“Wish everyone safe and sound”: Ambient affiliation in online comments on medical consultation videos on Bilibili.com

Abstract

The emergence of social media has expanded the traditional landscape of health communication research. This study applies the framework of “ambient affiliation” in Systemic Functional Linguistics to a digital health context. Specifically, it explores how viewers of medical consultation videos on Bilibili.com, a Chinese online video-sharing platform, discursively negotiate alignments and construct bonds of shared values and knowledge in their online comments. Discourse analysis of the comments shows that ambient affiliation among viewers is formed in relation to four main types of interaction (i.e., evaluating the participants of medical consultations, sharing illness experiences, seeking health-related advice, and negotiating medical knowledge), through recurrent deployment of communing and dialogic affiliation strategies that act upon particular ideational-interpersonal couplings in the online comments. We argue that ambient affiliation in this digital discourse reflects the interest- and content-focused interactions in the ‘affinity space’ offered by the social media platform. Our study expands the existing knowledge on ambient affiliation by situating it in a digital health context. It also provides insights into how medical practitioners and health educators can more effectively disseminate health knowledge and enhance public health literacy on social media.