“We Are Here to Give You Emotional Support”: Performing Emotions in an Online HIV/AIDS Support Group

This work shows how, by writing detailed descriptions of their illness experiences, participants in online support groups create emotionally vibrant, empathic communities in which emotional rhetoric frames various moral dilemmas.

Abstract

Since the advent of the Internet, social critics have debated its effects on intimacy and social relationships. I show how, by writing detailed descriptions of their illness experiences, participants in online support groups create emotionally vibrant, empathic communities in which emotional rhetoric frames various moral dilemmas. I illustrate my argument with a detailed analysis of "emotion talk" among members of an HIV/AIDS support group over a 2-year period. My findings add to current debates by encouraging sociologists to consider the emotional dynamics within the online support group as a moral, rather than just psychological or therapeutic, component of interaction.