Pandemic Reflections
Asynchronous Session
Featured Legitimising a Global Fight for a Shared Future: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of the Reportage of COVID-19 in China Daily View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yating Yu
“A community with a shared future for humankind” has become a dominant concept in China’s foreign policy in the last decade. Although this concept has been investigated by several studies in different domains, little attention has been given to its discursive legitimation in China’s media communication from a linguistic perspective. To fill this gap, the present study employs critical metaphor analysis to investigate how the aforementioned concept is legitimised via the predominant discourses associated with COVID-19 in 111 news articles collected from China Daily, a state-owned Chinese English-language newspaper. The findings show that COVID-19 is represented as a common enemy of humankind, other nations of the world are constructed as China’s allies, and the World Health Organisation is depicted as the leader of the global fight against the pandemic. These representations are constructed by the interplay of “war” metaphors and other linguistic processes, and hold ideological implications for collectivism and humanitarianism. The findings shed light on the use of language by China Daily in promoting official ideologies, projecting China’s national image, and improving China’s international relations amid a global health crisis.
Covid-19 Post-truth and Audiences’ Participation: Misinformation/Disinformation Language in Communicating the Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cristina Greco, Marianna Boero, Saleh Altakrouri
This comparative study reports the analysis of the discursive and narrative aspects of the language of misinformation/disinformation and fake news used in communicating Covid-19 through audience participation after the first data and scientific outcomes were shared worldwide. The comparative facet of the research allows us to reflect on the practices of participation in media discourses within a diverse socio-cultural context through two case studies: Italy and Saudi Arabia. The study analyzes a variety of post-truth discourses, not limited to verbal language but considering the complexity of the syncretic texts. Post-truth discourse divergences from the forms developed by the scientific inquiry with the aim of creating a counterargument that can influence people’s opinion and persuade them in assuming other theories. The changes experienced by people over the past months (anxieties, fears, alternate moments of doubt and security), in the case of Italy, have been often linked to the uncertainties in communicating Covid-19 throughout the media. On the other side, in the case of Saudi Arabia, where the Sars-Cov-2 arrived later compared to Italy, the media agenda has been in contrast with a misinformation of post-truth in counter-analyzing and counter-augmenting the influential newspapers’ breaking news by creating and spreading contents by social media, and generating a mistrust in the scientific discourse by audiences participations. Starting from recent semiotic of communication studies on the relationship between fake news and post-truth, our proposal is to analyze different communication forms in the Italian and Saudi social media dedicated to the ongoing health emergency.
#Movietheater during the Pandemic: A Bona Fide Interpretive Community on Instagram View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chris Mich
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie industry was already concerned about competing with streaming media and dropping box office results. Once the pandemic hit, moviegoers realized "you don't know what you got till it's gone" and the use of the hashtag #movietheater was employed to in nostalgic longing for "normalcy" and the communal act of going to the movies. Through the application of bona fide group perspective, social action media studies and interpretive community, one can see that #movietheater on Instagram is a unique group consisting of film fans of all walks of life, theater owners - for both international chains and local arthouses - that have kept up each others' livelihood and helped all cope with the worldwide pandemic.
Geopolitics Framing of Taiwanese Media and Government during/of the COVID-19 Outbreak View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chia Heng Chang
As existing literature underlines the geopolitical and political issues in the discussion among pandemic, the current project examines the COVID-19 geopolitical framing of the Taiwanese media and government through a qualitative thematic analysis on the newspaper front pages and the official daily press conferences between November 2019 and May 2020. By taking in the complicated relationship between the ROC and PRC governments and the current governing party’s political ideologies, three main themes are identified in the context. As the officials and some media frame and name the disease Wuhan pneumonia with negative labels attached, the Taiwanese citizens stay in Wuhan involuntarily after the city lockdown are treated differently when they address their intention to return home. While banning the facial mask exportation at the beginning of the outbreak in China, the “mask diplomacy” framed by the government exploits the masks as a way of raising Taiwan’s voice in the international communities.
