Communication Commons^™

Communication On A Health-Related Website Offering Therapeutic Support: Phase 1 Of The Heartnet Website, Leesa N. Bonniface, Lelia Rosalind Green, Maurice G. Swanson

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper investigates the usefulness of a modest-budget website set up to support people recovering from heart-related incidents through a combination of all or some of the following: surgery, drugs, and lifestyle change. Online communities have been shown to offer support for their members. Ideally, the members of this experimental site would eventually constitute an online community. Effective interaction and personal communication indicate that an online community is developing. The opposite is also true: declining and aborted exchanges might indicate a failure to establish community. This paper reports on the first eight weeks of the experimental website HeartNET. As a …