The good news is that when people search for health information, they are usually motivated to understand it. Thus, they really do spend time processing the information, and usually retain it fairly well.

The bad news is that the quality of information varies widely, especially in social media.

Tim Sellnow and Katherine Anthony (in a recent edition of the Journal of Applied Communication Research) show that people look for "message convergence." Meaning that if the same idea is discovered multiple times, especially from credible sources, then people assume that information is correct. That assumption can, of course, be incorrect (e.g., vaccines and autism).

Social media allows the use of distribution of health information in an effective manner which is reachable to a wide target audience. However, the quality of information, credibility of source is a factor that needs to be taken into consideration especially given the amount of online and commercial promotions of some health products. Marketers may provide information which is not 100% proven but which may be very convincing to potential readers seeking for health information especially if backed by comments and reviews of "so called" users. Health literacy may increase but quality of knowledge may not necessarily increase.

With the advent and availability of new media, health information seeking is definitely on the rise. 60% of the internet users access social media related to health (The Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009 )

Study by the Pew internet and American Life Project found that of the people seeking health information online, 66% seeked information related to a specific disease or problem while 55% of the people seeked information related to certain treatment or procedures (Fox & Jones, 2009).

Baker, Wagner, Singer, et al. (2003) have found that among the persons with chronic health care conditions, 48% of them said that health information on the internet improved the understanding of their condition.

So according to the various researches, we can see that the effects on health literacy is huge. As to whether it is more of positive or negative, it's still debatable.

Hi Mohammad,

Interesting question - but i think that health information seeking will have little direct short-medium term impact on health literacy. I think that the converse is more likely where health literacy impacts on health information seeking. To what extent is the question and leads us to the chasm of what's being done to address poor health literacy across the globe.