An emerging trend is what has become commonly known as ‘Medical Tourism’ where patients travel to overseas destinations for specialised surgical treatments and other forms of medical care. With the rise of more affordable cross-border travel and rapid technological developments these movements are becoming more commonplace. A key driver is the platform provided by the internet for gaining access to healthcare information and advertising. There has been relatively little attention given to the role and impact of web-based information to inform Medical Tourism decisions.This article provides a brief overview of the most recent development in Medical Tourism and examines how this is linked to the emergence of specialized internet web sites. It produces a summary of the functionality of medical tourist sites, and situates Medical Tourism informatics within the broader literatures relating to information search, information quality and decision-making.This paper is both a call to strengthen the empirical evidence in this area, and also to advocate integrating Medical Tourism research within a broader conceptual framework.

This paper reports the findings from an in-depth, exploratory research project designed to understand how consumers create, use and behave in response to content on consumer review websites. Based on data from members of a consumer review site, it seeks to capture the experiences and behaviours of consumers, and to convey their voice as users of social media and other digital sources. Consumers, who are part of Generation C, constitute a significant proportion of the membership on consumer review websites. In this paper, the nature of this generational category is discussed and situated within their use of social media. Reflecting calls in this journal for an innovative and open research agenda, the methodology is designed to reveal new forms of informational behaviour among this group of consumers, who are at the forefront of social media adoption. The research reveals that activities within consumer review sites are embedded in broader social media behaviours, and that this influences the creation and use of consumer-generated and marketing content. The identification of such new forms of consumer activity forms the basis for further research and the incorporation of Generation C into successful marketing strategies.

The management literature has extensively studied viral marketing in the last decade; however, there is a lack of research in understanding network structures and the role of influencers within popular cultural consumption, such as on-demand digital media and binge-watching. In this article, we investigate the role of social media in popularising the East Asian dystopian cultural drama Squid Game. We studied this phenomenon by analysing social network structures, dynamics and influencer characteristics that transformed Squid Game into a popular global digital cultural consumption sensation. Stemming from the foundational theories of popular culture binge-watching, network theory and the social media echo chamber effect, we demonstrate how careful ‘seeding’ and ‘broadcasting’ behaviour adopted by Netflix and key influencers helped the ‘reciprocal merging’ of creative media content within the broader social media space. Our study found that 13,727 Twitter users were tweeting or mentioned on the day show was released. Our research findings further present the characteristic of individual group-based echo chambers and their role in value co-creation towards expanding the network boundary through e-WOM. This phenomenon led to the show’s unprecedented popularity amongst a global audience within a short period. Contributions of our work expand viral marketing and echo-chamber concepts into the binge-watching and popular digital culture realm, where the interplay between dramatized Asian and Western dystopian social norms provided the very fabric of user-led promotion and value co-creation.