2026/07/24 by Johannes Thumfart · 1 voice
Computer Science · Medicine · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing #Data-Driven Disease Surveillance #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s44206-026-00275-1
openalex publication_date 2026/07/24 · openalex created_date 2026/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
This article traces the emergence of the research field “infodemiology” through the professional biography and influence of medical informatics scholar Gunther Eysenbach, from his 2002 coinage of the term “infodemiology” to the WHO’s framing of an “infodemic” during COVID-19. Methodologically grounded in an analogy between viruses and information, infodemiology examines the dynamics and public-health effects of (mis)information in digital media. Pursuing a historical-genealogical approach, I demonstrate how Eysenbach extended his early work on the “semantic web” into a broader program of “infoveillance,” increasingly oriented toward society-wide monitoring and intervention. I reconstruct crucial moments, including SARS (2003), H1N1 (2009), the rise of Web 2.0, and COVID-19, during which infodemiology became increasingly popularized. This genealogical study of infodemiology reflects a specific historical period in social media research, marked by comparatively permissive conditions for data scraping primarily using Twitter’s APIs. As Eysenbach and other infodemiologists continuously discussed and used digital contact tracing since the SARS-outbreak in 2003, this case study also analyzes infodemiology through the lens of Isin and Ruppert’s concept of “sensory power”. Deriving normative conclusions from my genealogical-historical findings, I argue that infodemiological approaches raise epistemological, political, and legal concerns since they take the analogy between viruses and information too far. This study maps the evolution of infodemiology from 2002 to the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the epistemic, political, and legal risks of overextending the virus-information analogy.