Justine's+Social+Activism

=A Healthful Approach to Social Activism=



Due to my disinterest in politics, I decided to focus more on the social activism aspect of my practicum topic of "social and political activism". After much thought, I have decided to examine social activism in the realm of eating healthy and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, without become negatively obsessed with body image and disordered eating. My project partner has chosen to look at ProAnorexia websites, or sites that advocate the use of anorexia and bulemia as a normal way to lose weight. Hopefully my topic will provide an interesting and contrasting viewpoint to her study and will inform Internet users that there are safe and effective ways to stay healthy.

Updates: So the first health site I joined is http://www.webmd.com. It is a website catered towards health and well-being and it has information on a variety of topics, including my focus of eating and diet. I joined WebMD so that I could check out the public forums on health and see how people interacted on the message boards and blogs. So far I have noticed that the message boards garner lots of discussion. One person's question typically receives several responses and often further develops into a dialogue between WebMD members. I also noticed that the website will have one of their certified WebMD specialists (such as a dietician or a nutritionist) interact and respond to the different posts.

I also joined http://www.WellSphere.com, another networking site that focuses on "health knowledge made personal". This site was extremely user-friendly. As soon as I created an account, I was given an array of topics to choose from so that I could join those communities I was most interested in. To further my investigation of social activism around health issues, my selection included: exercise community, healthy eating community, healthy cooking community, organic food community, and healthy living community. After exploring the different communities, I found that users post many useful tips pertaining to health, such as ways to cut calories or recipes for healthy eating, but there is not much dialogue between users. For example, many of the questions on the discussion boards were left unanswered. I wish I had answers to these peoples' questions...but for now I'm simply an observer

Not one to typically participate in group discussions on the Internet, I decided to be daring today and post a question. WellSphere has a public forum titled "Ask a Health Maven" where you can post a question that will be answered by a health expert but other WellSphere community members can respond as well. I went into my healthy cooking community and asked for suggestions for healthy, quick and easy recipes that college students can cook. Hopefully, I will get an answer and my question will spark dialogue between members...