The production of digital childhood biocitizens in Facebook biossocial communities

Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyze how the processes of medicalization of childhood operate in biosocial communities of parents in the social network. The investigation started from a virtual ethnography approach in two groups of communities of parents of children diagnosed with ADHD on the Facebook platform, from June 2021 to November 2022, using Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis as its analytical bias. The results demonstrate that social networks are spaces for anchoring, circulating and reinforcing discourses that act based on biomedical statements about the medicalization of childhood, and that construct subject positions for fathers, mothers and, in particular, children, these being the object of these speeches. Furthermore, the phenomena of medicalization of childhood become articulated by biopolitical strategies that reduce a set of social and educational problems to biological causes only. We can affirm, in the end, that social networks help in the expansion of diagnoses of childhood mental disorders through the countless sharing of information about possible disorders, acting as tools for the creation, circulation and control of bodies through discursive statements anchored in biopsychopathological discourses, which in turn allow the production of digital-informational biocitizens and biosocial communities.