La comdemia e la sua “variante Delta” nell’era del Covid

Dalla metafora bellica alla comunicazione ipocrita

Abstract

The underlying assumption behind this paper – focused on the period February 202/June 2021 – is that the phenomenon of infodemic has been treated since the beginning of the pandemic as a risk factor with the WHO defining it as an “overabundance of information – some accurate and others not – which makes it difficult for people to retrace sources and find reliable information when they need it”. Infodemic has become an issue that has immediately crossed the boundaries of academia by becoming an integral part of the emergency with its own space in the public and political debate. In the collective interpretation, this type of threat is mainly related to the circulation of fake news leading to disinformation and misinformation. As argued in a previous paper (…), however, it is important to pinpoint a further issue, related not only to the problems in communication management (both by public and private organizations), but also in the transmission and explanation of all those containment measures and recommendations towards the citizens that have occurred since the health emergency. We call it comdemia, a co-occurring issue that has received far less attention in the public and academic arena.

In Italy, even though at the end of the first wave the limit and the danger represented by the failure of the attempt to centralize a crisis communication had clearly emerged, it was indeed impossible to stop the dysfunctions generated by the enduring issue of the overlapping between public and political communications and, hence, to rectify this phenomenon. As a matter of facts, as we will try to show, the situation has worsened also due to the war metaphor introduced at an institutional level during what appeared to be the worst moment (i.e. the first lockdown). This pattern has characterized the communicative frame since its very beginning and has often been clumsily replicated by political actors at various levels. At the same time, the second wave in Autumn 2020 has brought an exponential increase in infections and deaths. In the background there has been the attitude of traditional media generally supporting the institutional actions which has, instead, become itself part of the comdemia and a public opinion thorn between fear and cohesion, trust and protest. Furthermore, at the beginning of 2021 we observed a change of attitude more rather an overcoming of comdemia, a sort of “Delta variant” in communication, that we called “hypocritical communication”. This variant accumulated to the previous scenario, rather than replacing the comdemia, with the result of becoming even more contagious.

The main focus of our analysis is to propose possible “vaccines” that could not only help us in fighting Covid-19 but also in healing a series of weaknesses which have afflicted the Italian public and institutional communication.