Health Communication Studies In New Media Environment

Health Communication is an important branch of the science of Communication.Health and communication are both important and eternal themes of human life.Nearly40years passed since Health Communication first being put forward while inChina, Health Communication study has gone through from an "absent" state thengradually transformed into an attractive research field with growing number ofscholars and the public pay close attention to. Mass media offers a great variety ofeffective channels to disseminate health issues, to some extent contributed to raisingthe level of public health and people’s health consciousness. Media technologyenhancement and the accumulation of health communication experience together notonly make a revolution to the traditional frame of Health Communication, but alsofundamentally changed the way we live. With the development of informationtechnology, the network, mobile phone and other tools which represent the rapiddevelopment of new media provide the public new access to information, the rapiddevelopment of new media has played a certain role in promoting HealthCommunication study. Early in April2009the CPC Central Committee State Councilhad pointed out on Deepening the Views of Medical and Health System:Accelerating health promotion and education, health care institutions and agencies,schools, social enterprises should vigorously carry out health education, fully takeuse of various new medias, strengthening health medical and health knowledgedissemination, promoting healthy and civilized lifestyle, promoting public rationalnutrition, improving people’s health awareness and self-care ability under new mediaenvironment. We should pay more attention to health communication work andutilizing kinds of means to improve people’s health awareness, spreading diseaseprevention and control knowledge, advocating a civilized way of life using the powerof new media.The background section describes the basic theory of Health Communication, itsdevelopment and an overview of Health Communication in the traditional forms ofmass media, analyzing its characteristics, its advantages and disadvantage comparedto new media environment mentioned later. This paper focuses on how Health Communication works under the new media environment. Dissertation unfolds fromtwo dimensions: media and content. Firstly, from the point of media, the authormainly discusses the effects on Health Communication from web2.0networkenvironment and smart phones. The discuss on the network environment mainlyanalyses the health issues-related websites or health channels or columns, the overallpublic health issues-related websites can be divided into two categories:comprehensive portal for Health Channel and professional health sites. Generally,health columns rely on editorial staff, they are more inclined to audience-dominantstyle; while professional health issues-related sites generally rely on the relevantbusiness or professional research team, which has a strong backing of professionalsand expertise; Micro blogging is another effective means of Health Communication.In recent years, micro blogging is eye-catching due to its features of easy operation,highly interactive and so on. Micro blogging take advantage of fragmented timesupplying the information to the audience, however with the increasingly numbers ofmicro blogging users, the amount of information continues to expand; the situationbecomes worrying when it comes to public physical and mental state. We must notleave the risks and hazards behind when using the power of new media. Secondly, theextensive use of smart phones greatly changed people’s daily lives, and thus phone isto become the fifth media apart from newspapers, television, radio and Internet. Itsspecial features make it an irreplaceable tool to communicate. Smartphone’s featuresof portability, social interaction, and information integration, wider range of usergroups and fragmentation of time make it an irreplaceable form of HealthCommunication.New media environment brings Health communication great opportunities, weshould also note the problems caused by information explosion. While fully use of itsadvantages, optimizing the new media environment from improving the followingaspects: Health Communication information quality, Web Editors’ professionalism,proper regulations on the issue and audiences’ consciousness towards HealthCommunication behaviors.