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ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only claimed innumerable lives but the concomitant inflation has also frustrated many small and large enterprises, not to mention the loss of jobs that employees have suffered and sometimes succumbed to through self-harm and suicides. In this context, this paper probes how a politics of representation has deeply informed the dissemination and consumption of ‘COVID news,’ rendering a legitimate visibility largely to the loss and contributions of subjects that have access to socio-economic and political resources. Milan Kundera uses the term ‘symbolic voltage’ to refer to the role that the media plays in ‘constructing’ our everyday realities. In The Lost Dimension, Paul Virilio states that modern media technology has created a ‘crisis of representation’ or an optical illusion, where the distinctions between near and far, object and image, have imploded. In a bid to keep apace with a metanarrative of pandemic-engendered loss, the collective consciousness of different societies has not adequately focused on the marginalised subjects – the wage worker, the woman, the juvenile and the scholar from suburban/rural area. The paper argues that the ‘Covid-19-as-a-past’ is likely to be represented through the semantics of traditional history, which is a narrative of and by the powerful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. There is a concern for the planetary health, and this model includes ‘material, biological, social and cultural’ variables interacting in the complex and non-linear ‘dynamics of natural systems’ (Whitmee et al., 2015, 1978).
2. Automated Artificial Intelligence is a variation of Automated Machine Learning and applies intelligent automation to the steps of building predictive machine learning models (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-studio/autoai).
3. A report commissioned by UNESCO in 2019 found gender biases in AI training data sets, leading to algorithms and devices reinforcing gender stereotypes that stigmatise and marginalise women on a global scale. Similarly, Google image recognition shows bias towards African Americans. https://en.unesco.org/AI-and-GE-2020.
4. According to a study conducted by Andreu Casero-Ripolles, ‘57% of US adults followed the news about COVID-19 “very closely” and 35% “fairly closely”. In total, 92% of citizens actively consumed news about the virus, compared to 8% who consumed news sporadically’ (4).
5. This has led to the formation of a group spearheaded by researchers titled ‘End the Virus of Racism.’.
6. Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of culture industry draw an analogy between the mass culture and factory that produces systemised cultural goods such as films and television, which control the masses as passive consumers. Culture industry orchestrates the value systems and ideologies of a society, leading to an authoritative and exploitative relation of the ruling classes or intelligentsia with the other social classes. It functions as an ideological state apparatus that maintains hegemonic socio-economic systems (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, p. 107; Althusser, 1971, pp. 205–6).
7. ‘Grocery workers are risking their safety, often for poverty-level wages, so the rest of us can shelter in place,’ said John Logan, director of labour and employment studies at San Francisco State University. ‘The only way the rest of us are able to stay home is because they’re willing to go to work’ (The Washington Post. April 6, 2020 at 8:10 p.m. EDT).