Eighteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

The highest rate of death, after the World War II, is due to Covid-19 epidemic and more than 2 million people have died since the epidemic outbreak in December, 2019, so the word “death” is one of the highest frequency words in social media; moreover, the use of social media has grown due to quarantine and successive restrictions and lock downs. The most important aspects of the approach used by this study include: the analysis of Iranian social media users’ reactions to the images of those died due to Covid-19, investigating if seeing such images via social media is effective on the users’ perception of the closeness of death, and evaluating the extent to which the fear of Covid-19 death is instrumental in persuading users to observe health protocols or causing mental problems in social media users. Since the goal of this study is to discover how social media users perceive and react to the images of people dead of Covid-19, cultural studies approach is used. Receipt analysis method and in-depth interviews are used for collecting data from Iranian users; also, snowball sampling is used in this study. The probable results would show that cyberspace users experience the closeness of “death” more than any time else and to cope with these annoying images, avoid viewing the more if they view, it would lead them to suffer from mental problems.