Infodemic: The formation of a new Media-concept

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic and the virus spread of hoax information which accompanied this disease encouraged the World Health Organization to use the word infodemic which was actively employed by the foreign and Russian mass-media. The redoubled attention of the mass-media to the problem of infodemic led to the growth of its social importance, to the increase of the word infodemic frequency which made it order of the day. The semantics of the word infodemic was sophisticated, new meanings in the mass-media definitions appeared, the former demanding meta-language reflection, a new media-concept was formed. The aim of the article is to explore infodemic as the key media-concept of the present time. The main stages of the media-concept’s life cycle are revealed, the peculiarities of its functioning at each stage are described. The research bank was formed with the help of the corpus method. The following methods were employed in the process of the language material scrutiny: definition analysis, component and conceptual analysis, the method of metaphoric modelling, discourseanalysis and content-analysis. The infodemic rapidly turned into a concept due to the highprofile nature, the importance and the ingenuity of the pandemic itself and its reflection in the traditional and social mass-media. The media-concept infodemic went through several stages: onset, growth and maturity. It acquired three lavish and highly-structured layers: notional, figurative and evaluative. The information in each of these layers is distributed according to three conceptual segments: “information — spread — consequences”. In the process of the media-concept’s evolution its initial connection with the medical sphere was weakened. The infodemic was interpreted as a flow of copious and false information which appears and spreads in the mass-media and the Internet in the periods of crucial social periods. The mediaconcept “infodemic” functions as an indicator of a wide variety of social problems connected with the media-consuming.