Developing digital health literacy amidst the Covid-19 infodemic

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the concurrent infodemic highlighted the urgent need to develop autonomous and advanced reading skills for an increasingly complex and ambiguous world. Particularly, in this context, there appears to be a tension between people seeking clear, authoritative information and advice on the internet, and health experts giving recommendations, actively defining the boundaries of their (in)expertise by formulating (un)certainty that is such a prevalent feature of this novel virus. Our claim is that possible evidence of a creditable source online emerges when the healthcare professional describes their (in)expertise through a systematic deployment of a wide range of warranting strategies, while claiming authority in a limited field of knowledge (Richardson 2003). Our analysis addresses the expert online formulation of (un)certainty focusing on a daily coronavirus podcast, i.e., Coronacast. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study uncovers the major types of warranting strategies used by the health hosts in a corpus containing only episodes where there is an expert guest and/or a link to scientific sources. Deeper understanding of how healthcare providers/health podcasters use warranting strategies may make a meaningful contribution to the repertoire of tools useful for identifying un/reliable messages in an increasingly digitalized world.