"The harsher truth: we built a world that was prone to Coronavirus, but not ready for it". Clearing confusion in our “infodemic” of media & narratives
Covid-19 blows our minds, not just because of its global impact, but because we’re in an information environment which can so overload us with facts, updates and narratives that our response as citizens becomes limited, exhausted and at worst conspiratorial.
So we were delighted to find this comprehensive piece from Ed Yong, science correspondent for the US magazine The Atlantic, on why Coronavirus is so confusing. Screening for its US context - ie, we don’t have health-care systems in the UK that “yoke medical care to employment” - it’s a very useful list of ways that our minds can be swamped if we are too open, not discriminating enough, when faced with the “info-demic” (as one contributor puts it).
Here’s two sections which deal with how the media responses, and our need for blame
The media’s default rhythm of constant piecemeal updates is ill-suited to covering an event as large as the pandemic. “Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there,” says New York journalism professor Jay Rosen.
“It requires a lot of background knowledge to understand the updates, and the news system is terrible at [providing that knowledge].” Instead, the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation.
If the media won’t change, its consumers might have to. Kate Starbird at the University of Washington recommends slowing down and taking a moment to vet new information before sharing it. She herself is spending less time devouring every scrap of pandemic news, and more time with local sources. It’s the equivalent, she says, of “hand-washing for the infodemic.”
And at the end:
…The coronavirus is not unlike the Y2K “millennium” computer bug—a real but invisible risk. When a hurricane or an earthquake hits, the danger is evident, the risk self-explanatory, and the aftermath visible. It is obvious when to take shelter, and when it’s safe to come out.
But viruses lie below the threshold of the senses. Neither peril nor safety is clear. Whenever I go outside for a brief (masked) walk, I reel from cognitive dissonance as I wander a world that has been irrevocably altered but that looks much the same.
I can still read accounts of people less lucky—those who have lost, and those who have been lost. But I cannot read about the losses that never occurred, because they were averted. Prevention may be better than cure, but it is also less visceral.
The coronavirus not only co-opts our cells, but exploits our cognitive biases. Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos. We crave simple narratives, but the pandemic offers none.
The facile dichotomy between saving either lives or the economy belies the broad agreement between epidemiologists and economists that the U.S. shouldn’t reopen prematurely. The lionization of health-care workers and grocery-store employees ignores the risks they are being asked to shoulder and the protective equipment they aren’t being given.
The rise of small anti-lockdown protests overlooks the fact that most Republicans and Democrats agree that social distancing should continue “for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus.”
And the desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible:
humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces;
soaring levels of air travel;
chronic underfunding of public health;
a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains;
health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment;
social networks that rapidly spread misinformation;
the devaluation of expertise;
the marginalization of the elderly;
and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups.
It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.
In the classic hero’s journey—the archetypal plot structure of myths and movies—the protagonist reluctantly departs from normal life, enters the unknown, endures successive trials, and eventually returns home, having been transformed.
If such a character exists in the coronavirus story, it is not an individual, but the entire modern world. The end of its journey and the nature of its final transformation will arise from our collective imagination and action. And they, like so much else about this moment, are still uncertain.