This special issue features 12 contributions by early career scholars and artists dealing with the role of mediatization in the COVID-19 pandemic conjuncture. Themes such as mediated intimacy and sociality, pandemic ideology, politicians’ curated authenticity and discursive constructions of self, and playbour and resistance in digital games are examined in five original articles, while three autoethnographic contributions explore the concepts of mediated presence, collectivity, contemplative community, loneliness and relationality. The autoethnographies – in the form of short film, collage and poetry vignettes, respectively – add a personal experiential layer to the broader themes. To generate (mediated) interpersonal dialogue, two artists/academics engage deeply with the autoethographies, further reflecting on the themes explored therein. The issue concludes with an interview with Professor Andreas Hepp, of the University of Bremen, who comments on the contributions and reflects on the role of “deep mediatization” in the pandemic world.
This study re-evaluates the media communications of the domestic public’s interests related to environmental justice in the case of China’s air pollution in China’s public diplomacy initiatives. It examines media representations of environmental justice by China’s state-sponsored China Daily, and compares them with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, and British and American mainstream newspapers. The examination starts from 2015, when Beijing issued the first ever red alert for air pollution, to 2018, when air pollution still haunted the country. This study finds that, besides the general policy schemes of smog mitigation, China Daily extended coverage to the general causes of smog and the domestic public’s detailed demands for smog mitigation. It mainly adopted a neutral tone in covering environmental justice. The obvious discrepancy in coverage patterns between China Daily and other news media appears in the tone of covering ‘adequacy’ in environmental justice, with the former being neutral and the latter adopting more critical voices. This study offers a better understanding of China’s evolving governmental stances in dealing with environmental justice issues in the case of air pollution.
This special issue of Networking Knowledge was first conceived of in 2020, at the start of the first UK lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time during which the freedoms and spaces for movement of humans all over the world were radically altered in endless ways daily routines and professional lives disrupted, and family and social relationships inflected by the sudden necessity of digital communication. COVID-19 had, and continues to have, a profound effect on collective and individual health and physical and mental wellbeing, relationships, and politics and economies, all over the world. Inequality became further entrenched during the pandemic (Jenkins 2021; Coy 2021). It cost lives and livelihoods (World Health Organisation 2021; Sundaram 2020; Russon and Smith 2021), and the precarious circumstances in which many people already lived were exacerbated. COVID-19 has been characterised by loss of many kinds.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Netflix aired the docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. This aligned with the United States declaring a national emergency and the beginning of stay-at-home orders. Netflixexperienced a significant increase in viewership and a large number of responses to Tiger King’s content from viewers and media outlets (e.g., Stoll 2021). In this article, we present an analysis of social media responses on the Netflix official Facebook page and online news articles associated with Tiger King published between 20 March 2020 and 30 March 2020. This thematic analysis reveals that public response was mainly related to expressions of sentiment, characters featured in the docuseries, and references to the show’s content (e.g., specific scenes). We also identified character references, series content descriptions, and real-life events as themes within media sources. We conclude this article by discussing the potential for a ‘Tiger King Effect’ in the U.S. and the media’s role in distributing human-animal related materials to the general public.
Though the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become dominant in discourses surrounding the climate emergency, its globalising tendencies risk discouraging grassroots action. This article argues, therefore, that in order to better understand the climate crisis, a more local approach is needed. Folklore is suggested as one such way the specific impacts of the Anthropocene can be read. To investigate, this article analyses the folklore of Máiréad Ní Mhíonacháin as a ‘Capitalocene Patch’, combining Anna Tsing’s ‘Patchy Anthropocene’ and Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’ theories. In particular, this article looks at how Ní Mhíonacháin’s folklore records human and non-human produced landscapes, and asks how piseoga (superstitions) might produce healthier relations with the environment.
