Week 9: “I feel better already”: New Media, Health & Well-Being

Inspired by Tania Lewis’ reading on ‘seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondia.’ This week I decided to investigate the availability of health information online. Realage.com is a website designed to calculate your real age through answering various lifestyle questions, the DIY website instantly supplies you with a health plan interacting with your lifestyle habits. Lewis argues, the internet provides a wide range of information easily tailored to a young person’s lifestyle needs as an active consumer (Lewis 2006). The reason why I decided to explore this website which Lewis recommended from Oprah Winfrey herself was because Lewis argued that youth are associated with high rates of internet usage and have a tendency to avoid dealing with the ‘mainstream’ medical system. I thought this was an interesting theory to investigate being a part of generation X I questioned my class tutorial to gauge their reaction of what Lewis was saying.

RealAge calculated my actual biological age as 25.5 years old. This was five and half years older than my actual age (20) and was attributed to certain lifestyle decisions. For example, I answered that I did not floss my teeth on a daily basis so my RealAge increased due to that lifestyle decision.

When asking, “Would you agree with Lewis in saying that our generation avoids dealing with the ‘mainstream’ medical system, preferring the Internet to self diagnose?” The class disagreed with Lewis’ statement. They seemed quite interested in the health plan on the RealAge website. Two members of the audience said they would rather be secured with a doctor’s diagnosis then just seeking out medical advice on their own online. Reasons for this included misdiagnosing because of online information. One would comment how interesting it is to test a theory into practice especially in the form of new media.

Reference List

Lewis, T. (2006). Seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondria? Media, Culture & Society, volume 28, issue 4: 521-539. (accessed May 19, 2010).

RealAge, 2010. http://www.realage.com (accessed May 19, 2010).