"Pandemic Publics": The Digitalised Public Sphere in the Time of Covid-19 and Beyond, Vol. 29 - 2022, No. 2
Guest Edited by Joss Hands
Public Reason in the TIme of Covid-19
In the long history of democracy some notion of rational intercourse has always played its part. A common arena, whether concrete or abstracted, has provided a capacity for the exchange of opinion, argument and for arbitration and decision making. While the nature of this arena has evolved, a shared understanding of what the grounds of agreement, and disagreement, has usually been evident. This consensus has come under radical question in contemporary politics. The attendant concepts of communicative, or public reason — the former most closely associated with the critical theorist, philosopher and sociologist, Habermas, and the latter with the political philosopher Rawls has also been challenged from left and right. This article will present a defence of the use of public reason as an important component of the fight against COVID-19, and in the cause of both democracy and social solidarity — as these ideals have come under strain in the first decades of the twenty-first Century.
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The Datatext: A Multilevel-discursive Theory For Improved Public Health Data Visualizations
In the run up to the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson challenged the British public to “squash the sombrero,” and so save thousands of lives in the event of the pandemic overburdening an already stretched National Health Service. There was a jarring sense of incongruity between this tabloid metaphor, and the minimalist line-graph to which the prime minister was referring. Best practice in infographic design may be well-suited to the communication of data amongst scientists and other literate audiences. But today matters of public health are subject to debate between citizens who are actively engaged in creating and circulating knowledge amongst wider publics with variable levels of literacy. Here a different epistemic approach, and different assumptions about design, are required. When conceiving of the infographic in public health as a multilevel discourse containing visual arguments mutually re-enforced by combinations of words, numbers and images, what I call a datatext (after W.J.T. Mitchell), it may be possible to design more effective communications. In this paper I set out a theoretical approach to infographic design drawing upon image schema theory, as well as conventional best practice. I conclude with recommendations for designing effective datatexts for optimal biocommunicability.
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Knowledge on Stage: Public Roles of Scientists In Times of Communicative Abundance
This article explores the challenges and dilemmas the current scenario of communicative abundance poses to experts and scientists that are willing to influence policy-making (or that are dragged to arenas of political debates). It identifies eight contemporary challenges worth noting: (1) dissemination of disinformation; (2) scepticism towards science and experts; (3) multiplication of voices with public resonance; (4) volume and (in)accessibility of data; (5) polarisation and fragmentation of publics; (6) algorithmic distribution of communication; (7) grammars of current public communication; and (8) a complex interplay between visible and invisible discursive arenas. It, then, discusses the strategies used by scientists to deal with these challenges in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It does so through a series of illustrations drawn from visible scientists acting in the Brazilian public sphere. Despite the fact that novel strategies and innovative adaptions are noticed, the article also points to the resilience of top-down forms of communication.
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Covid Publics and Black Lives Matter: Posts Placards and Posters
This article will examine the ways in which COVID has reconfigured the boundaries between online and offline, as well as public and private spaces. The threat posed by the global pandemic meant that public spaces quickly emptied, work zoomed into the home, and windows became notice boards filled with moraleboosting messages. Every Thursday, UK doorsteps became the space in which private individuals emerged from their own homes to express their gratitude to key workers in general and the NHS in particular. Whilst posters calling for better provision of PPE occasionally appeared in people’s windows, online talk about Booing for Boris never fully materialised into offline action, and the doorstep continued to function as the threshold between public and private space. However, the killing of George Floyd radically disrupted these threshold spaces. Information about Black Lives Matter demonstrations leapt from activists’ digital networks into the hyper-local and granular chains of communication established by COVID mutual aid groups, grassroots communities of care and small clusters of neighbours. Similarly, the slogans which had been circulating within activist networks for years quickly appeared on the placards of protesters as they moved through city spaces, before finally settling in people’s windows alongside rainbow posters urging neighbours to “stay safe.” When—on the first Thursday after the final NHS clap—many individuals chose to relinquish the comforting anonymity afforded by mass demonstrations and take the knee on their doorstep, they called their neighbours, as well as their government, into a dialogue about race. In this way, the windowpane and the doorstep finally became a dynamic space which both separated and connected online and offline as well as public and private spaces.
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The Elitist Public Sphere In China: A Case Study Of Online Contestation By Former Critical Journalists During The Coronavirus Outbreak
This paper explores a contingent sub-public sphere promoted by a group of former critical journalists in China during the coronavirus outbreak at the beginning of 2020. During the initial outbreak of coronavirus in China, the observed former journalists, who left the field of critical journalism during the re-structure of Chinese news industries under Xi Jinping’s leadership, drew on their knowledge of Chinese politics and censorship to contest information cover-up by the state, online censorship, and the state’s discourses of China as a successful model of combating the virus. Their activities effectively engaged mass participation of Chinese people and promoted critical opinions of the public. The paper bears the primary aim to deepen the understanding of the episodic formation of elite-driven public spheres in China by investigating the nuances of each case. I therefore, in this particular case study, explore concepts of habitus and capital from Bourdieu’s field theory as analytical tools in the investigation of the persistence of political participation and government scrutiny by former critical journalists on social media after leaving the field of critical journalism. The empirical research combines materials collected through 15 former critical journalists’ WeChat accounts between January and May 2020, along with in-depth interviews.
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Platform Governance and the “Infodemic”
This article discusses the dominant metaphor of infodemic, the role of platforms and their policies. In understanding the spread of Covid-19 misinformation as an informational epidemic, we are led to construct the problem as one of viral spread. Virality, however, has been conceptualised as a key attribute of social media platforms. A tension therefore emerges between to encouraging good virality while limiting bad virality. To examine how platforms have dealt with this , the article analyses the policies of two platforms, Facebook and YouTube, alongside the EU Code of Practice which they have both signed. The analysis reveals that they focus on the circulation of mis/disinformation, developing an apparatus of security around it. This consists of a set of strategies, techno-material tools for the enforcement of the strategies, measures for disciplining users, and procedures for legitimating and re-adjusting the whole apparatus. However, this apparatus is not fit for the purpose of addressing mis/disinformation for two reasons: firstly, its primary objective is to sustain the platforms and not to resolve the problem of mis/disinformation; secondly it obscures the question of production of mis/disinformation. Ultimately, addressing mis/disinformation in a comprehensive manner requires a more thorough and critical social inquiry.
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Covid-19 and Race: News Coverage of Structural Racism and The Role of John Henryism and Racial Weathering in Bame Covid-19 Deaths
In this article, I use media analysis and materialist theory to examine two overlooked factors that have emerged out of the startling statistics around race and Covid-19. These are 1. John Henryism and 2. racial weathering. I argue that missing from media coverage are the manifold confounding and unexplored ways in which race and racism are enacted by Covid wherein the disease itself is understood as existing within a network of interacting human and non-human forces and structures. My argument is that the tendency for the media to confine itself to focusing on how social determinants impact the health of racialised groups, while important, has meant that other, more granular enactments of race and injustice have been ignored.
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