Challenges and possibilities of livestreaming in health communication: The felicitousness of interaction in breast cancer awareness live events

The multimodal and interactive affordances of livestreaming have been studied in, for example, gaming, sports, education and live-tv. We analysed livestreaming in the rarel-studied context of health campaigns, focusing on breast cancer Facebook live events in Egypt. Drawing on Goffman’s situational analysis and conversation analytic insights on turn-taking, we examined the felicitousness of the local interaction: whether audience members who participated by posting in the chat received appropriate responses to their comments. We identified three common interactional situations that revealed unique challenges and affordances in these livestreaming events. The most common audience comment praised the campaigners’ work and, when responded to by an appropriate appreciation (emoji), enhanced amicable communication. Participants also regularly asked medical questions, which could be answered or not. Personal medical questions were often not answered or sometimes responded to with asking the member of audience to contact their own doctor, which suggested misaligned expectations of a focused, individual medical consultation as opposed to the role-based general informational purpose of the livestreaming event. The livestreams also had a high volume of audience comments, which led to many not receiving responses and users thus reposted questions or answered others’ questions, potentially resulting in peer-to-peer learning, but possibly also incoherence, misinformation, and frustration. Findings suggest that livestreaming affords phatic communication and interaction but also poses situational and technological challenges specific to the health context, especially treatment of unanswered questions, with contributions to the emerging research on interaction in livestreaming and practice of health campaigns.