This article presents mediated intimacy in friendships as a necessary but difficult course of action to bridge physical absence between close friends. Following migration research to picture the mediation of intimacy of transnational family members, differences regarding the communicative behaviour, and specifically, the obligation to communicate contrasts distant friendships with translocal family interactions. Drawing on a German study on friendship communication, this paper asks the question how to derivate measures for profound friendship exchange in social distance, with regard to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Findings reveal communication media are definitely useful to keep up existing friendships but they also prevent meaningful friendship interaction. Accordingly, this paper contributes to the discussion of mediated communication and the production of mediated intimacy in friendships and highlights potential prospects to enhance physically distanced friendships.
In this collage, I reflect on my Radical Dharma community gatherings and examine how they are helping me to (re)imagine community and connection during pandemic times. Using the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013), I explore through my artwork the following questions: How is COVID-19 changing the way I, as a disabled Latina mother-scholar, relate to others in person and over digital space? Is physical distancing creating more social isolation and separation? Or is it paradoxically making me more attune to the pain, needs, and wants of my fellow beings on this planet? How does this ultimately impact my scholarship? Through the use of meditation, journaling, and reflecting on our virtual meetings, I tried to express within the collage our coming to terms with change and grief within the context of the pandemic and the current Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on police brutality. I argue that we are in the midst of creating a virtual fugitive space (Stovall, 2015), where we can (re)imagine what community can look like post-pandemic through embodied contemplative practice and collective care (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). We are using computer-mediated technology (e.g., Zoom, Slack, Teamwork Projects) to not only work on community mending (Ortiz, 2018) for communities of color, but also their (and our) liberation.
As the global concern with animal welfare grows, the roles of animals in various cultural and historical settings need to be examined. This study analyses a popular Japanese TV show, Natsuzora (‘Summer Sky’), aired in 2019, that shows the life of a dairy farm in post-war Japan from the 1940s to the 1970s, when the consumption and production of meat and dairy gradually increased with technological development. This is contrasted with the present time, against the backdrop of the Tokyo Olympics 2020, and a rise in awareness regarding animal welfare. The study analyses of the story of Natsuzora and the different reactions towards it from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Animal Rights Center. It also scrutinises the social and historical background of the drama by referring to agricultural statistics from the 1940s to the present.
This special issue features 12 contributions by early career scholars and artists dealing with the role of mediatization in the COVID-19 pandemic conjuncture. Themes such as mediated intimacy and sociality, pandemic ideology, politicians’ curated authenticity and discursive constructions of self, and playbour and resistance in digital games are examined in five original articles, while three autoethnographic contributions explore the concepts of mediated presence, collectivity, contemplative community, loneliness and relationality. The autoethnographies – in the form of short film, collage and poetry vignettes, respectively – add a personal experiential layer to the broader themes. To generate (mediated) interpersonal dialogue, two artists/academics engage deeply with the autoethographies, further reflecting on the themes explored therein. The issue concludes with an interview with Professor Andreas Hepp, of the University of Bremen, who comments on the contributions and reflects on the role of “deep mediatization” in the pandemic world.
It is widely accepted that television is a powerful medium and that its influence, particularly on children and young people, can be profound (see for example Canadian Paediatric Society 2003; Strasburger 2004; Matyjas 2015). The representation and categorisation of non-humans in such content may therefore influence a culture’s attitudes towards those species and, by extension, its children’s views. This article investigates animal characters on three hundred and fourteen children’s TV shows across five days of ‘free’ to view UK programming during summer 2020, and is the first study in over twenty-five years (since Elizabeth Paul’s in 1996) to focus specifically on mainstream children’s TV, and the only one to have sole regard for pre- and early primary-age UK viewers. With research clear that the media is so influential, recognising the role of such culture transmission is vital to ‘undo’ unhelpful assumptions about animals that result in their exploitation, and change future norms (Joy 2009). Television media either ignores or misrepresents the subjective reality of many (particularly food) species, but with children preferring anthropomorphised animals to most others (Geerdts, Van de Walle and LoBue 2016), this carries implications in terms of responsibility for our ideas and subsequent treatment of those non-humans in everyday life.
