COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability in Postdigital Environments

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

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Chapter 6 COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability in Postdigital Environments

In: Pandemic Storytelling

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Monika Pietrzak-Franger

Monika Pietrzak-Franger
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 113–128

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004716681_008

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From the start, the pan-medial narrative of COVID-19 was bound to be unreliable: with narrators not knowing either how, why, or when things were beginning to change; having to (covertly or not) rely on extant pandemic narratives, epidemiological languages of prediction, tediously drawn up speculative scenarios; having to choose from a plethora of voices that suddenly merged in an avalanche of medial noise; having to construct (seemingly) reliable narratives at a time when there was little information to fall back upon; having (or wanting) to conform to particular standards of ‘reporting’ and affordances of given platforms. In times when reliability was something the public craved, what they were confronted with was unreliable cross-media narration. The infodemic rescaled the problem.

With the multiplication of dis- and misinformation practices, the concern with unreliable narration, or more specifically, narratorial intentionality, took center stage. Although much has been written about (COVID-19) illness and (pandemic) outbreak narratives, critical attention to and scrutiny of the visual (multimodal) and transmedial character of narratives that came in the wake of the pandemic are still outstanding. With the nod towards larger questions of knowledge construction and communication, I look at such selected narratives and the poetics of unreliability that have become salient in this context. By attending to multiple means of communication and various (digital) media platforms, I aim to both expand the work on narrative in the Medical Humanities, and, once again, plead for the necessary transmedia approach in the field.

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Pandemic Storytelling

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 3

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004716681

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 18 Dec 2024

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 6 COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability in Postdigital Environments

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Pandemic Storytelling

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