hedging, pronoun usage, and the use of reported speech, it examines how participants use genetic information to claim and impute identities as, for example, disease sufferers, customers, and research subjects, how they manage offers and requests of advice and sympathy, and how they discursively construct things like expertise, affiliation, and risk. This analysis is used as the starting point for a broader discussion of the ways laypeople work together to make sense of complex scientific information, and of the impact the sharing of genetic information as a form of socializing might have on future forms of social interaction and participation in public life.