In response to the shifts of communication following the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, this research investigates the disorienting experience of navigating loneliness and intimacy in the digital space. Creative writing is a relatively unexplored but recently emerging field of academic inquiry (Skains 2018, 84). Poetry in particular involves research into the language and textures of the world—it is a critical way of thinking that incorporates not just the signified meaning of words, but also the phonaesthetics, placement, space, and textual structure. This practice-based creative work is presented in the form of a 9-part autoethnographic prose poem that echoes the fragmented and asynchronous nature of digital communication (Bonner 2016, 11). Through stream-of-consciousness vignettes that could be read in any order, I emulate the experience of scrolling through a feed. I explore ideas of limitlessness in the face of apocalyptic endings, where our desire for more is troubled by having too much. This experimental and experiential paper is ultimately an interrogation of the tension between affective relations and isolation, where mediated bodies are troubled by longing, loneliness, and looking.
Popular media, both literature and film, provide a location in which animal suffering, resistance and solidarity are finally visible. An examination of Bong Joon-ho’s award-winning film Okja (2017) and Karen Joy Fowler’s New York Timesbest-selling novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) reveals complex media representations of animals that highlight the significance of twenty-first century media in depicting the animal in the human world.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (Nintendo 2020) huge popularity has previously been attributed to escapism prompted by the singularity of lockdown life (Frushtick 2020; Zhu 2020), resonating with analyses which have been quick to frame lockdown as a radical historical caesura in experiences of work and leisure (Harari 2020; Krastev 2020). However, Adam Chmielewski and Fernanda Bruno argue that lockdown can be seen in relation to continuities in neoliberalism’s alienation, isolation and hyperconnected domestic digital labour (2020; 2020) - a condition of prolonged and displaced anxiety I term ‘ever-lockdown’ - necessitating a more nuanced account of Animal Crossing’s ambivalent mix of busywork and relaxation. Rather than escapist utopia, consumerist dystopia (Chang 2019), or softened capitalism (Bogost 2020), I will consider Animal-Crossing as providing absorbing boredom in which intense interactivity can be interpassively (Pfaller, 2017) withheld in a time of demanding and destabilising crises, facilitating a subtle, affective sense of place amidst the ‘ever-lockdown.’
When the Afghan government collapsed in the wake of the Taliban takeover in August 2021, a huge humanitarian evacuation got underway (Wadhera 2021; Zalan 2021; Sabbagh et al. 2021). During this evacuation, UK and international news media reported widely on the actions of former Royal Marine Pen Farthing who, along with his animal rescue charity Nowzad, was engaged in an attempt to get around one hundred and forty dogs and sixty cats out of Kabul to the UK on a privately chartered plane (see for more information Kim 2021; Jackson 2021; Tanner 2021). Farthing complained that the UK Ministry of Defence had obstructed this rescue on the ground, despite the fact that Nowzad had arranged a flight paid for by donations and so did not represent either a financial cost to the Ministry and, as the animals would travel in the hold, didn’t represent a ‘waste’ of space on evacuating flights either. There ensued something of a war of words between Farthing and the Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace MP, with Wallace eventually declaring ‘I’m not prepared to prioritise pets over people’ (BBC News 2021a). Several media commentators expressed disgust that Farthing seemed to be doing precisely that (see for example Downham 2021; Kirkup 2021; Hinsliff 2021). The (frequently vitriolic) debate went viral on social media, with opinion divided as to whether Farthing was a hero or a nuisance whose priorities were offensively misplaced. The foregrounding of this sensationalised, momentarily viral debate, this perceived direct competition of interests, in media of all types served to distract from other discussions about the situation in Afghanistan at the time, including whether or not the UK Government was really being honest with the public, and doing all it could to facilitate the evacuation in general. Farthing had dubbed his rescue attempt ‘Operation Ark’.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown in India restricted ‘real world’ protests, shifting dissent to digital spaces. In this article we explore virtual environmental activism on Instagram by looking at two case-studies that gained prominence during this period. The first was the death of a pregnant elephant in Kerala by consuming cracker-laden food meant to deter boars from crop-raiding. The second was an oil and gas leak in Baghjan, an ecologically sensitive region in Assam. Through content analysis of ‘Top’ posts, we thematically classified the representations of nature and non-humans constructed through Instagram visuals, identifying overlaps and contradictions in the two cases. Observing that the images of animals in pain generated massive response, we argue that Susan Sontag’s (2003) framework on the haunting power of images of human suffering can be expanded to include non-humans. These visuals highlight certain creatures, excluding other species and vilifying human communities belonging to the same landscapes. We show how unilinear models of economic development and progress, as well as hierarchical and casteist notions in Hinduism continue to shape environmental debates in India. The religious overtones discount the environmental discourse based on scientific knowledge, and disrupt nuances of community driven action. By tracing the online trajectories of the two protests, we also illustrate how virality limits Instagram activism by sidelining local voices and privileging short-lived consumer action over systemic change.
