The production of digital biocitizens of childhood in Facebook biosocial communities

Abstract

This research aims to analyze how the processes of medicalization of childhood operate in biosocial communities of parents in the social network. The investigation started from a virtual ethnography approach in two community groups of parents of children diagnosed with ADHD on the Facebook platform, from June 2021 to November 2022, using Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis as its analytical bias. The results show that social networks are spaces for anchoring, circulating, and reinforcing discourses that act on biomedical statements about the medicalization of childhood, and that construct subject positions for fathers, mothers and, in particular, children, these being the object of these speeches. Furthermore, the phenomena of medicalization of childhood become articulated by biopolitical strategies that reduce a set of social and educational problems to biological causes only. We can affirm, in the end, that social networks help in the expansion of diagnoses of mental disorders in children due to the countless sharing of information about possible disorders, acting as tools for the creation, circulation, and control of bodies with statements anchored in biopsychopathological discourses, which in turn allow the production of digital-informational biocitizens and biosocial communities.