Viralpolitik. Pandemia, populismi e altre infodemie

Autori

  • Nello Barile Università di Comunicazione e Lingue Iulm, Milano
  • Massimiliano Panarari Universitas Mercatorum, Roma

Parole chiave:

Virality, isolation, memes, immunology, populism, politainment

Abstract

After years of euphemistic use of the term, virality returns forcefully to disrupt our lives, traumatically bringing us back from the virtual, which we referred to long ago, to the most tragic real that escapes us and we cannot manage. Since the viral has been transformed from an adjective to a noun (the video, the content, the meme), we have forgotten the anxiety, anguish and panic that can cause true virality, or rather biological virality, then increased from media and social virality.  In the so-called "new normal" of this neo-viral age, imposed by the problematic coexistence with Covid-19, and in post-pandemic society, unprecedented political cleavages and new fractures arise in the already extremely jagged field of public opinion. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the medical-scientific sector projected into politics, living a series of divisions, between center-right and center-left and between majority and opposition and, perhaps, also the genesis of further original categories and oppositions (for example, that between a "populism" and an epidemiological "reformism"). In the "Covid era", the immune and epidemiological paradigm has become a fundamental element of public life, and provides an important key for interpreting a collective mentality undergoing profound transformation, which seems to have found first and foremost behavioral models of reference but also to level of imagination in this umpteenth declination of the figure of the technician with specialist skills. The virologist, the infectious disease specialist and the epidemiologist (and, to a lesser extent, the pulmonologist) have in fact identified the "anchors" and the reference characters of the TV and social media of the current stage of the age of public democracy.

Biografie autore

Nello Barile, Università di Comunicazione e Lingue Iulm, Milano

Nello Barile insegna Sociologia dei media nel Corso di Laurea in Comunicazione, Media e Pubblicità dell’Università IULM di Milano. È autore di numerosi libri, articoli e contributi in Italia e all’estero sui media digitali, sul consumo e sulla comunicazione politica tra cui Brand Renzi (Milano, 2014) e Il marchio della paura (Milano, 2016), Politica a bassa fedeltà (Milano, 2019).

Massimiliano Panarari, Universitas Mercatorum, Roma

Massimiliano Panarari è consulente di comunicazione politica e pubblica. Insegna Comunicazione politica all’Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia e collabora con la School of Government dell’Università Luiss “Guido Carli” di Roma e l’Università “Luigi Bocconi” di Milano. Commentatore dei quotidiani La Stampa, Il Piccolo, Europa e Giornale di Brescia. Collabora con varie testate culturali, tra cui le riviste Il Mulino e Reset, ed è autore dei libri L’egemonia sottoculturale (2010) ed Elogio delle minoranze (con F. Motta, 2012)

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Pubblicato

2020-10-20

Come citare

Barile, N., & Panarari, M. (2020). Viralpolitik. Pandemia, populismi e altre infodemie. Mediascapes Journal, (15), 211–221. Recuperato da https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/mediascapes/article/view/17154