Communicating the Ontological Narrative of Ebola: An Emerging Disease in the Time of “Epidemic 2.0”

ABSTRACT

In this article, we critically analyze the implications of “Epidemic 2.0”—specifically the formative role of social media (as an exemplar of Web 2.0 technology) in disseminating information during epidemics. We use a narrative analysis framework to study the Ebola-related messaging on the official Facebook pages of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the wake of the recent epidemic in Western Africa. Using as our corpus all the messages on these pages between the period of July 1 and October 15, 2014, our analysis traces the development of an ontological Ebola narrative: a specific, historically contingent, ideological plot that reaffirms contemporary Western anxieties around emerging infections. Our analysis focuses on the evolution of this ontological narrative from a) consulting and containment, to b) an international concern, and c) the possibility of an epidemic in the United States.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments on this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2015 International Communication Association convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Notes

¹ In this article, we use the term to refer to both the Ebola-Zaire and Ebola-Sudan strains of the genera Ebolavirus, of the Filoviridae family, which together have represented nearly all the casualties resulting from this virus.

² While sociological, cultural, and political definitions of globalization processes abound, we use Ritzer’s (2010) working definition of a “transplanetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places, and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows” (p. 2).

³ At the time of this writing, this number has escalated, with the total mortality from this epidemic exceeding 10,000.

⁴ Note that this is dynamic number, and changes every day.