Talking Past Each Other

Abstract An explorative case study is used to investigate the formation of information pathologies on the societal level. The paper conceptualizes these particular information pathologies as ‘interaction-related information pathologies’ (Picot et al., Information, organization and management. Springer, Berlin, 2008) and proposes that the production of information by multiple stakeholders leads to ‘distortions’ (Cukier et al., Inf Syst J 19(2):175–196, 2009) on the societal level. This broad proposition is then explored by means of a qualitative case study of the media coverage surrounding the implementation of the ‘Electronic Health Card’ in Germany. Based on that study, the initial proposition is further specified by conceptualizing how a process of path constitution ‘distorts’ a debate from being about legitimacy of an ICT innovation to being about illegitimacy of stakeholders.