Marching Orders: the Covid infodemic
by Sarah Hartman-Caverly
EXCERPT //
Covid-19 is a disease of the body, but infected and uninfected alike are equally susceptible to its comorbidity of the mind: the “infodemic.”
Declared by the World Health Organization, academia, libraries, and governments worldwide, symptoms of the Covid infodemic include compulsive doom scrolling, the despondency of information overload, and false beliefs fed by online misinformation (often attributed to snake-oil hustlers, social media opportunists, and average citizens). Effects of the infodemic linger, leaving its victims feeling overwhelmed, confused, and distrustful. Once afflicted, many people turned to established medical authorities, government agencies, and news sources in response—and away from friends and family. Then, the second-wave infodemic hit—the flip-flops, walk-backs, retractions, corrections, and other information variants incubating in officialdom. The modest trust bump benefitting many institutions during the first year of the pandemic receded.
Once reflexively smeared as conspiracy theories, questions about the pandemic’s origin—and about the risk-benefit of various public-health responses—were now resurfaced as legitimate lines of inquiry. Such developments leave many to wonder: What did our officials know, and when did they know it?
Surely, not all of the misinformation disseminated from authority sources was disinformation (intentionally misleading information)—they may have relayed what they thought was true at the time. Such is the nature of transparency and real-time information sharing in the face of a complex, novel, globalized threat. Our officials are only human, after all.
But the infodemic presents additional, subtler symptoms.
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