'His story is truly vivid…': The role of narratives of vicarious experience in commodification and marketisation of genetic testing in Chinese social media

Abstract

This paper uses a narrative inquiry approach to investigate how genetic testing companies in China strategically construct narratives of vicarious experience (NoVE) about their clients to market genetic tests on social media. Ten stories about clients undergoing genetic testing are examined to identify the forms that NoVE take and the functions that they perform in relation to the companies’ promotional agendas. Two types of NoVE are identified: ‘compound narratives’ that combine elements of narratives of personal experience (NoPE) and NoVE, and ‘NoVE proper’ that are narratives told in the third person throughout. The NoVE demonstrate long Complication and explicit Evaluation, which together with specific discourse devices foreground their authenticity and enhance their tellability. Authenticity of the narratives is primarily foregrounded through heteroglossic interplay of the ‘voice of medicine’ and the ‘voice of the lifeworld’ and tellability is enhanced through extreme case formulations. These discourse and rhetorical strategies are powerful tools to facilitate the companies’ marketing agendas by better enabling the target audience to relate to the stories. At the same time the strategies conceal the explicit involvement of the companies in the production of the narratives, raising ethical questions about the commodification of genetic tests in the emerging consumer market.