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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Ros Gill and Amnon Aran, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful suggestions and input on this paper.
Notes
1. For a more detailed account of the methodological design of my study and the process of data selection and analysis see Orgad (Citation2005).
2. For example, in the “Shared Experience” website about a quarter (552) of the whole collection of cancer patients' stories (2,382) are breast cancer stories (www.sharedexperience.org, data accessed on August 4, 2004). In “CitationThe Cancer Survivors Network” of the American Cancer society's discussion board, more than 60 per cent of the messages (16,943) regarding cancer experience, are breast cancer-related (www.acscsn.org/Forum/Discussion/summary.html, data accessed on 7 October 2003).
3. Media representations of breast cancer are occasionally discussed in patients' forums, especially in relation to the use of celebrities on television. While I did not conduct a systematic study of these discussions, having followed them for a couple of years, it seems to me that there is neither a clear negative nor positive perception among patients of these representations. See also Pitts (Citation2001, Citation2004) for some discussion of the relationship between mass media representations of breast cancer and the online discourse of the disease.
4. I borrow this from Leopold (Citation1999), whose book is entitled A Darker Ribbon.
5. In making this observation, I draw loosely on Warner's (2002) account of “counterpublics.”
6. For a discussion of these aspects see CitationOrgad (forthcoming a, Citationforthcoming b).