War metaphors have been found to be the most frequently used metaphors for conceptualizing diseases, epidemic and medicine. During the COVID-19 epidemic, war metaphors have been found to be widely used in both online and offline coverage. This study mainly focuses on how war metaphors were used in Chinese social media coverage about the COVID-19 epidemic. Using the method of semantic network analysis and the account of The People’s Daily on the Chinese social media platform Weibo as an example, the findings show that war metaphors are widely used in the digital coverage of COVID-19. Compared with defensive metaphors and war process metaphors, offensive war metaphors are appearing much more frequently in digital coverage, and often with the use of national collective subjects. These two characteristics highlight how digital coverage uses militarized metaphors to mobilize and inspire enthusiasm among the Chinese people, and to strengthen the Chinese government’s control in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic.
The following work is an autoethnographic study on emotional engagement and sense of presence mediated by Internet in cases of extreme situations. This story is the one of death. In April 2020, my step-father died of lung cancer. The COVID-19 lockdown had caught him and my mother in Berlin, where my step-father had been undergoing his treatment which unfortunately turned out to be unsuccessful. Based in Lisbon, I was not able to be physically next to my parents during these hard times. However, I tried to do my best giving support via messages and videocalls. It coincided that on the night of my step-father's death, when my mother was next to him in the hospital room, I was also there, “next” to them both, but via videocall. My short film is a creative reflection on the concept of mediated presence.
The aim of this article is to investigate the sociotechnical imaginaries present in UK online news articles and below the line comments in connection with genetically modified animals. This article attempts to provide an answer through a qualitative study using discourse analysis. The findings reveal how sociotechnical imaginaries present in news articles depict genetically modified animals as ‘other’ in comparison to those bred through selective breeding. In the below the line comments, a key feature is of monstrosity. Here, the sociotechnical imaginaries draw on the concept of ‘other’ along with the imagery of Frankenstein. Nature also features in the sociotechnical imaginaries in the news articles. Journalists present genetic modification as overcoming nature, as well as scientists designing nature. The article concludes by discussing how sociotechnical imaginaries can bring invisible nonhuman animals to the fore. Here, difference makes genetically modified animals newsworthy.
This article offers an alternate evolution of Lev Manovich’s (1999) concept of the database film, explored through the work of Welsh experimental filmmaker Scott Barley. Suggesting the existence of an affective type of database, this codifies their production as a form of ecological activism which phenomenologically affects viewers and creates a worldhood that each film inhabits. Viewers emerge as agential participants, which this article argues is an entanglement that occurs and continues long after the film’s initial release. Barley’s works often eschew formulations of humans, and instead invoke abstracted images of the world and wild animals, engendering an altered process of thought that attempts to avoid, reject and/or refute anthropocentrism. As Barley’s work continues to catalyse considerations of darkness, time, space and Jean Baudrillard’s simulation (1994), I argue that such films allow moments of stasis and stillness that are akin to death, bringing forth further considerations in viewer-participants about the world(s) they inhabit.
