COVID-19: Communication Strategies during the Pandemic

Abstract

The profound cultural and communicational changes brought by internet and social media platforms in the last two decades have had major repercussion in the conceptualization of the world of information and many of its dynamics. In the last decade we have a conspicuous crescent amount of scientific literature focused on social media environments and, consequently, many new fields of application and research studies have spread. Social media platforms possess an accessible democratic nature that opens to everyone the territories once controlled by the mass media, official sources of political parties, organizations, and governmental institutions. In this article we will explore some of these peculiar dynamics and phenomena examining how social media have been involved by and have contributed to constructing the social imaginary and the conceptual frame of the current global pandemic caused by Coronavirus. We will also analyze the use of the war metaphor made by many politicians referring to COVID-19 in order to shape public understanding. We also aim to demonstrate that structural changes in communication, made possible by the digital dimension of social media together with the narrative-subjective approach to the facts have undermined the epistemological basis of truth as a realistic representation of the world. Keywords: communication, COVID-19, fake news, infodemic, post-truth