The Covid-19 World: Learning or Downfall
- PDF / 260,936 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 1 Downloads / 162 Views
The Covid-19 World: Learning or Downfall Juha Suoranta 1 Accepted: 1 September 2020 / Published online: 17 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Communication . Covid-19 . Critical pedagogy . Education . Semiosphere .
Umwelt
Umwelts United The award-winning Netflix drama Dark (Odar 2017–2020) is based on the idea of time travel through ages and between parallel worlds. A time cycle manipulated by a secret society of time travelers called Sic Mundus ends at an apocalypse over and over again. Unfortunately, the real world cannot be switched off or rewound as the German television drama. On the contrary: in the present, ‘reality violently breaks in’ (Coeckelbergh 2020, emphasis in original). Covid-19 is a novel coronavirus, yet its causes are much older and well-known. For years, experts (e.g., Morse 1993) have warned of new pathogens that result from a combination of several, often amorphous factors: climate change, massive urbanization, the proximity of humans to farm or forest animals that serve as viral reservoirs, and the worldwide spread of microbes accelerated by war, global economy, and international air travel (Henig 2020; Lewis 2020). There are also other pressing questions, such as how we treat non-human animals (O’Sullivan 2020). Despite these discussions, it is commonly understood that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the Covid-19 disease, is a biological entity. Within this understanding, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an external biological threat or random ‘force of nature.’ In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (1961: 24) states that human misery and suffering arise from three sources: from our bodies, which are ‘doomed to decay and dissolution,’ from the external world which rages against us without mercy, and from our relations to other human beings. In the context of Covid-19, Freud’s typology is irretrievably outdated if read dichotomously (human beings here, nature
* Juha Suoranta [email protected]
1
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:538–545
539
there), or fragmentally (as if different entities of the world did not form a whole). In the global world of mercurial flows and relations (of viruses, human beings, digital bits, material artifacts, and particles), approaches based on fragmentation are unable to describe the whole accurately (Peters 2020). As Morse (1993: viii) remarks, although viruses are biological of origin when ‘the host is human, social factors can play a very significant role in both dissemination and expression of disease. On a larger scale, many epidemics can be understood only in their ecological context.’ As we try to make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is critical to examine the complex interplay of viral behaviors in all spheres of life. Such complexity brings about the concept of ‘viral modernity’ that is ‘based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information an
Data Loading...
