TECHNICAL COMMUNICATIN QUARTERLY, 17(3), 264-288 Copyright Q 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC R,outledge ISSN: 1057-2252 print / 1542-7625 online Taylor&Frands Group DOI: 10.10.1080/10572250802100360 Communicating Values, Valuing Community through Health-Care Websites: Midwifery's Online Ethos and Public Communication in Ontario Philippa Spoel Laurentian University Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional iden- tities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two mid- wifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional con- sumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework. INTRODUCTION According to Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva (2004), two dominant models have emerged for understanding Web-based interaction: the "consumption model" and the "community model" (p. 1). The consumption model approaches the Internet mainly as a medium for transmitting and retrieving information as well as goods and services; it positions users primarily as anonymous individuals en- gaged in private consumer experiences (p. 1). By contrast, the community model exploits the potential of the Internet for facilitating interactions and relationships among groups of individuals with "shared values, norms, and meanings, and a shared history and identity" (p. 2). For the rapidly growing domain of online health communication, the distinction between consumption and community models of Internet communication raises fundamental questions about the nature of the communicative relationship be- tween the health-care organization that hosts a website and the members of the