Tweeting as Signaling: Deception in Congressional Response to Black Lives Matter View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zhaozhi Li, Charles Chang, Chenglin Zhang
With the rising use of social media in political communication, elected officials often have to respond instantaneously to the demands of their constituents in digital campaigns, even at the expense of compromising partisanship. However, is such eclecticism still valid at the legislative level? This study argues a deceptive signaling effect of Twitter political campaigning in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. When the BLM ignited a nationwide demand for police reform in the United States in May 2020, the legislators, though most tweeted to chastise the murder of George Floyd, disappointed the public by killing two bills addressing police brutality. We tested the argument by collecting and examining 541 thousand tweets of the 116th U.S. Congress since 2020 and their voting records. We devised a novel deep-learning classifier model to identify the political attitude of tweets regarding racial justice and policing. We discovered an active bipartisan discussion of racial justice on Twitter momentarily. However, in a month, the responsiveness of the Republicans plummeted, while the Democrats kept the momentum. Moreover, after controlling the effects of BLM protests or politician partisanship, tweeting responses from both parties become insignificant to their voting decision. We conclude that when facing social movement, a bipartisan strategy on social media is adopted by legislators to signal their responsiveness to social demand, but the strategy is transient and ineffective in changing legislative decisions. Namely, Congress members merely “cheap talk” on social media to signal their willingness to engage their voters.
Rethinking Borderlands in Cyberspace: Facebook Bans and Restrictions after the Attack on the Capitol View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mayra Ramales
In the The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshal McLuhan argues that the Internet would create a "global village" of collective consciousness. Today, the Internet has become a place not of collective human consciousness, but an extension of the already present borders and hierarchies that exist in non-virtual life. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter have made it so the Internet disguises itself as place accessible by everyone and a space to build community. The reality, however, is that the Internet functions as a highly surveilled space; when considering the ways in which identities and power constructs develop in cyberspace, it is important to rethink borders and how the Internet has also become a segregated space. Through the work of Alexander Galloway, I analyze the usage of Facebook’s language in their Community Standards; I argue that the language used to identify deviant individuals online changes following the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, into a generalized language that unfairly targets anyone regardless of political affiliation. Analyzing this change will bring forth the ways in which corporations in power create new barriers and borders within the internet. After COVID-19 left the world with virtual space as the only “safe” space from the virus, what do these understandings of virtual space tell us about the way the internet needs to be monitored in order to move towards equity? How has the Internet as an extension of real life made it and unsafe space for marginalized people and activists to exist?
Media Memory of COVID-19 in the Digital Age: A Case Study from the Chinese Mainland View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chang Liu
In January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic became a global public health event. In collective memory studies, a nation or a country’s significant event tend to form a collective memory. By constructing the collective memory of historical events, nations (countries) can influence their citizens’ identification process. Therefore, the study of collective memory has crucial social value. By analyzing the collective memory construction process of COVID-19, we can further explore how the concept of nation is constructed and how national identity is achieved in contemporary China. China has a special media environment compared to Western countries since the official media plays important role in media activities. Thus, the memory field in China is constituted by two: one is the official media memory field (including official media organizations, party papers), other is the civil media memory field (such as digital social platforms). By comparing the roles, functions, and relationships of the two fields in the construction of memory, we can understand the media construction mechanism of collective memory in contemporary China. In particular, it can provide an opportunity for us to study the methods and approaches for ordinary Chinese netizens to participate in the construction process of collective memory, which is still an open area in memory studies. This study uses quantitative and qualitative research methods comprehensively including textual analysis, content analysis, word frequency analysis, and discourse analysis.
Social Capital and the COVID-19 Vaccine Dilemma in the United States
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hana Noor Al-Deen
With the outbreak of COVID-19, most people’s daily lives have been greatly altered. The CDC confirmed the first U.S. COVID-19 virus in January 2020. By March 11 of that same year, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The US declared a public health emergency and the death toll reached 220,000 by October 19. On December 11 and 18, the FDA approved Emergency Use Authorization of COVID-19 vaccines for Pfizer and Moderna respectfully. The first vaccination administered was on December 14, 2020 and by September 2, 2021 more than 372 million doses had been administered. Of this number, only 174 million people or 52.7% of the total U.S. population have been fully vaccinated (AJMC 2021 and NPR, 2021). Aside from the children under the age of 12 who are not qualified to be vaccinated, the rest of the population basically either hesitates or outright refuses to be vaccinated. Social capital has been defined as “networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate co-operation within or among groups” (What, 2007). Keeping such definitions in mind, social capital accommodates different forms of social relations such as formal/informal, strong/weak, internal/external, and so on. These social relations can be explained by the dimensions of social capital which are bonding, bridging, and linking. Because people are influenced by different forms of social relations, this study attempts to examine the role of social capital in relation to those who hesitate or outright refuse to be vaccinated.
