This paper asks why new technologies for self-treating mental health maladies have been appearing on cable television and on the Internet since the mid-nineties, particularly those recommending the self-management of mental illnesses. New therapeutic media are symptoms, the author argues, of cultural health discourses that pivot on normal health ideals promoting citizen productivity. These health discourses promote prevention as new diagnostic form, and tie diagnosis to recovery options. New media technologies respond to the demand, seeking to seduce a new market of the diagnosed into consuming their media products. More importantly, new technologies offer therapetuic choices that reify the diagnostic/recovery process and cultural health norms. The paper diagnostic/recovery process and cultural health norms. The paper investigates the different niche markets of new therapeutic technologies, particularly why some promote self-mangement.

Even only ten years ago electronic mail was a novelty outside of computer science departments. But now, with tens of millions of people on-line, email is constituent of much day-to-day social and professional life. This rapid increase in the number of Internet inhabitants has made possible the unprecedented phenomenon of very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people participate in many-to-many communications. The most obvious manifestations of this phenomenon are Usenet newsgroups hosted on hundreds of thousands of servers on the Internet and archived by a handful of industrially-sized sites (e.g., http://www.dejanews.com). These conversations are not amenable to current discourse analysis techniques, and we hardly know where to begin in analyzing discussions consisting of 100,000 or more messages a year. In this paper we introduce a set of computational tools that can graphically display and assist in the analysis of VLSCs. We are especially interested in a set of VLSCs devoted to illness-based social movements. Illness-based social movements are one example of a new sort of politics that is facilitated by the advent of VLSCs. Using the graphical display capabilities of our computational tools, we present several findings concerning illness-based social movements. We elaborate and supplement the computationally facilitated findings with another set of close- and contentualizing-readings of the communications of the illness-based social movements. The Investigation of VLSCs and Illness-Based Social Movements is collaborative work underway at the MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program and the MIT Media Laboratory. 

This presentation is focused on the historical connections between online community and commerce/economics. It makes the case that the most influential symbol for online community, the WELL, should be examined in light of sociocultural trends "apart" from Internet-related ones, most importantly those that began to shape the social mores of the Baby Boom generation in the late 1960s. Of particular importance is the borrowing of language and ideas from Sixties literature and song in subsequent structuring of community discourse. That structuring must be further connected to post-60s capitalism to add a missing and important historical link to contemporary debates about the construction of online community. Particular emphasis will be placed on the rhetoric of community as it has been taken up by those in e-commerce endeavors.