“Older and Younger People”: Towards a Cross-Generational Online Peer Support About Cancer. The Example of Glioblastoma on French Digital Platforms

Abstract

The present paper, based on science communications, deals with interferences and reconfiguration at work between generations due to digital devices dedicated to discussion about one particular type of brain cancer: Glioblastoma. Glioblastoma is a rare brain cancer more than often diagnosed at a late stage, with a very poor prognosis and huge and disabling neurological impairments at the time of identification of the disease. Thereby, when a web patient chat room happens to deal with glioblastoma, the discussion happens most of the time between close relatives. This paper analyzes these digital testimonies to explore how they enable, build, and give access to a “parent expertise” instead of patient expertise, and this through intergenerational solidarity. This specific corpus of web discourse is analyzed, which a semio-communicational analysis mixed with thematic content analysis, discourse analysis, a pragmatic, narrative, and socio-semiotic analysis. This analysis first shows how the architexts of the forums promote the emergence of a figure of intergenerational, then focuses on the variations of the two major types of exchanges carried out, between generations, within these digital frameworks: a relationship to illness experienced as extraordinary upheaval, and to the accompaniment of the disease in the very ordinary of everyday life.