On Residues, Echoes, Digital Afterlives, and the Slow Haunting of Health Information.

Abstract

Health communication scholarship has developed models that emphasize circulation, interpretation, mediation, and context, including ecological approaches, diffusion and network theories, and research on audience reception. This piece argues health information moves beyond delivery and mutates in circulation. It develops three concepts: residues (persistent fragments detached from original context), echoes (repeated and transformed circulation across networks), and digital afterlives (platform-mediated continuation beyond authorial intent). It further introduces slow haunting to describe the temporal and affective accumulation of these informational traces. The article proposes an ecological view of health communication centered on persistence, simultaneity, and overlapping circulation patterns, where different versions of health information coexist.