Christian Fuchs - Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow)

Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow) — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow)" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...61

COMMUNICATING COVID-19

Everyday Life, Digital
Capitalism, and Conspiracy
Theories in Pandemic Times

BY

CHRISTIAN FUCHS

University of Westminster, UK

United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright 2021 Christian Fuchs

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions service

Contact:

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-723-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-720-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-722-1 (Epub)

CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1.	COVID-19 Infection and Death Statistics.
Table 2.1.	David Harvey's (2005b) Typology of Social Space.
Table 2.2.	Social Space in the Coronavirus Crisis.
Table 2.3.	Lefebvre's Distinction Between the Lived and the Living.
Table 2.4.	Five Types of the Means of Communication.
Table 4.1.	Sampling of Relevant Artefacts.
Table 5.1.	Data Sources Used in the Conducted Empirical Research.
Table 5.2.	The Coding Scheme Utilised in the Conducted Research.
Table 5.3.	descriptive Statistics of the Analysed Dataset.
Table 5.4.	Named Enemies in the Use of the Friend/Enemy Scheme; Total Number of Postings Using the Friend Enemy Scheme: N = 452, Listed are all Persons and Groups That in Total had More Than Ten Mentions.
Table 5.5.	The Ideological Square Model, Own Visualisation Based on van Dijk (1998, 267).
Table 6.1.	Exit Polls in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Elections Showing the Share of Voters Who Fall Into a Specific Category.
Table 6.2.	Sample of 19 Trump Tweets About COVID-19, Accessed on 19 December 2020, Numbers Are Given in Thousands.
Table 6.3.	Share of Weekly Deaths due to COVID-19, Pneumonia and Influenza in the United States, 2020.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1.	Everyday Life and Everyday Communication.
Figure 2.2.	Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in the Coronavirus Crisis.
Figure 3.1.	Breitbart's Spreading of Rush Limbaugh's COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory on Social Media, https://www.facebook.com/Breitbart/posts/rush-limbaugh-it-looks-like-the-coronavirus-is-being-weaponized-as-yet-another-e/10164646988865354/, Accessed on 28 March 2020.
Figure 6.1.	A Tweet by Donald Trump Containing Fabricated.
Figure 6.2.	Election Fraud Conspiracy Theory Tweets by Donald Trump.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Earlier versions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3s Section 3.3 have been previously published as a journal article that has been reproduced and built upon with kind permission of the journal tripleC (http://www.triple-c.at). Original source: Fuchs, C. (2020). Everyday life and everyday communication in coronavirus capitalism. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 18 (1), 375399. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v18i1.1167

INTRODUCTION: PANDEMIC TIMES

ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the goal of the book, namely to answer the question: How have society and the ways we communicate changed in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis?

It outlines the context, namely the COVID-19 pandemic's transformation of society and analyses what role capitalism plays in this role as context of the pandemic that is not its cause but a condition and that does not determine but conditions the effects of the pandemic on society.

1.1 Communicating COVID-19

This book is a contribution to the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic on society. It takes a sociological and communication studies approach for analysing the following question: How have society and the ways we communicate changed in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis?

This main question was broken down into a series of sub-questions. There is one chapter in this book dedicated to each sub-question:

• Chapter 2: How have everyday life and everyday communication changed in the COVID-19 crisis? How has capitalism shaped everyday life and everyday communication during this crisis?
• Chapter 3: What is a conspiracy theory? How do conspiracy theories matter in the context of the COVID-19 crisis?
• Chapter 4: How do COVID-19 conspiracy theories about Bill Gates work?
• Chapter 5: How do Internet users react to COVID-19 conspiracy theories spread on social media?
• Chapter 6: How has Donald Trump communicated about COVID-19 on Twitter? How have conspiracy theories influenced his Twitter communication about COVID-19?

The book is organised in the form of seven chapters. The introduction sets out the societal context of the study. Chapters 26 address the mentioned questions. Chapter 7 draws conclusions for the future of communication and society.

1.2 SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19

In 2020 and 2021, the pandemic crisis that emerged from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) this virus causes shook the world. The virus originated in bats. It was most likely transmitted to humans by the pangolin (Andersen et al. 2020), a subdomain of the mammal clade of Ferae, to which besides the pangolin also carnivorans (e.g. dogs, bears, cats, big cats) belong. The virus first appeared in December 2019 on a food market in Wuhan, the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei, and spread worldwide.

shows some data about COVID-19 infections and deaths. Until mid-March 2021, one year after the World Health Organization (WHO) had declared the disease a global pandemic, there were more than 120 million infections worldwide with 2.7 million individuals who had died from the disease. This means an average mortality rate of 2.2%.

Although not as deadly as SARS or MERS, COVID-19's currently guesstimated 2% mortality rate is comparable to the Spanish flu, and like that monster it probably has the ability to infect a majority of the human race unless antiviral and vaccine development quickly come to the rescue

(Davis 2020b, 14)

Table 1.1. COVID-19 Infection and Death Statistics.

Next page

1234567...61

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow)»

Look at similar books to Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow). We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Kenny Abdo

Covid-19 Pandemic

The New York Times Editorial Staff

Conspiracy Theories: Real, Imagined and Manufactured

Andreas Önnerfors

Europe: Continent of Conspiracies: Conspiracy Theories in and About Europe

Christian Fuchs

Nationalism 2.0: The Making of Brexit on Social Media

Christian Fuchs

Digital labour and Karl Marx

John Bodner

COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories

Christian Fuchs

Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter

Fuchs

OccupyMedia! The Occupy movement and social media in crisis capitalism

Christian Fuchs

Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory

Prooijen

The psychology of conspiracy theories

Christian Fuchs

Social Media: A Critical Introduction

Dentith

The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories

Discussion, reviews of the book Communicating Covid-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times (Societynow) and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.