In this article, I analyze the meaning-making struggle within a major Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an online observation of interactions directly following the outbreak in Poland, and in-depth content and conversational analysis of selected conversations, I posit that the pandemic circumstances were experienced in this community as a pervasively ambiguous situation: ambivalent in cognitive, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. The article identifies collective social processes embedded in digital interactions through which this initial ambiguity was ordered, and narratives of the pandemic emerged, enabling the collective management of fear of the novel infection.
AdlerP. A.AdlerP. (2008). The cyber worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves. Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), 33–56.
2.
AttwellK.SmithD. T.WardP. R. (2018). “The unhealthy other”: How vaccine rejecting parents construct the vaccinating mainstream. Vaccine, 36(12), 1621–1626.
3.
Ball-RokeachS. J. (1973). From pervasive ambiguity to a definition of the situation. Sociometry, 36(3), 378–389.
4.
BarnesB. (1992). Status groups and collective action. Sociology, 26(2), 259–270.
5.
BlumeS. (2006). Anti-vaccination movements and their interpretations. Social Science & Medicine, 62, 628–642.
6.
BradyE.SegarJ.SandersC. (2016). You get to know the people and whether they’re talking sense or not: Negotiating trust on health-related forums. Social Science & Medicine, 162, 151–157.
7.
BraunV.ClarkeV. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101.
8.
CastellsM. (2010). The power of identity. 2nd edition with a new preface. Wiley Blackwell.
9.
DamasioA. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam.
10.
Del VicarioM.VivaldoG.BessiA.ZolloF.ScalaA.CaldarelliG.QuattrociocchiW. (2016). Echo chambers: Emotional contagion and group polarization on Facebook. Scientific Reports, 6(1), Article 37825. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37825
11.
Díaz-CrescitelliM. D.GhirottoL. F.SissonH.SarliL.ArtioliG.BassiM. C.AppicciutoliG.HayterM. (2020). A meta-synthesis study of the key elements involved in childhood vaccine hesitancy. Public Health, 180, 38–45.
12.
FosterD. (2016). “Keep complaining til someone listens”: Exchanges of tacit healthcare knowledge in online illness communities. Social Science & Medicine, 166, 25–32.
13.
GalegherJ.SproullL.KieslerS. (1998). Legitimacy, authority, and community in electronic huovila groups. Written Communication, 15(4), 493–530.
14.
GarfinkelH. (1999). Studies in ethnomethodology. Polity Press. (Original work published 1967)
15.
GavinJ.RodhamK.PoyerH. (2008). The presentation of “pro-anorexia” in online group interactions. Qualitative Health Research, 18(3), 325–333.
16.
GordonS. L. (1989). The socialization of children’s emotions: Emotional culture, competence, and exposure. In SaarniC.HarrisP. L. (Eds.), Children’s understanding of emotion (pp. 319–349). Cambridge University Press.
17.
HineC. (2015). Ethnography for the internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday. Bloomsbury.
18.
HochschildA. R. (2003). The managed heart. Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
19.
HoffmanB. L.FelterE. M.ChuK.-H.ShensaA.HermannC.WolynnT.WilliamsD.PrimackB. A. (2019). It’s not all about autism: The emerging landscape of anti-vaccination sentiment on Facebook. Vaccine, 37(16), 2216–2223.
20.
HöijerB. (2011). Social representations theory. A new theory for media research. Nordicom Review, 32(2), 3–16.
21.
HuovilaJ.SaikkonenS. (2016). Establishing credibility, constructing understanding: The epistemic struggle over healthy eating in the Finnish dietetic blogosphere. Health, 20(4), 383–400.
22.
KataA. (2012). Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm—An overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. Vaccine, 30(25), 3778–3789.
23.
LamontM.MolnárV. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28(1), 167–195.
24.
LivelyK. J.WeedE. A. (2014). Emotion management: Sociological insight into what, how, why, and to what end?Emotion Review, 6(3), 202–207.
25.
McKenzieP. J. (2003). Justifying cognitive authority decisions: Discursive strategies of information seekers. The Library Quarterly, 73(3), 261–288.
26.
MeredithJ. (2019). Conversation analysis and online interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 241–256.
27.
MoscoviciS. (1984). The phenomenon of social representations. In FarrR. M.MoscoviciS. (Eds.), Social representations (pp. 3–69). Cambridge University Press.
28.
PhillipsT. (2019). “Mostly accurate with occasional piles of bullshit”: Patient “boundary-work” in an online scientific controversy. Health Sociology Review, 28(3), 261–276.
29.
PinkS.HorstH. A.PostillJ.HjorthL.LewisT.TacchiJ. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. SAGE.
30.
PolonskiV. W.HoganB. (2015). Assessing the structural correlates between friendship networks and conversational agency in Facebook Groups. In Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (pp. 674–677). https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7e42d64a-f3bb-43da-bd6b-ba1ef248e5bb
31.
RafanellI. (2013). Micro-situational foundations of social structure. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 43, 181–204.
32.
ScheerM. (2012). Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion. History and Theory, 51(2), 193–220.
33.
SmithN.GrahamT. (2017). Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 22(9), 1310–1327.
34.
SmithsonJ.SharkeyS.HewisE.JonesR. B.EmmensT.FordT.OwensC. (2011). Membership and boundary maintenance on an online self-harm forum. Qualitative Health Research, 21(11), 1567–1575.
35.
SoboE. J. (2016). Theorizing (vaccine) refusal: Through the looking glass. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 342–350.
36.
SquireC.AndrewsM.TamboukouM. (2008). Introduction: What is narrative research? In AndrewsM.SquireC.TamboukouM. (Eds.), Doing narrative research (2nd ed., pp. 1–26). SAGE.
37.
StaskeS. A. (1996). Talking feelings: The collaborative construction of emotion in talk between close relational partners. Symbolic Interaction, 19(2), 111–142.
38.
TaylorT. L.BoellstorffT.NardiB.PearceC. (2013). Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method. Princeton University Press.
39.
ThoitsP. A. (1989). The sociology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 317–342.
40.
ThoitsP. A. (1990). Emotional deviance: Research agendas. In KemperT. D. (Ed.), Research agendas in the sociology of emotions (pp. 180–203). State University of New York Press.
41.
ThomsonA.RobinsonK.Vallée-TourangeauG. (2016). The 5As: A practical taxonomy for the determinants of vaccine uptake. Vaccine, 34(8), 1018–1024.
42.
van DijckJ. (2013). Culture of connectivity. A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.
